I nudged my shoulder against Harlow’s. “She’s here because she’s my best friend.”
Toby stuck out his hand. “I’m Toby. I live next door.”
Harlow shook his hand. “Hello, Toby who lives next door. It’s nice to meet you. But if you’ll forgive me, I need to steal our girl back. People are looking for her.”
Toby’s brown eyes met mine. “All righty then.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Maybe we can check out that lake some other time, huh?”
“Yeahsureokay,” I mumbled.
Harlow locked her arm with mine and we spun around and started walking back toward the Oliver farmhouse when I heard Toby call out, “Taliah?”
I turned back around. “Yeah?”
“It’s good that you’re here.”
I squinted at him in the sunlight. “I hope so.”
Harlow tugged at my arm. “We really have to go.”
I gave Toby a little wave and then started back toward the farmhouse. When we were a good distance from him, Harlow started needling me. “He’s cute.”
“Who?” I said, playing dumb.
“You know, if I were into that,” Harlow added, elbowing me.
“Right.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“Oh. You know. The way you meet people in Oak Falls,” I deadpanned. “Hopping fences.”
“Cute.” And then she repeated, “He’s cute.”
“He’s my grandmother-who-I-don’t-know-at-all’s neighbor. He’s grieving my grandfather-who-I-never-knew-at-all. They’re apparently close. And he’s also apparently friends with my cousins who I’ve never met but already hate me.”
Harlow swatted at a mosquito.
“So?”
“Aren’t you concerned at all that my cousins already hate me?”
Harlow shrugged. “They’ll come around. I’m more focused on cute boy for now.”
“He lives in Oak Falls.”
“So? You’re always full of excuses, Tal.”
“Harlow. My grandfather is dying.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I know. But still. The boy’s cute.”
We were close to the back porch. I saw Julian sitting alone in a wooden rocker. “This doesn’t exactly seem like the right time for romance, you know? There’s already too many new people in my life.”
Harlow didn’t say anything to that. She just squeezed my arm.
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.”