According to the website, if you paid a hundred dollars a month, you’d help sustain a West Bank farmer. In exchange, you’d receive fermented olives. I didn’t eat olives, but that seemed irrelevant. It did nothing for Gazans fleeing death, but it felt like an investment in some kind of future. What embodied life beyond human wars better than a thousand-year-old tree?
I entered my card information then enlarged the photo of the family. The Shaheens. The father had warm, creased eyes and a large belly. The mom looked vaguely agitated in the way my mom often looked vaguely agitated, her brown eyes challenging the camera. They had four sons—the youngest looked ten, the eldest probably in his twenties, all different versions of each other: tanned, dark brown hair, warm brown eyes, except for the second-born, whose complexion was milky white. The youngest had clearly been horseplaying and was yelled at right before the flash. The eldest towered over everyone, looking miserable in the way young men caught off guard often looked in pictures, his focus not on the camera but somewhere beyond it.
When I reached the end of the payment process, I was asked what I wanted to name the tree. I stared at the planes shooting into the air for a long time through the glass. I didn’t know why, but I typed, “Joel.”
Chapter 30
I walked outside LAX, past the sliding Arrivals doors, my suitcase scraping the ground behind me. The weather was warm and inoffensive in a way that made me feel like I was being lied to. Cars snaked in the interminable distance. Four vehicles down, an idling blue Toyota. I ran up, excited, smacking the window. Jay jerked, eyes wide.
He got out of the car shaking his head. “What if I’d had a gun?”
I recalled the gleaming black machine on the kitchen table. How, if this were a story, Chekhov would be upset if it didn’t go off soon.
“Who just shoots someone banging on their car?”
Jay said, “Americans,” then nestled my suitcase in his trunk between bulk rolls of Costco toilet paper and slouching shopping bags.
In the car, he grabbed my head like a child holding a basketball and planted quick kisses all over my face. I touched his smooth chin then pulled the political thriller from my bag. “For you.”
His smile recruited all the muscles of his face. “I’ve been wanting to read this one. Thank you.”
The cover photo was of the White House, its windows burning.
That morning, at the holiday program at Jay’s school, we sat on folding chairs near the stage. Small feet shuffled beneath the curtain’s hem. Jay peeled off to chat with another teacher while I flipped through the program. Two students welcomed us in English and Spanish, passing a sheet between them from which they read their lines. Jay returned to his seat when the curtains rose. The music teacher lifted her wand, and the melancholic whine of “Christmas Time Is Here” filled the auditorium.
Leaning into me, Jay said, “That’s Carmen and Ila. Hector and Jamal are over there.”
It was strange seeing these kids he’d told stories about each week like a serialized show—this week Hector clogging the classroom sink with slime, the last Ila running a sticker-trading ring at lunchtime, the next Jamal having a breakthrough with his multiplication tables.
When the program ended, we stayed back to collect the chairs.
Two little boys ran up to Jay. “Mr. Wright!” They bobbed like apples.
Jay crouched to tell them how awesome their singing was, then waved me over. “Hector, Jamal, this is my good friend Ms. Cat.”
“Good friend orgirlfriend!” Hector said.
“Hi, Jamal, hi, Hector. It’s so nice to meet you two.”
Jamal brushed a wrist against his cheek. “You’re not arealcat, are you?”
I gasped. “How did you know!? You can’t tell anyone, okay?”
The boys giggled. Dropping to the floor, they circled each other, petting the air. A man marched over and yanked Hector up, dragging him through the doors so Hector tripped over his own feet. Jamal quietly got up and stood there, staring expressionless the way kids did when they were on the cusp of understanding something about the world. Jay’s hand found the top of Jamal’s head. He told him he and Hector were the best, most convincing cats he’d ever seen.
Chapter 31
Jay’s dad lived in a yellow bungalow: windblown garden out front, pots on the porch steps, a cracked fountain that had stopped spurting water years ago, sticking up from the ground like a sinking ship. He was staring off into the distance, smoking, when Jay and I pulled in the driveway for Christmas dinner. He’d always reminded me of a dentist with his elegant silver coils, his rimless glasses that seemed from a different decade.
“Look atJet’s Beauties of the Week.” He hugged us on the porch before turning away to cough.
Nodding at his blunt, Jay said, “Be careful.”
He waved him away. “I’m fine. It’s my knee, that’s the problem.”
“When’s your surgery?” I asked.
“What surgery?”
