7. THE GIFT

MERSIHA was still a teenager when she got to Utica.

She was still thinking about the things stolen from her by the Bosnian War: Her high school graduation. Her prom. She had looked forward to parading down the main street of Travnik with her classmates, wearing a short black dress, as townspeople clapped.

“I became an adult in like 48 hours,” she said, laughing. Suddenly, she was the one translating for her mother, Ismeta, 44, and her sister, Melissa, 17.

She was overjoyed to be reunited with her mother, who raised her daughters by herself. They were separated for 18 months during the war. To keep them safe, Ismeta sent the two girls to Croatia with her sister.

“I’m never letting go of you again. Never!” Mersiha said, hugging her mother in their rental apartment.

When the girls were growing up, their mother was a perfectionist.

She baked buttery cakes, which she placed in a row, the swirls in the frosting facing the same direction.

“She ironed everything—even underwear,” Mersiha said, laughing. “She smoked, but you couldn’t smell it, because she cleaned everything with bleach.”

Soon there was no time to dwell on anything.

The three of them got jobs at a curtain factory. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Mersiha and Melissa were baggers. Young and strong, the sisters threw themselves into the work.

“I bagged 3,500 curtains in 8 hours,” Mersiha said, proudly. She was lightning quick—grabbing folded curtains off a machine, then throwing them into a bagging machine. “I would break that machine constantly. My sister was the best bagger in the place.”

The sisters hoped that if they worked hard, they would get a raise. “How dumb we were!” Mersiha said, laughing. They stayed at minimum wage. Yet they did not slow down.

Their coworkers thought they were crazy: “The Americans said, ‘My God, what are you guys doing?’ ”

But their mother showed signs of exhaustion. She said her legs hurt. Her skin became bruised.

The day she was to go to the hospital for tests, she put on a red blouse and a black pencil skirt. She was living with Mersiha and Hajrudin, who had recently married. Waiting for Melissa to pick her up, she smoked a cigarette on the stairway.

“This might be my last one,” she said.

That evening, Melissa returned, alone, carrying their mother’s clothes. She was being held overnight at the hospital.

Mersiha just stared at the red blouse.

For the next two years, their mother fought leukemia. The disease and its treatment initially mystified and frightened the family. “We didn’t know—what is cancer, what is chemo?” Mersiha said.

The doctors started their mother on an aggressive course of chemotherapy. “She had every side effect; she lost her hair. She was not able to walk.”

At the end, their mother was hospitalized. “But she was never alone,” Mersiha said.

When the sisters saw her for the last time—a small, still figure in the hospital bed—they both lost consciousness.

A nurse administered shots of adrenaline to the two young women.

Mersiha had an American friend, Elaine. She was a high school teacher, who befriended many young Bosnian refugees; she often checked on Mersiha after her mother’s death.

Elaine encouraged her.

“Maybe this is the time you should start college,” she told Mersiha. “It would make your mother happy. This is what she wanted for you.”

It was true: Mersiha had promised her mother she would go to college. Elaine said she would help her apply to schools—and she did.

She told Mersiha, “I can’t see anything stopping you!”

Mersiha received an associate degree at a community college. Then she completed an online bachelor’s degree through SUNY Empire State College—and got a job as a teacher’s aide at a middle school.

But every few days, she baked Bosnian pastries, her mother’s way: Hungarian Girl, palm-sized rectangles of chocolate and hazelnut. Peachies, cookies that look like two cheeks pressed together.

As a child, she watched her mother expertly roll out dough for an apple cake, spooning chunks of fruit onto it, before lifting the dough into the pan. “When I tried, the dough would break,” she said.

Mersiha’s baking delighted Hajrudin. “I didn’t think I had any talent,” she said.

Then one afternoon, Hajrudin, who worked at Utica Metal Products, slipped on the wet factory floor, damaging his spinal cord. And this accident—which could have paralyzed him—sent them spiraling into new lives.

At home, recovering, Hajrudin was struck by how much Mersiha did for their family.

“I thought, ‘How can I help her?’ ” he recalled. “I felt so sorry for her—and honestly, for myself, too,” he added, laughing.

He started baking bread. Every day.

He was not just trying to be helpful: “She’s the brain for everything,” he said admiringly about his wife. “I wanted to impress her.”

Mersiha thought his bread was good. That he had potential.

“Why don’t you take some classes?” she said. She knew there was a culinary arts program at MVCC and thought he could use a career change.

The class’s first assignment was baking baklava. But when Hajrudin brought the dessert home, Mersiha was appalled.

“You call that baklava?” she said. The pastry was dried out, crackly. Her baklava was rich with ground walnuts; the phyllo was feathery.

Hajrudin was not offended: “You make some, and I’ll bring it to the teacher.”

That night, Mersiha stayed up late, baking. She was amazed when the professor called her the next day. “She ordered a sheet of baklava,” Mersiha said. “Oh, my God! I felt very honored.”

She started to see herself differently.

She remembered her eighth-grade art teacher telling her she could not draw: “You’ll never have any artistic talent.”

“That’s not true,” she told me, laughing. “I can’t draw, but I have these things in my head. I can make things with my hands.”

When her niece went to law school, she made a cake that looked like a pile of colorful law books. For a friend’s wedding, she baked a cake topped by a fancy edible shoe.

She posted her photos on Facebook.

“People started asking me, ‘Can you make this? I can pay you.’ ”