I Have Lost My Way(31)

Nathaniel stares at the smudged pictures of omelets and burgers and skyscraper sandwiches with deep concentration. Freya, who claimed to be so hungry, hasn’t even looked at the menu. She’s frowning at her phone.

“Order?” the waiter asks, tapping his pen against the pad as if he has dozens of other places to be, dozens of other tables to service.

“I’ll have the minestrone soup,” Harun says.

“Cup or bowl?”

“Cup.”

The waiter grunts. “You?” he asks Nathaniel.

Nathaniel is looking at the menu with a bewildered expression. “Uhh, the same, I guess.”

Ammi sometimes talked about what it was like when she moved to America to marry Abu. She’d studied English in school, but it turned out to be completely insufficient for carrying on actual conversations. She learned by parroting what the natives said. When Harun realizes that’s exactly what Nathaniel just did, he deeply regrets ordering the soup.

“I’ll have a Cobb salad, no bacon, no egg, dressing on the side,” Freya says, looking about as pleased with her order as Harun is with his.

“Two cups of minestrone and a dry Cobb,” the waiter repeats, already starting to leave.

He’s halfway back to the kitchen when Freya calls out, “Wait. I changed my mind.”

Harun braces for the waiter’s ire. And sure enough, he returns with a murderous expression on his face.

“Sorry,” Freya says, smiling at him, as if trying the “kill ’em with kindness” strategy. It doesn’t work for her either.

“I’d like a grilled cheese on rye bread with tomatoes.” She licks her lips. “And American cheese. It has to be American.”

“Salad or fries?” the waiter asks.

Freya hesitates for a second. “Fuck it,” she decides. “Fries. Extra crispy.”

“Extra crispy?” the waiter asks.

“Yeah, put them through the deep fryer twice.”

The waiter appears horrified by this.

“And a side of honey.”

“Honey?”

“For the fries.”

The waiter looks even more horrified.

Freya smiles.

Harun looks at Nathaniel, gaunt Nathaniel, and feels his hunger as if it were his own, though his appetite vanished when James told him to get the fuck out his life. Knowing the risks, he calls the waiter back. By the look on his face, Harun is fairly certain one of them is going to have their meal adorned with a healthy side of spit.

“I would like the same as her,” Harun says.

“You want what she’s having?” The waiter is incredulous, as if he knows that Harun doesn’t even like grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Exactly. Fries extra crispy.”

“You want honey too?”

“Sure,” Harun says. He looks at Nathaniel, thinks of Ammi doing as the natives do. “Should we just make it three?”

There’s a look on Nathaniel’s face—relief, gratitude—and Harun wonders why it fills him with shame.



* * *



— — —

When the food comes, Nathaniel is overcome by the force of his appetite. His last meal was six bags of airplane pretzels stolen off the cart and hastily eaten in the tiny lavatory.

He’s nearly undone by the tastes of the food. The ooze of melting cheese on his tongue, the tiny caraway seeds that explode under the force of his molars, the delightful sweetness of honey with french fries, which Freya has insisted both he and Harun try, holding the fry so close to Nathaniel’s mouth that it is a minor miracle he doesn’t eat her finger too.

It’s only when he looks up and sees Freya and Harun staring at him with similarly peculiar expressions that he understands he has done something wrong, revealed the wild man within him (Don’t tell your mother). He looks down at his barren plate. He’s devoured everything: the sandwich, the fries, the pickle, even the wilted lettuce that he realizes was meant for garnish. Meanwhile, neither Freya nor Harun has eaten even half of their sandwiches.

He is mortified. He’s been too long out of this world. He’s become uncivilized.

Just us, buddy.

Wordlessly, Harun takes half of his sandwich and puts it on Nathaniel’s plate. Freya does the same.

Nathaniel protests, but they cut him off.

“I’m not hungry,” Harun says.

“Neither am I,” Freya admits.

Nathaniel stares at his magically replenished plate. “If you weren’t hungry, why did you order all this food?” he asks.

There’s a pause as Freya and Harun glance at each other. Then they look at him. “Because you were,” they say.



* * *



— — —

Nathaniel excuses himself to use the bathroom.

There, in a stall no bigger than the one on the airplane where he consumed his last meal, he pinches the skin above his nose to keep the tears from coming.

Then he pulls out his phone and calls his father.



* * *



— — —

When he comes out, something is different.

For one, a cluster of girls surrounds the table. But the thing that’s really changed is Freya. He doesn’t know how to explain it, only that she looks like a different person. He steps tentatively closer and hears the girls squealing, recalling how the girls at school used to cheer like that when he hit a fly ball deep into left field, back when he was at least half a human.