He glanced at me, an unreadable expression on his face. It began to dawn on me that Toby was the word “earnest” in living form. I could easily imagine him dressed in an Eagle Scout uniform, passing out canned goods to homeless people on a snowy Christmas Eve. I began to wonder if I’d crossed some imaginary line. Like it was okay for him to joke about Oak Falls being small and boring and provincial, but not okay for me to do so.
“I dunno,” he said slowly. “I figured you might just want to see it since it’s one of your grandfather’s favorite places.”
“Really?” Something inside me thrummed with a curiosity I hadn’t known I had.
“Yeah. When I was younger, he used to take me, Brady, and Carter down there to fish.” Toby let out a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh but more the mere echo of one. “I really liked your grandfather. He was a special guy.” And then he quickly corrected himself. “I mean like. And is. Present tense.”
He flashed me an apologetic look and I shrugged. “The verbiage is difficult, huh?” I said.
He nodded somberly. “I love Tom. You see, I lost my dad when I was six, so Tom tried to be like, I don’t know, a father figure of sorts. When I was younger, he used to invite me over on Saturday afternoons and we’d build model airplanes together with your cousins. He really welcomed me into your family.”
It felt impossibly weird to hear them described as my family when I wouldn’t have been able to pick Tom or my cousins out of a lineup.
“He sounds like a nice guy,” I offered. “But I wouldn’t really know.”
Toby nodded thoughtfully. “You and Julian didn’t want to hang out here too much, huh?”
I stopped walking and gaped at Toby. “What are you talking about? I didn’t even really know for sure that Julian was my father until yesterday afternoon.”
He turned to face me. He took off his baseball cap and passed it back and forth between his hands. “I had no clue. I just assumed you lived in New York City or somewhere fancy with Julian.”
I fought back a laugh. “Trust me, I’m not from New York. I live about five hours away in a place just as boring as this one.”
“Hey,” Toby said, his grin back. “Oak Falls isn’t boring. I’m going to prove that to you.”
Toby started walking again, his pace quickening like we needed to make good time. The air was getting stickier by the moment and the sun was climbing higher and higher in the sky. Also, the cow scent had not dissipated.
“I mean, there obviously was something wrong between Julian and Tom, right?” I asked. I was fishing, I knew, but I couldn’t help it.
“I dunno,” Toby said slowly. “I just know Julian didn’t come home a lot.”
“Well, I think he’s pretty busy, you know?” I was surprised by the defensive tone in my voice.
“Yeah,” Toby said quietly. “We all get it. He’s a big rock star, but I don’t think that gives you a free pass to be a jerk to your family.”
“He’s been a jerk to his family?”
“Look, it’s not really my place to talk about this,” Toby said tentatively. “You should probably ask Julian.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I just want to clear the air.”
Toby glanced at me, his eyes widened as if bracing for me to say something of marked import.
“Something smells like cows. And it’s not me.”
His shoulders hunched forward and he laughed. This time it was not a mere echo, but the real deal. And it was lovely. We were about to head down another hill when I heard Harlow bellowing, “Taliah Abdallat!”
“Uh,” I said, audibly swallowing. “That’s my friend.”
Toby nodded. He looked amused.
Within a few minutes, Harlow had caught up to us. Her face was flushed red from running and she was panting. Her hair was pulled into a messy low ponytail. She looked from Toby to me and back again, and then cast me a teasing smile. I gave her the don’t-you-dare glare and she laughed.
“You ran off.”
“I, unlike you, didn’t run anywhere.”
Her teasing smile widened. “Okay, smartass. Everyone is looking for you.” She turned again to Toby. “I’m Harlow, by the way. No one understands why I’m here, but I am.”
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 sti
ll 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 b
ottom teeth and enhanced her dimples. “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself again?”
His eyes shone. “Always.”
III.
“What the hell, Oliver!” Harlow said as we pulled into the parking lot of Oak Falls Memorial Hospital. “You’re a sadist. You can’t leave us hanging like that.”
I had to agree with Harlow. I wanted more, more, more. But even as Julian filled in certain blanks for me—how my mom met him, when she met him—more blanks appeared. Wider and more nagging. When did it go wrong? How did it go wrong?
I wanted to know. And I also didn’t.
Unlike Harlow, I’d never liked sad stories.
“Sorry, lady,” Julian said to Harlow, but he was looking at me. “Got to stop for now. We’re here.”
I moved to get out of the car, but Harlow stayed planted in her seat. “Tal,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Is it okay with you if I just wait on a bench outside the hospital?”
I nodded. Julian stepped out of the car, presumably to let me and Harlow talk in private.
“I want to be there for you,” she said.
“I know.”
“But it feels weird.”
“It feels weird to me, too.”
She gave me a knowing look and then stared down at her chipped nail polish. “I know. But it’s different. You . . .”
“I . . . ?”
“You should be here,” she finally said. “This is your family.”
“But I don’t know them,” I said, and then amended, “Well, I barely know them.”
“That’s the point, though, right? That’s why you should be here. To get to know them.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Julian watching us.
“You should go,” Harlow said firmly. “I’ll be right here.” She paused and then looked out the window and gestured. “Or right there.” She pulled volume three of Saga out of her oversized canvas tote bag. “I even brought reading materials.”
She reached over to hug me. “I feel like I should say good luck, but that doesn’t sound right. So I’ll just say I love you, okay?”
“I love you too,” I said, and stepped out of the car. It felt good to say that aloud and to hear her say it too. When we were younger, we used to tell each other “I love you” all the time, but as we got older, we stopped saying it. Like it was stupid to repeat something we already knew. But sometimes you need to say things aloud. It makes them feel real. And after the few weird months that Harlow and I’d had, I was glad it was starting to feel real again.