travel.
Eventually, Lula buckled down and wrote a story in English, with the help of a dictionary and a thesaurus she found in Zekeâs room. In the flyleaf was an inscription. âTo Zeke, Happy Birthday from Mom, may words give you wings!â What heartless witch gives a teenage boy a thesaurus for his birthday?
Trying not to think too hard, Lula wrote a story about the blood feud in her great-great-grandfatherâs time. She pretended that her Cousin George was the bridegroomâs brother and added a long poetic passage about the bride walled in, stone by stone. There was also a lot about muskets, information that came easily, her dad having been a gun nut, and finally lots of folkloric stuff, curses and proverbs she found on Albanian online forums. She put in everything but the sound track of Albanian folk songs.
Mister Stanley liked her story so much that it became part of the package they gave Don Settebello, who now listed writer among her skills, along with translation and childhood education. Independently, or maybe not so independently, Mister Stanley and Don suggested she write a book. Lula couldnât imagine why a country would want a citizen from a long line of blood feuders. So to tip the scales in her favor, she wrote a sad story about the day she heard that her parents had been killed in the NATO bombing.
âIâm so sorry,â Mister Stanley said.
âIâm okay,â Lula assured him.
It was true, theyâd died in the war. So what if they hadnât really got stuck in Kosovo when the war broke out, but had sneaked across the border when it was almost over? Thousands of refugees had been fleeing from Kosovo into Albania, from the Serbs and from NATO. Only her crazy father had stolen his brotherâs car and, fueled by drink and misguided patriotism, driven himself and her mother in the wrong direction. His Kosovar brothers needed him! Her dad had gotten it into his head that the Kosovo Liberation Army could use his collection of tribal muskets. So what if it wasnât the NATO bombing that got them, but an auto crash, and her dad was driving drunk? Theyâd hit a NATO tank. Lulaâs private opinion was that heâd been on a suicide mission. The six years since her parents died sometimes seemed like an eye-blink and sometimes like forever. Some days Lula could hardly remember them, some days she couldnât stop seeing their faces. She still cried whenever she thought about her dadâs funny porkpie hat, a style increasingly popular with hipster boys in Brooklyn.
âYou should write a memoir,â Mister Stanley had said, that first conversation.
âMaybe short stories,â said Lula.
âI donât know,â said Mister Stanley. âDon says nonfiction sells better. A memoir of immigrant life. Coming from the most backward Communist country and moving hereââ
âNot the most backward,â said Lula. âYouâre forgetting the stans. Turkmenistan. Uzbekistan.â
âSorry,â said Mister Stanley. âThat was thoughtless.â
âDonât mention it,â said Lula.
B y the time the Lexus had passed the house four times, Lula had progressed from being sure it had nothing to do with her to thinking it was no wonder that the car had come to punish her for lying.
The Lexus stopped. Three guys got out and ambled toward Mister Stanleyâs. No double-checking the address. They acted like they lived here. All three wore black jeans streaked with white dust. Maybe they were in construction. Had Mister Stanley hired someone to fix the house and not told her?
One of the men wore a red hoodie appliquéd with the black double-headed Albanian eagle. Not exactly regulation INS business wear. So it made sense, of a kind. How many Albanians were there in the metropolitan area? The odds were against this being a random home invasion. Which wasnât to say that her fellow countrymen wouldnât rape