Dreaming in English by Laura Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

when the bubble pops, you feel like it was all just a lovely dream. Like it was stolen time, and for stealing that time of course there’s a price you must pay. If I’ve learned anything in this world, it’s that happiness has a price. You just don’t always know what it will be.
    I sigh to have been reminded of this, and I wish so much it wasn’t true.
    But it is.
    In my life, and in my family’s life, it has always been true.
    At the intersection of Speedway and Tucson boulevards, Ike turns left onto Speedway. When we get to Country Club Road, where he should turn right to go to my sister’s house—that had been the plan, to see first Ike’s family and then mine—he keeps driving straight.
    “Did you forget to turn?” I ask.
    “I want to show you something.” He continues to Magnolia Avenue, the next big intersection, and pulls into the shopping plaza on the right. He parks in a spot in front of a corner store with a sign in the window that says AVAILABLE . He turns off the ignition and stares through the windshield at the vacant storefront. “Here she is. My perfect anchor spot.”
    “Is this—? Oh, Ike! Is this it? Is this going to be your coffee shop?”
    “That was the plan.” But instead of sounding happy, he says this like he just lost his closest friend. He takes a huge, miserable breath. “I did not see this coming.”
    “Ike?”
    He keeps looking straight ahead. From the side, I see that his swallow comes hard. Then, finally turning to me, he says, “Want to get out and see it?”
    “Of course!” I climb down from the truck, approach the store, and peer in the window. It looks to have been a restaurant, as there’s an ordering counter and some food display cases. “It looks nearly ready to go.”
    He comes up, wraps his arms around me from behind, and looks over my shoulder into the abandoned restaurant. I lean back into him, feeling like a puzzle piece that has just been connected with its rightful partner. “There’s a ton of work to be done. It’s kind of a dump. But the location’s perfect.” He tells me how when Starbucks looks for locations, it looks to open them in shopping plazas where there’s already a grocery store, and he points out the Trader Joe’s directly across from this space. He goes on to describe how he’d change the layout, what sort of furniture he’d buy, what sort of lighting he’d have.
    “I always thought I’d go modern with the design,” he says. “But then—well, remember how you said I could use your ‘capturing freedom’ photographs as my artwork? That made me want to go cozier. And then I thought, maybe classier, too. So I’m going metal, wood, and glass, with a big wall fountain right there.” He points out the spot against the far wall.
    I hardly heard anything beyond the mention of my photographs. “You really want to use my pictures?”
    “Absolutely,” he says. “And I want you to sign them, and I’d like to sell them, too, if you’re okay with that.”
    “If I’m okay with that?” I repeat. “Of course I’m okay with that!”
    When I first arrived in America, Ardishir gave me his camera, and I took so many pictures. I took a picture of a teenage boy with three earrings in his ear and one in his lip. I took another of a barefoot, shirtless black man with crazy braids riding a unicycle and playing a flute. One of a car with pink daisies painted on it. Still another of my friend Eva from the waist down—of her miniskirt and thigh-high boots. Girls’ bare shoulders. Front doors open to the world. Public hand-holding between gay men. Line dancing at a country-western bar. Cheerleaders doing cartwheels across the campus lawn.
    You’re looking for freedom in all its often overlooked details , Ike had observed. You’re photographing tiny acts of everyday rebellion.
    He was right. And even after three months, I still see freedom best that way, in its small, everyday forms.
    I look once more through the window of the coffee shop