The mulch was damp when Jamil stepped off the sidewalk to allow the group of teenage boys jog past him. Bits of soggy, fragrant wood chips stuck to the worn fake leather. The ticking spray of the offending sprinkler punctuated the steady stream of whooshing cars on their Monday morning commute along Verugo Avenue. As Jamil surveyed the lush lawns in LA’s valley, he wondered, as he often did walking to work, if California were still in a drought.

The ten minute walk from his bus stop to his assistant job at the Burbank Studio’s office used to be Jamil’s favorite part of a weekday. Passing a quiet residential neighborhood that wasn’t littered with abandoned mattresses, rusted car parts and sleeping homeless bodies had once given Jamil a pep in his step as he imagined himself walking through time and into a future where he, too, had a dense green lawn to water. He had admired the Spanish-style architecture and tall arched windows framed in breezy palms. He had noted the make and model of the cars he saw, still parked along the curb each weekday morning, wondering if their drivers were still asleep, unbeholden to the grind of a workday schedule. Today, though, he thought only of Perdita’s scowl as she had served him scalding chai that morning. And the Friday morning before. And each weekday morning in the last month.

Perdita’s patience had evaporated with the passing of the five indistinct seasons they had spent together in a cramped Los Feliz studio. In the beginning, she, too, had been taken with perpetually sunny mornings, the gentle hum of busy highways, the abrupt way mile high palms dotted the horizon line. On their first trip together after graduating from a modest state university back East, she had studied carefully the way Jamil became gregarious and chatty with a waiter when they ordered their first glass of orange wine. She had loved how his usually soft voice grew booming, as if the sound waves adapted to fill the sprawl of LA. She had run her hand through his thinning hair, which he had, perhaps for the first time she had known him, left undone and in disarray, and conjured fantasies of riding in convertible cars, top down, along the Pacific Coast Highway. And so, she agreed, readily, that they should pool the graduation money they had gotten from their respective families and settle together out west, like the beginnings of every great American story. Those stories though, Jamil thought, always fade to black as the protagonist arrives at the threshold. Rarely do they show you the journey of becoming.

While Jamil sat at the kitchen table that morning, delicately blowing air over the rim of the steaming mug, his eyes followed Perdita’s pacing. She had taken to early morning phone calls with her older brother, the one who had just bought a townhouse, new construction, down the block from her parents’ home at the end of a cul de sac in Patterson, New Jersey. The same brother who, a few months earlier, had been the first family member to visit them out West, and made his disdain for Jamil well known as he circled the perimeter of their apartment, pick up random items and sighing before setting them back down. Each night during his visit Perdita had recited to her older brother the menu of southern Indian dishes she wanted to make him and had stocked the fridge and pantry for, only for him to decline, impolitely, and inform her that he would be driving them in his rental car to this or that upscale restaurant in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills, and feign surprise when Perdita had not dined there before. Perdita was steadfast in transferring her resentment for her brother’s callousness onto Jamil and his short comings, as is often the case for immigrant couples with judge mental family members. After that visit, Perdita’s brother began calling most mornings to relay this and that update about the renovation of their home or the fuel efficiency of their new car or the lavish dinner he’d taken their parents to the night before, and as he would offer a detailed, colorful recap, Perdita would cup her palm over the microphone and whisper to Jamil a summary of the one-sided conversation with increasing hostility towards him.

That Monday morning, Perdita recounted for Jamil her brother’s plans to take their parents to New York City over Labor Day weekend and the theater tickets he had gotten a deep discount on. Jamil simply nodded along. When she hung up the call, Perdita did not quickly pack up her backpack to head to the local library where she worked remotely completing Tamil translations for an immigration law firm. She looked at Jamil apologetically, perhaps for the first time in months, and sat down across from him at the kitchen table.

“My brother has offered us their guest room,” she said folding her hands in her lap as if this conversation were a foregone conclusion. “We can stay there as long as we like while we search for our own place.”

“Our own place where?”

“Home, Jamil. Near my parents and yours. I can do my work from anywhere, and Faisal can help you get a job quickly. We can get a car and not have to take the buses everywhere. We can buy all the groceries we want and not just the ones we can carry on a twenty minute walk.”

In the eighteen months they had been in LA, Perdita had not cut her hair. She had worn it for years in a blunt bob that curved inward just at her chin. As it grew longer, it also grew curlier. That morning, it was parted to the left side and fell attractively over her cheekbone. Jamil loved her long hair. He reached across the circular table, which was barely an arm’s length long, to tuck it behind her left ear. The chai was now a drinkable temperature but it sat between them, untouched.

“We are home,” he summed up.

In the ensuing silence between them, which lasted perhaps only five minutes, Jamil and Perdita each played out their unspoken exchange in their thoughts. Perdita would leave. Jamil would stay. She pictured herself, a few months into the future, in a New Jersey apartment on the third or fourth floor so that it got enough sunlight for her to grow a coriander plant on her kitchen countertop. She would have fresh coriander top sprinkle atop daal when her parents visited her for dinner. When she cooked, she would close her bedroom door so that her linens wouldn’t soak in the scent of curry. She would do her work from a desk against a window wall because she could afford to run the air conditioning all day in the summer. Jamil wondered what of their knickknacks and decor she would take with her, if any. He thought about the weekend flea market in Pasadena that always had a nice selection of cheap wall art. He wondered how long he would wait before asking out the young Phillipina intern who had just started working in the audio engineering department. Sitting there in silence, it occurred to both of them that they had each been leaving for months.

Perdita had been leaving with every phone call to her family, with every declined invitation to join Jamil at work happy hours, with every recipe she bookmarked dreaming about a kitchen she didn’t have. Jamil had been leaving with every morning commute fantasy in which he pictured moving into one of those homes on Verdugo where Perdita never made an appearance.

The table between them seemed to grow longer. Jamil stood, politely pushed in his chair without scraping the floor, picked up the backpack that always awaited by the front door, and closed it delicately behind him. In a few weeks’ time, Jamil would once again think his ten minute walk from the bus stop to the office was his favorite part of the day. But until then, he would act the part of a despondent new bachelor.