Dreaming in English by Laura Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

and visualize all that he has described for me—the high-class coziness, the wall fountain. But mostly, I imagine my photographs on the walls. I will have them enlarged and very nicely framed. I’ll make them grand, very professional. I will be an official artist.
    I turn back to Ike and throw my arms around him. “Thank you!”
    He accepts my hug but not my thanks. “There’s one big, deal-breaking problem. My parents were supposed to match my investment dollar for dollar, to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars. I’ve spent the last three years of my life remodeling and flipping houses with my dad to earn my share, and that was in a rising housing market. God knows how long it would take me to earn the rest, but after tonight . . .” His eyes contain acute pain. “There’s no way they’re going to give me the money now.”
    “Oh, Ike.” I did this. I caused him this pain. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Don’t ever say you’re sorry for marrying me.”
    “But I am if it . . . What can we do to make things better with your parents?”
    He considers that for a moment. “I don’t know that we can do anything.”
    “But this is your dream, Ike. You can’t just give up on a dream.”
    He gives a halfhearted shrug. “There’ll be other locations. Other opportunities.”
    He doesn’t sound like he believes this, though, or that he can stand the wait.
    I step away from him and go around the corner of the store, as if I want to look inside it from a different angle. But what I really want to do is kick the plate-glass window, or knock over one of these chained-down, leftover wrought-iron tables, or . . . or something. Something violent and destructive on purpose, because in marrying Ike—in making my dream come true—I’ve done something unintentional and yet vicious. I’ve ruined his.
    I steady my breath and then look across the abandoned café and study my new husband. He leans against a concrete pillar on the covered patio with his arms crossed, staring through the window that separates him from the dream he was so close to realizing. That he would have realized, had I not come along. He catches my gaze and gives me a smile that’s so sad I simply can’t bear it, and so I go to him resolutely. “Maybe your parents are right, Ike.”
    He looks at me as though he’s not at all surprised by what I’ve said. As though he knew I’d say such a thing. “My parents mean well,” he says. “But they’re not right.”
    “If you want to have our marriage annulled, I’ll understand.” I say this firmly, but inside I’m quivering, for this is not what I want.
    Thankfully, Ike doesn’t either. “Are you crazy, Persian Girl?”
    “You didn’t know this was going to happen,” I say. “You would’ve made a different decision if you had.”
    He shakes his head no. “I don’t think so.”
    “This is your dream , Ike. You can’t give up on it.”
    We’ve been holding hands as we’ve talked, but now he grips my forearms. “Listen carefully. I’d also like to go para-sailing. And bike across the country, and hike the Appalachian Trail. I’d like to buy a Harley, and live in Spain for a year. Opening a coffee shop isn’t a dream, Tami. It’s just one of the many things I’d like to do at some point in my life.”
    “ All those things are dreams, Ike. You’re a man of many dreams.”
    “But they’re not—” He stops, frustrated, and looks away, struggling to find the right words. When he looks back at me, his eyes are earnest. “When you said good-bye, when you told me you were going back to Iran and would probably never come back, I thought I’d lost you. I felt so . . . hollow. Nothing meant anything anymore. You call them dreams, and maybe they were at some point, but after losing you, they all just became things on a list. Even opening the coffee shop didn’t mean what it used to.”
    He takes my breath away, Ike does.
    “Once I met you, my dreams changed,” he says. “Everything I