Emrah proposed to me in August at the Pannonian Lake, kneeling on the wet wooden steps and nearly dropping the ring into the salt water. From then on both our families kept saying it was high time the parents met. My dad died six years ago, and Emrah's mom lives in Innsbruck with another husband, so on that first Saturday in October there were supposed to be just four of us at the table: my mom, Emrah's father, Emrah, and me. Mom made sarma, pita, and three salads, even though Emrah had told her his father ate nothing but ćevapi. The apartment in Brčanska Malta smelled of bay leaves, and since noon Mom had changed her blouse twice.
Admir Softić rang the bell at seven on the dot, with a tray of baklava and a bouquet that had obviously been picked by the florist. Mom opened the door with her apron still tied around her waist. They looked at each other. The tray tipped, and Emrah caught it at the last moment. "Zemira," said Admir, not as a question but as if he were reading a name off a list. "Admir," said Mom. Then she took off her apron and folded it on the little cabinet in the hallway, which she had not done even when the principal of her school came to our house.
Dinner lasted two hours, and it was the strangest dinner of my life. Admir praised the sarma and looked at his plate. Mom brought out the salt three times, even though it was already on the table. They talked about the price of gas, about how Tuzla had changed and which café used to be where, and both of them kept saying "our high school," as if it had belonged only to them. Under the table Emrah kept nudging me with his knee. I nudged him back. When Admir said that Mrs. Fazlić, the chemistry teacher, still carried the same brown handbag, Mom laughed so loudly that she startled herself.
I caught her in the kitchen while she was cutting the baklava. "Who is he to you?" "Nobody," she said, and cut a piece no one could possibly eat. "Mom." She put down the knife and looked at me. "Sit down, Inela. He was my first love," she said. "From sophomore year until graduation. Ninety-nine. We were supposed to go to university in Sarajevo together. We agreed: the first of September, seven in the morning, at the station. I waited for him until noon. He never came." "And?" "And nothing. I enrolled here. He left. Pride is a strange thing when you are eighteen." Admir's laugh came through the door, and Mom went on cutting the baklava, smaller and smaller.
At the same time, out on the balcony, Emrah was getting the other version, while his father smoked a cigarette he promised would be his last. Admir told him he had waited at the station from half past six until ten, with two bags and a cassette he had recorded for the trip, and that Zemira never came. He thought she had changed her mind because of her parents, since her father had never liked a boy from Kreka. In the evening he left alone, and afterward he did his best to let nothing tie him to Tuzla. He was in Sarajevo, then in Germany, then he came back, married, divorced. "Which station?" Emrah asked, because my Emrah is an engineer and always asks the right questions. Admir looked at him as if he had asked what year it was. "The train station, of course. Where else would I wait for the train to Sarajevo?"
At midnight, after Admir had gone, Emrah and I sat on the steps in front of the building and compared versions. Mom, as it turned out when I asked her, had waited at the bus station, because she had always gone to Sarajevo by bus. Twenty-five years, two people, two stations, and not a single phone. We laughed until the neighbor on the second floor opened her window and asked whether we knew what time it was. Then we stopped. "What do we do?" Emrah asked. "We tell them," I said. "No," he said. "We invite them to the station. This time to the same one."
On Tuesday I told Mom that Admir wanted to hand over something for the wedding, something from his family, and that the easiest thing was to meet on Friday at seven, at the bus station, because he was heading to Lukavac from there. Emrah told his father the same thing, only with my mom in the starring role. It was so transparent that I was sure they would see through us right away. They did not. On Friday, from five o'clock on, Mom changed into three different blouses and switched her earrings twice. "To hand over an envelope," I said. "To hand over an envelope," she repeated, and switched them a third time.
At half past six Emrah and I sat down in the café across from the station, by the window, with two juices and the feeling that we were in a movie we would never have paid to see. Mom arrived first, ten minutes early, and stood by platform three with her handbag pressed against her stomach. Admir came over from the parking lot at five to seven, in a blazer that was too tight across the shoulders. He saw her and stopped. She saw him and looked around for us, and then, you could see it even through the glass, she understood. She said something. He said something back. And then they were both laughing, the way people laugh when something has finally turned out right.
Admir took something small and yellowed out of the inside pocket of his blazer and showed it to her. Emrah found out later that it was a train ticket, Tuzla to Sarajevo, for the first of September, ninety-nine, never used. Mom opened her handbag and took out hers, a bus ticket, with the same date. I had not known she had it. I had not known either that she had spent the whole night after that dinner leafing through her graduation album, or that she had been carrying the ticket in her wallet ever since. They stood on the platform with two old tickets in their hands while the bus to Brčko boarded around them, and none of the passengers had any idea what they were looking at.
They did not go anywhere. They walked off toward the center of town side by side, not holding hands, but close enough that their shoulders touched with every step. At the traffic light they stopped, even though it was green, let it turn red and then green again, and then they crossed and disappeared from view. We were left with two juices somebody had to pay for. Emrah paid. "And what if it works out for them?" he asked as we were leaving. "Then you will be my husband and my future stepbrother, or whatever it is called," I said. "Husband," he said. "Just husband. I do not want to hear anything else."
That winter Mom came home later than I did. She bought walking shoes and went up Ilinčica every Sunday, and I knew with whom, though I never asked. She hummed songs I knew only from her cassettes. Once I caught her dancing in the kitchen with a dish towel in her hand, pretending to wipe the stove. Admir started coming to Sunday lunches and, as it turned out, eats everything, not just ćevapi. Emrah said he had never seen him eat pita. Mom said he had loved pita back in ninety-eight.
One Saturday Admir brought the cassette he had recorded for the trip in ninety-nine. Mom carried the old cassette player up from the basement, it barely worked, and they listened to the tape in the living room from beginning to end, while I pretended to study in my room and listened through the wall. At the end of side two, after the last song, came the voice of Admir at eighteen: "Zemira, if you are listening to this, we are already past Doboj." Mom was silent for a long time, and then she laughed.
The wedding was in June, in a hall by the lake. Mom made the seating chart, and she put herself next to Admir, "for practical reasons," as she said, though none of us had asked why. When the band played an old song from the late nineties, they got up before we did. I watched Mom laughing with her head thrown back, just as in the graduation photo that had stood in the glass cabinet my whole childhood, and I had never asked who had been standing beside her, cut off at the edge of the picture.
Emrah leaned over to my ear. "So is this our wedding or theirs?" "Ours," I said. "Theirs started on a Friday, at the bus station, at seven."