The Expats Read Free Page A

warming to that bottom line. She’d long ago reconciled herself to being broke, forever. But now it was looking like forever was, after all, finite.
    “Who knows.”
    “That’s a pretty lame answer.”
    He walked around the deteriorating kitchen counter and put his arms around her, from behind, changing the whole tenor of the conversation. “This is it, Kat,” he said, his breath hot against her skin. “It’s different from how we’d imagined it, but this is it.”
    This was, in fact, exactly what they’d dreamt: starting a new life abroad. They both felt like they’d missed out on important experiences, both encumbered by circumstances that were exclusive with carefree youth. Now in their late thirties, they still yearned for what they’d missed; still thought it was possible. Or never allowed that it was impossible.
    “We can do this,” he said softly, into her neck.
    She lay down her knife. A farewell to arms. Not her first.
    They’d discussed this seriously, late at night, after wine. Or as seriously as they could, late, tipsy. They’d agreed that although they had no idea if it would be difficult to arrive in another country, it would definitely be easy to leave Washington.
    “But Luxembourg?” she asked. The foreign lands they’d imagined were places like Provence or Umbria, London or Paris, maybe Prague or Budapest or even Istanbul. Romantic places; places where they—places where everyone—wanted to go. Luxembourg was not on this list, not on anyone’s list. Nobody dreams of living in Luxembourg.
    “Do you happen to know,” she asked, “what language they speak in Luxembourg?”
    “It’s called Luxembourgeois. It’s a Germanic dialect, with French tossed in.”
    “That can’t be true.”
    He kissed her neck. “It is. But they also speak regular German, plus French, and English. It’s a very international place. No one’s going to have to learn Luxembourgeois.”
    “Spanish is my language. I took one year of French. But I speak Spanish.”
    “Don’t worry. Language won’t be a problem.”
    He kissed her again, running his hand down her stomach, down below the waistline of her skirt, which he began to gather up in fistfuls. The children were on a play date.
    “Trust me.”

2
    Katherine had seen them many times, at international airports, with their mountains of cheap luggage, their faces merging worry with bewilderment with exhaustion, their children slumped, fathers clutching handfuls of red or green passports that set them apart from blue-passported Americans.
    They were immigrants, immigrating.
    She’d seen them departing from the Mexico City airport after a bus from Morelia or Puebla, or air transfers from Quito or Guatemala City. She’d seen them in Paris, coming up from Dakar and Cairo and Kinshasa. She’d seen them in Managua and Port-au-Prince, Caracas and Bogotá. Everywhere in the world she’d gone, she’d seen them, departing.
    And she’d seen them arriving, in New York and Los Angeles and Atlanta and Washington, at the other ends of their long-haul travels, exhausted, yet not even close to finished with their epic journeys.
    Now she was one of them.
    Now this was her, curbside at the airport in Frankfurt-am-Main. Behind her was a pile of eight oversized mismatched suitcases. She’d seen such gigantic suitcases before in her life, and had thought, Who in their right mind would ever buy such unmanageable, hideous luggage? Now she knows the answer: someone who needs to pack absolutely everything, all at once.
    Strewn around her eight ugly person-sized suitcases were four carry-on bags and a purse and two computer bags and two little-child knapsacks, and, on low-lying outcroppings, jackets and teddy bears and a ziplock filled with granola bars and fruit, both fresh and dried, plus brown M&M’s; all the more popular colors had been eaten before Nova Scotia.
    This was her, clutching her family’s blue passports, distinct from the Germans’ burgundy, standing out not