Matt’s next visit was on a hot day at the end of May. Mouna could tell that schools had begun to close for the summer; children were popping up with their parents in the daytime. The last customers trickled out like slow sweat, and she leaned against the back wall with her eyes closed until jolted out of her reverie by the sound of Matt tinkering with the gumball machine.

“Why did you start doing this?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “I had some extra cash and figured I’d make a little investment. You know, for college.”

“How can this be enough for college?”

“One machine’s probably not, but maybe I’ll save enough to get a few more around town. And I have a summer job lined up.”

He looked up and saw her smiling. “What?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

He shut door of the coin bank and stretched up. “Well,” he joked, “if you get your dentist’s license I totally want a share for bringing you so many new patients.”

Mouna started laughing. “Of course.”

Matt called and said he was going away the last two weeks of June, and asked if the machine was depleted enough for an early maintenance visit. Mouna told him to come. Later, when she saw the gumballs still crowding the fishbowl, she raided the cash register for quarters and cranked them into the coin slot, watching them spiral down into a plastic bag she had taped at the mouth of the chute.

She would do this all summer, apologizing to customers for giving them nickels and dimes and, after hours, feeding the quarters to the gumball machine in a ritual Ameen watched on the security cameras, though he never said anything.

By July they had finally accepted the futility of fans and decided to install an air conditioner. Ameen was determined to do it himself, so Mouna held the ladder steady from below. He started teasing her about her low tolerance for the cold, and to his surprise she responded, with a sudden but gentle shake of the ladder, making outlandish threats he knew she didn’t mean. When Matt arrived they were laughing, at themselves, at each other, and because it felt so fresh.

Matt accepted their offer of cake and ice cream, so they all went upstairs and sat around the kitchen table together.

“How did you decide to name the store after Ameen?” Matt asked them.

Mouna looked into Ameen’s eyes. “We never really talked about it,” she said. Ameen met her gaze for a moment, then looked away.

“We had to make a decision in a hurry,” he told Matt. “Also, my name means ‘trustworthy person’ in Arabic, so we thought it would bring us more customers,” he said with a wink.

“What does your name mean, Mouna?” Matt asked her.

“Wishes,” she said. “The plural.”

Matt laughed. “That’s a pretty great name, honestly.”

“I’ll save it for my dentistry practice,” she smiled.

“What would my name mean, if you say it in Arabic?”

Ameen thought about it. “Well, there isn’t an exact translation,” he began, then Mouna looked up. “The verb die,” she said. “Past tense.”

“Yikes,” said Matt, then fell silent. They finished the rest of the ice cream and cake without speaking until Ameen offered Matt some tea, but he said he had to get going.

One night in late August, Mouna went to bed later than usual and was woken up almost immediately by a loud crash downstairs, followed by what sounded like rattling.

“Ameen, wake up!”

He threw off his bedcovers with a sudden jerk of his arm and asked her what was the matter.

“I heard something,” she said. “Downstairs.”

They huddled together and listened. “I don’t hear anything, love,” Ameen said, getting under the covers again. “Go back to sleep.”

Mouna didn’t move.

“You could have imagined it,” said Ameen softly, stroking her back.

She could have. Her imagination didn’t have to stretch far to find tragedy, after all. She resented Ameen; he should have been the same, not far away from her, in sleep, as though he had never had a namesake who lived and breathed and was now locked away in a bedside drawer.

When she woke up the next morning, it was past the store’s opening time, but Ameen wasn’t downstairs. She could hear his voice in the next room, talking on the phone. He was talking about a break-in.

She quickly got dressed and went downstairs.

Whoever it was must have picked the lock. The door looked intact. The cash register, of course, had been cleaned out. It would have been a completely silent break-in except for the gumball machine violently toppled, its gumballs scattered among shards of glass that just yesterday held a half-full globe. That was probably what woke her up.

“The police are on their way,” said Ameen from the foot of the stairs. He looked at Mouna. “Do you want to call him?”

Mouna shook her head. She bent and picked up the broken body of the machine, and placed it upright where it used to stand, now offering them nothing.

Matt arrived before the police did. Sweeping some of the glass away with his sneakered foot, he kneeled to examine what was left of the gumball machine.

“Can you fix it?” asked Mouna.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I guess it depends on the cost of the replacement parts. I might have to take it somewhere.”

“Take it with you,” said Ameen. “We’ll clean up.”

“Don’t they need it for fingerprints or something?” asked Matt.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Mouna.

“Anyway, we already touched it,” said Ameen.

They stood in a strange new silence. “I’m sorry, Matt,” began Mouna, then stopped. Everything she wanted to say echoed from years and miles away from their little shop, too heavy for scattered gumballs. That’s the thing about loss, she thought. In all its manifestations, it never leaves anything to share.

Upstairs, she watched at the window as Matt heaved the machine into the back of his car. The police came, they left, and then it was just her and Ameen again; two people who never learned to grieve together. How horrible to realise that he was right to sing and to sleep soundly, and she had been doing it all wrong, all alone.

She never wanted to tell Ameen any of this, but then he came upstairs and opened his bedside drawer, and he collapsed into sobs as several gumballs rolled into view.

Rosy Tahan is currently studying psychology at New York University Abu Dhabi, but prefers to explore human behaviour through literature. She is Syrian and will therefore always find a way to include olive oil in her writing.