by Trish Doller
Every month since then we have traded postcards with single-line snapshots of our lives. From me: “Good-bye, Sandusky. Hello, Fordham.” From him: “Finally I am on the other side of the kitchen door.” On the back of this card is an Egyptian postage stamp and a New York City address with the message: “Go to my cousin’s restaurant. There will be a gift there for you.”
At the Astoria Boulevard station, I exit the train and walk down Astoria. Hang a right onto Steinway Street. A pair of twenty-something women wearing jeans with their hijabs passes me on the sidewalk. Across Steinway is a hookah lounge, a travel agency specializing in pilgrimages to Mecca, and a clothing shop window filled with colorful abayas. I walk past a mosque, several Middle Eastern restaurants, and a halal grocer. Next to the front door a man sits on a kitchen chair smoking a cigarette. He reminds me of Masoud. The whole neighborhood reminds me of Cairo.
I stop when the address on the building matches the back of the postcard. The building is a little shabby—not unlike the koshary shop in Giza—but the door frame is tiled in a variety of Egyptian patterns like patchwork and a bronze hand-of-Fatima knocker on the front door makes it feel as if this is the entryway to someone’s home instead of a restaurant. I read the address again, even though I know this is the right place, and touch my fingertips to the knocker for good luck. Then I step inside.
The interior is warm and inviting, the air fragrant with the scent of spice and meat. The walls are painted saffron yellow and hung with Egyptian tapestries, gilded mirrors, and artwork with no specific theme. Running along the entire length of one wall is a banquette thrown with dozens of patterned cushions, and hanging over each table is a lantern like the ones I bought at al-Gomaa. It is a restaurant for leisurely meals and long conversation.
“Sit wherever you like and I’ll be with you in a moment,” a male voice says, and my attention turns sharply away from the lanterns to the kitchen area, which is part of the dining room in the same way the takeaway counter was part of the koshary shop. Behind the tiled counter—his back to me as he works a large skillet over a gas flame—is Adam Elhadad.
I don’t need to see his face to recognize him. I know the shape of the shoulders that once held my arms up around them. I know that dark curl tucked behind the ear that heard the quiet declarations of my heart. My pulse picks up speed and I stand frozen in the middle of the room, waiting for him to turn around.
And then he does.
He reaches for a menu from a stack at the end of the counter, and when he finally looks up, he stares at me for a long moment, as if I might be a hallucination or a ghost. “Caroline?”
Tears well up in my eyes as I nod. “It’s me.”
“You’re here.” The note of wonder in his voice makes me laugh.
I hold up the postcard. “You invited me.”
It takes less than a single heartbeat for him to drop the menu on the counter and close the space between us. His body is warm, and the scent of onions and cumin clings to his hair, as his arms crush me against him. I am crying and happy and my world feels right again.
“I have imagined this moment so many times,” he says, his voice low beside my ear. “But I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“Your postcard showed up in my mailbox yesterday. I came as soon as I could. Why didn’t you tell me you were in New York?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Mission accomplished,” I say. “How long have you been here?”
“I arrived last month but thought I should first get to know Hammad and his family.”
“So, wait . . . if you’ve been here, who sent this postcard?”
“I didn’t want to ruin the surprise with a US postage stamp,” Adam says. “So I had Magdi send the card three weeks after my arrival and then hoped you would come.”
“If I had known you were the gift, I would have been here yesterday.”
“It’s good you didn’t come yesterday. We were very busy.”
“I have missed you so much.”
He touches my face, touches my hair. “It’s been the same for me.”
“Do your parents know?”
“Yes.” He nods. “We talked a long time about you—about the possibility of you—and they realize now that how I feel is serious. They want me to be happy.”
I blink back tears and my throat feels too clogged to speak. Adam grins and releases me.
“So. You have arrived at just the right time,” he says. “Hammad lets me run the kitchen between lunch and dinner, so you have the restaurant almost entirely to yourself and the best chef of the day.”
I laugh. “You should be more confident.”
“Come sit.” He pulls out a stool at the kitchen counter. “Let me cook for you.”
He goes around to the stove and clanks a heavy iron skillet onto the gas burner. My face is flushed with happiness while I watch him sear cubes of lamb and listen as he tells me that after my family left Cairo, he enrolled in culinary school. “I saved all the money from your father,” he says. “He always paid me too much.”
I think back to that day in Cairo when Mom scolded Dad for being too liberal with the contents of his wallet. “I’m glad.”
“For a year I went to school in the morning and waited tables in the evening, but when a kitchen assistant position became available at the hotel, I talked my way into it.”
Adam brings me a dish of hummus and a plate of warm, fresh Egyptian bread.
“After I finished school, my father suggested I come to work for my mother’s cousin Hammad,” he says. “He’s a local celebrity because a television show once filmed an episode here. So I’m the waiter when Hammad cooks, but in the afternoons I am allowed the run of the kitchen to practice.”
“Best chef of the day.”
