II.
“You don’t have to be nervous,” Julian said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. Harlow and I were once again seated in the back of his Mustang. We were headed to the hospital to see Tom. Though I couldn’t stop wondering if we were really headed to see Tom or just the final shadow of him.
The thought made me shudder.
“Right,” I said. “You keep saying that. But it seems like you’re the one who’s nervous.”
He fiddled with his sunglasses, pushing them up on the bridge of his nose. “You’re probably right.”
I swallowed. “When’s the last time you saw him?”
Julian let out a long, audible sigh and winced a little. “Eh. I think five years ago. Christmas? Maybe.”
“Five years ago?”
He shrugged. Harlow glanced down at her phone. I think she could sense the conversation was about to take an awkwardly personal turn and she wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible.
“Dad and I don’t …” He trailed off and took a sharp right turn. I jerked with the movement of the car, my shoulder bumping against Harlow’s. “We don’t,” he continued, “have the best relationship.”
I opened my mouth to ask why, but he cut me off.
“I disappointed him,” he said plainly. “Though I probably shouldn’t put that as past tense. As long as he’s still breathing, I’m disappointing him.”
“That’s a pretty intense thing to say,” I said slowly.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “But sadly that doesn’t make it any less true.”
“What went wrong?” Harlow asked bluntly, and then gave me an apologetic smile.
“Shit,” Julian mused, fiddling with his sunglasses again. “What didn’t go wrong?”
“That’s not an answer,” I pointed out.
“Okay,” Julian said, barking out a hollow laugh. “Well, here it is, cold and simple and straight up: I followed my dream at the cost of ruining my dad’s.”
He continued, “My dad owned a small homemade furniture store near campus. His dad had owned it before him. The stuff they sold there was simple—stools, rockers. My grandfather made the furniture by hand from the wood he got from chopping down trees on his land. He passed the trade down to Dad, along with the land. And so Dad, of course, had high hopes and big dreams that I’d continue the legacy.”
Julian paused. We were stopped at a red light. He let out a heavy breath. “But do you know what I find more interesting than woodworking?”
“Music?” I asked softly.
“Yeah. That. And everything else.” Another hollow laugh. “Your mom and I had that in common, you know? It was one of the first things we connected over.”
I wrinkled my nose. “A disinterest in woodworking?”
“Well, no. But the shared fear of disappointing our parents. Because their dreams for us were diametrically opposed with our dreams for ourselves.”
Harlow perked back up. “Tell us more.” And then clarified, “About you and Lena.”
Julian rubbed his right temple. “Mm. Okay. Where did I leave off?”
“The diner,” I said, an eagerness creeping into my voice.
“The diner,” he said, making eye contact with me through the rearview mirror. “Right.”
Oak Falls, 1994
Lena made a face as she bit into her hamburger.
Julian looked crestfallen. “You don’t like it?”
“The meat,” she said, chewing slowly and slightly embarrassed to be talking while eating, “isn’t … cooked?” She put her burger back down on the plate. She took her knife and cut into the meat to show him the revolting pink splotches.
He laughed. “That’s a perfectly cooked burger. You don’t want it too well done. The meat would be burned all to hell.” He took a long slurp of his vanilla milk shake.
She wrinkled her nose.
“You eat burnt burgers where you’re from?”
She smiled slightly. Where you’re from. “At twenty-one May Street? Yes.”
He nodded, matching her smile and following along with her joke. “Yes. I’ve heard that May Street has a reputation for only permitting overcooked burgers.” He popped a fry into his mouth. “But seriously. Are you going to tell me where you’re from?”
She considered continuing to be wry, but decided against it. “Jordan. Do you know where that is?”
“Vaguely,” he said, and then quickly confessed, “Not really.”
“In the Middle East. Sandwiched between Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.” An idea popped into her head. “Do you have a pen?”
Julian smiled and produced one. “I do, in fact. My server’s pen. For all the orders I’m currently not taking.”
She drew a sloppy map of the Middle East on her napkin. She showed it to him. “There’s Jordan.”
He propped his elbows up on the table. “Do you miss it?”
“Yes.” She smiled again. “Especially the burnt meat.”
“What brought you here?”
She was about to use her standard response about studying medicine. The one she’d rehearsed for years. The one she’d almost convinced herself of. But instead she said, “I came to be an artist.”
His face lit up. “An artist? What type of art?”
She shrugged and nibbled at one of her fries. “I haven’t decided yet. Technically, I’m studying biology at Hampton.”
“Biology?” He rolled the word over his tongue. “That’s an odd choice for a budding artist.”
“My mother thinks I came to America to become a doctor,” she explained.
“Ah. I understand that.”
“You do?”
“My parents think I’m working at the diner to save money to be able to go to college.”
“And you aren’t?”
He grinned and shook his head. “Well, most of the time, I’m not even working. And when I am, I’m saving money to move to New York. You see, my father owns a store.” Something crossed over his face. “The store, it’s close to here, actually. And he wants me to take it over. It was his dad’s before it was his, so it’s kind of this family thing.”
Lena nodded along. “But you don’t want to run the store?”
Julian shook his head again. “No. And I don’t want to make wooden stools for the rest of my life. But to get my dad off my back, I told him that I was going to go to college so that I could be more book smart when it came to running the store. Business degree or some shit.”
“But that’s not your plan?”
“Naw,” he said, his grin back, stretching wider this time. “I’m going to be a musician.”
“A musician?”
“Yeah.” He locked his eyes with hers. “I want to write songs that make people feel new things. And remember things they’ve forgotten.” He paused and tapped his knuckles against the table. “I want to write your favorite song.”
Lena blushed. His sheer confidence in his dream was infectious. It made her want to believe more deeply in her own.
When she didn’t say anything, he added, “Isn’t it perfect?”
“What?”
“This.”
She smirked. “I already told you the burger wasn’t cooked properly.”
“No, silly,” he said, and the word “silly” very much felt like its meaning as it slipped from his mouth. “This. Us meeting. Someday we’re both going to be killing it in New York. You a badass artist. Me a badass musician.”
She considered this, tilting her head to the side. “I don’t know how I feel about New York.”
“But what if I’m in New York?”
“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?”
“Always,” he said with a grin. And then something crossed his face. “I’m Julian, by the way.” He stretched his hand across the table in a way that seemed overly formal considering the bizarre intimateness of their encounter so far.
When she would replay this afternoon over again in her head, as she would do multiple times over the years to come, she always found it strange how time didn’t seem to exist in her memory. The afternoon felt both like an eternity and a fleeting blip. Maybe all of life’s most defining moments were like that.
She shook his hand. “Lena.”
“Lena. I should’ve known you would have a perfect name.”
“What makes a perfect name?”
“One that perfectly suits the face it is assigned to.”
She studied his face. The faded acne scars. The hooked nose. The piercing, expressive eyes. “I don’t think Julian is the perfect name for you, then.”
This seemed to amuse him. “Oh, really?” He raised his eyebrows dramatically. “Then tell me, Lena, what would be a better name for me?”
She shrugged and dragged a fry through a dollop of ketchup. She was still in the process of determining whether or not she liked the condiment. Most days, she found it to be too sweet. But in this particular moment, she didn’t mind it so much. “What’s your last name?”
“Oliver.”
“Okay.” She popped the fry into her mouth, the burst of salt and sweet tomato paste tangoing on her tongue. “I think that’s better. I’m going to call you Oliver.”
“You, Lena,” he said in a theatrical voice, “can call me anything.”
She smiled wide despite herself. Wide smiles revealed the noticeable gap in her bottom teeth and enhanced her dimples. “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself again?”
His eyes shone. “Always.”