He took the figurine from her thin fingers and rolled it between his thumbs. “She’s pretty,” he finally said.
“But she’s not saying anything.” Lena sighed and flipped over onto her back. She snatched the figurine back from him. She studied her, and then glanced at the twenty identical copies of her. There was still a surge of pride that would rise in her chest when she observed her own art. This made her feel guilty, and worse, silly even. Childish. But she couldn’t help it. She was still unbelievably giddy that she was finally making art with her own two hands.
She just wished her own work wasn’t also a constant disappointment to her. She wanted to be better. There was an insurmountable gap between her ambitions and the actual product she was creating.
“Be patient,” Julian said. “Keep your ears open and listen. She’ll talk to you eventually.” He gestured toward all the figurines. “They all will.”
“How typical. The musician tells me to listen.”
Julian laughed and wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her close to him. He covered her neck with kisses. “It’ll come. You just have to trust it.”
“I’m not so good at trust, Oliver.”
“I know.”
It frustrated her endlessly that Julian was a more patient artist than she was. She’d wrongly assumed he would be more impulsive. That she would be the calm-headed and steady presence in their relationship.
When she’d first met him that one afternoon, she’d seen the fire inside of him. What she had slowly come to realize was that he kept his fire tucked away. It was always there—a steady simmer in his stomach—but he wasn’t prone to the types of fitful explosions that she was. Julian worked inconsistently on his music. He still worked at the diner, not that he took that job very seriously. He would often convince her to come by in the afternoons and he would sit with her at a booth, the two of them sharing a sub-par vanilla shake, him willfully skirting his server responsibilities.
When she would ask him about his music he would say, “Lena, I’m marinating.”
“Oliver,” she would answer, teasingly but still with a caustic bite to her voice, “marinating is for meat.”
“Be patient,” he would always say, kissing the space between her bushy eyebrows.
Lena was not patient, though. She dutifully worked on her art projects in between her studies. She still hadn’t dropped her premed classes. Her course load was brutal. She had long, grueling chemistry labs and hours and hours of biology homework, memorizing different organisms, mapping out the life cycles of trees.
She knew she should just quit, but quitting felt like fully untethering herself from home, from her promise to her mother. And she wasn’t quite ready to do that yet.
But Julian kept pushing her to.
“Habibi,” he would say, the Arabic word for sweetheart, which he had picked up from her. (She never bothered to explain to him that if he wanted to refer to her, he should say “habibti.” She enjoyed the slight grammatical error. Her American boy.)
“Why are you still wasting your time with that junk that you don’t care about?” Julian would ask.
When she was feeling combative and frustrated, she would snap, “Why are you still wasting your time at the diner? And when are you going to tell your father that you don’t want to run the store?”
But when she was feeling soft and vulnerable, usually when he’d catch her studying in the early-morning light, she’d say, “Because I owe it to my mother.”
“I would love to meet her,” he’d say.
“I’d love that too,” she’d say, and her heart would feel like it was bursting because of how true and untrue that statement was. As the months in America passed, it’d become harder and harder to conjure her mother’s face. She would look at the singular photograph she’d brought with her and slowly that image—that duplicated, glossy, and fake image—became the dominant one in her mind.
She ached for Jordan. Every morning when her eyelids fluttered and she found herself in Indiana instead of in her sun-soaked stone-walled bedroom back home, her insides would throb for a moment and then she would grit her teeth and whisper quietly to herself, “The first year is the hardest.” Sometimes when it was really bad, she would sit up in bed, curl her knees to her chest, press her kneecaps against her heart, and pretend she was back in Amman in that dusty, crowded apartment where she grew up. She would imagine herself sitting on the outside patio with her mother, her mother taking a long drag of a cigarette, Lena dipping a ma’amoul into a milky and sugary tea.
She tried to keep her pain hidden from Julian because she was embarrassed by it. As always, her greatest concern was being perceived as weak. It wasn’t a coincidence that all the miniature figurines she carved had secret holes in them.
Julian didn’t live with his family even though they lived in the same town. Lena found this impossibly strange.
“Your parents don’t mind?” she asked.
“No. They’re thrilled I’m out of the house.”
She frowned. “I doubt that.”
“Maybe my mom misses me a little,” he admitted.
Mrs. Oliver had a warm and generous personality. Like Julian, something inside of her simply glowed. Her frank way of speaking—her country drawl—and her button nose and freckled face had all endeared her to Lena immediately. The first time she’d met Mrs. Oliver, the woman had wrapped Lena up in a big bear hug, pushing Lena’s head against her bosom, and stroked her hair. “You poor thing. So far away from home.”
Coming from almost anyone else, such a personal gesture at a first meeting would’ve put Lena off. Angered her, even. After all, how did Mrs. Oliver know how she was feeling? But somehow Lena felt that Mrs. Oliver did know. And beyond that, that Mrs. Oliver really did care.
Julian’s mother frequently hosted Lena and Julian for dinner. They would join his little sister, Sarah, and Julian’s father, who was almost uncomfortably quiet. Lena would try to ask him a friendly question and he would respond with a monosyllabic answer.
“How are things at the store?” she’d say, carefully spreading one of Mrs. Oliver’s homemade jams across a biscuit.
Mr. Oliver would say something along the lines of “Good” or “Fine” and then ask Sarah about her day.
At first Lena had found Mr. Oliver to be rude. But as Lena grew to know Mr. Oliver better, she began to find him more endearing. Yes, he was impossibly quiet. But on the rare occasions when he did talk, she began to notice his dry sense of humor and self-deprecating wit. Like once, when she asked him about the store and he said, “We’re not Ethan Allen yet, but I’ll be writing to Santa again this year to ask him to grant my wish.”
“Dad!” Sarah had exclaimed, looking up from her plate, which was stuffed with Debra’s homemade macaroni and cheese and fried chicken thighs. “Santa doesn’t grant wishes. He brings gifts.”
“Same thing,” Mr. Oliver had said, casting a knowing sly smile in Lena’s direction.