“Hammad is very skilled,” Adam says. “But he basks in the attention and enjoys showing off in the kitchen. Many customers don’t mind waiting as he mixes politics and cooking, but others just want to eat.”
“How very tactful of you,” I say.
He throws a grin over his shoulder as the pan sizzles and the scent of onions and garlic wafts toward me. “Yes, because I’d like to keep my job.”
He explains that he lives in an apartment above the restaurant with Hammad’s family and shares a room with his two young cousins. “He pays me a fair wage,” Adam says. “Not so much that I could afford to live on my own, but enough that my father has been able to pay down the hospital bills and I can keep a small amount for myself. Someday that will change. One day I’ll work in a fine kitchen in Manhattan.”
“You absolutely will.”
A young white couple comes into the restaurant and Adam excuses himself to deliver a pair of menus to the new customers. As he takes their drink order, I scoop hummus onto a bit of bread, then watch as he finishes adding the ingredients to whatever dish he is preparing for me. He still looks like the boy I met in Cairo, but I can see the difference between that Adam and this Adam. This one is making his dreams come true.
“Do you like it here?” I ask as he adds the lamb mixture to a cone-shaped tagine and places it on a metal diffuser to keep the gas flame from cracking the clay pot.
“I have visited some of the museums,” he says. “My favorite is the natural history museum, but the city overwhelms me. It is exactly like Cairo and nothing like it at the same time.”
“I can imagine how that feels.”
He shoots me a knowing grin. “Steinway Street makes me feel like I am at home. In this neighborhood I can speak my own language without people looking at me as if I might be a terrorist, but it’s not the same as being with my family.”
I can’t imagine how that feels. In Egypt I never had to fear someone mistaking me for a terrorist. This boy doesn’t want to destroy the world; he wants to feed it. Anger washes through me, and I wish I could protect him from the people who refuse to see beyond his skin, who will never know the goodness of his heart.
Adam delivers the drinks and takes
the couple’s food order, then returns.
“I spend a lot of time here at the restaurant, and on Sundays I go to the Irish pub down the street where they show English football matches,” he says. “Liverpool’s unpredictability is always consistent. Which is comforting.”
Inside the circle of his arms, I thought we could pick up where we left off, that it could be effortless if we let it. But life might be too complicated for love to conquer all. Someday he will go home and we’ll go around the same circle again.
“What are you thinking?” Adam asks.
“This is never going to be easy, is it?”
He looks at me with those clear brown eyes, and I see a quick flash of sorrow as he realizes I am right. But then he does the little shrug-nod that makes my chest feel like a cage for my too-big heart. “Perhaps not, but when it comes to you, I would rather have good than easy.”
He turns to the stove to begin cooking the new order. And as I watch him, I know we are both right. I have to stop worrying about what might go wrong and just love him back. I take a deep breath and then, finally, loud enough so that Adam Elhadad can hear me, I say just one word.
“Bahebak.”
He turns around and gives me that huge smile—the one I can’t image ever getting tired of seeing—and we begin again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In a Perfect World was not meant to be my next book, but sometimes the world has other, better ideas. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sara Sargent, who gave me a seed and a watering can.
Working with Jennifer Ung has been a dream. She understood my vision and helped make it a reality. Big thanks to her and the team at Simon Pulse, including Mara Anastas, Liesa Abrams, Mary Marotta, Lucille Rettino, Carolyn Swerdloff, Catherine Hayden, Michelle Leo, Jodie Hockensmith, Christina Pecorale, Katherine Devendorf, Karina Granda, and Greg Stadnyk.
Kate Schafer Testerman is always in my corner, and I am grateful for everything she does.
Suzanne Young and Cristin Bishara constantly challenge me to be a better writer. I am so fortunate to have them as writing partners and friends.
While researching this book, I had an amazing group of people who answered my questions about Egypt, Islam, and living in Cairo, including Hend El-Nagy, Baasma Aal, Aneeqah N., Aya Elgadaa, Jon Baschshi, Miranda Kenneally, Amanda Ross, and Becky Harrison. Special thanks to Baasma and Aneeqah for reading the earlier drafts, and to Aya for lending her name. If I got anything wrong, it’s all on me.
My family is unwavering in their support and patience. Mom, Jack, Caroline, Scott, and Raquella, I love you all . . .
. . . and especially you, Phil.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trish Doller is the author of Something Like Normal, which was an ABC New Voices pick and a finalist for NPR’s 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels, among many other accolades; Where the Stars Still Shine, which was an Indie Next List pick; and The Devil You Know. She has been a newspaper reporter, radio personality, and bookseller, and she lives in Fort Myers, Florida, with a relentlessly optimistic Border collie and a pirate.
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ALSO BY TRISH DOLLER
Something Like Normal
Where the Stars Still Shine
The Devil You Know
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Simon Pulse hardcover edition May 2017
Text copyright © 2017 by Trish Doller
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ISBN 978-1-4814-7988-2 (hc)
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