Eventually Paul came to relieve her at the register, and Nina took her break. They didn't have enough staff today for more than one person to take a break at a time, so Nina sat alone in the break room eating a pesto sandwich from the coffee shop next door and checking the job sites again in case a new art related posting came up somewhere. She'd emailed some art directors as a matter of course, but none had ever seemed to be interested.

At her art school, in the public speaking class every undergraduate was required to take, the professor made them all do tongue twisters to warm up at the start of class. Red leather and yellow letters, seashells on the seashore, but the one that stuck with her was "you know you need Unique New York."

The class was across the country from New York, and yet, even there, you knew you needed unique New York. No one was powerful enough to resist the city's pull.

Some of her classmates — the wealthier, hungrier, more connected ones — did move to Unique New York the second their diplomas were in hand. But Nina graduated without a job lined up or a portfolio art directors wanted to see, so back home she went. At least she could come into the city whenever, she'd thought then, before she really understood how much work that was. How much time spent working and traveling into the city. And money.

The rest of the day was fairly peaceful, no irate customers or even especially chatty ones. Nina and her coworkers had time to read Hyperallergic on the store computers, Paul dramatically reciting the newest articles out loud. They shooed the last customer out three minutes before close and Nina began the long trek back to her car.

Paul lived in town with his girlfriend, who was doing a master's at the University, and Kate parked in the other direction. So, Nina walked alone, checking her phone again. She had a smattering of messages and notifications across a few apps, but nothing particularly urgent. She messaged a few former classmates on Instagram, the ones who were trying to make it in the big city after all, to see if they were going to the Illustration Society show. 

Her path to the unmetered parking spots took her past old, big Victorian-style houses in need of fresh paint jobs, a chain cafe imported from Europe, dog walkers and off-campus students. She was surprised when she first noticed how her idea of the University students had changed as she grew, from imaginary to aspirational to overprivileged to just— children. All of them. It hadn't been that long since she graduated herself, but it was already hard to see the undergrads as anything but kids.

Her drive home wasn't long, shorter than Kate's by a good half hour on high traffic days, but it felt interminable sometimes with the long red lights across the highway. Not like Nina was in a huge hurry to get home, though.

When she did get home, her mother was still grocery shopping after work, but her dad had already turned the TV to play some Russian political commentator talking about the war. Not on TV, of course, since everyone worth listening to had long been banned from Russian television and expelled from the country, but on YouTube, casting to the TV. "Anything new?" Nina asked in Russian.

"Same old, same old," her father replied in English. He'd been a fixture of the Slavic studies department at Middlewater for the past twenty years, and yet, refused to live in town for some reason. The University was too limiting or something. He didn't have any lectures today, so he was wearing sweats and a t-shirt from a Dostoyevsky symposium of yore. On lecture days, Nina's dad sparkled in patterned ties and collared shirts, shining brightly enough to make baby Nina want to be a professor herself. At home, the light was dimmed.

When the war started, so did the 24/7 YouTube political commentator streaming, like that would somehow make up for the fact that his sister's family was still in Kyiv and unable to leave it. They called daily at first, then weekly, but the longer it dragged on the less urgent it felt, a new status quo settling into a thin layer of despair over everyone involved, like dust in an attic. 

Nina went to the kitchen and started pulling out leftovers from yesterday's dinner to reheat. "I'm going up to New York on Friday. For an exhibition." Even speaking Russian, as she always did at home, Nina couldn't shake the English from her mouth, not after so many years of living here. She ended up saying a Russianized version of the English word "exhibition" instead of the Russian "vystavka," and noticed after the word had already flew out, a bird that couldn't be caught. "I mean, for a vystavka."

Her father let the error slide. "Whose?" 

"An Illustrator from the early twentieth century— she invented the Kewpies. Those baby dolls?" She didn't know if Kewpies were ever a thing in Russia, and switched to English for the word.

"Ah, sure. Have fun. Make sure you take your business cards with you."

"Will do." 

Nina set the leftovers on the counter. "Did you eat already?"

"Mhm, don't worry about me." Worry about the cold starving children in Ukraine, her dad didn't say. He waved her off.

Maybe I should go to grad school, Nina thought to herself, pressing the buttons on the microwave. At least that'd get me out of here. Her high school friends who'd majored in more practical things at college had mostly escaped to bigger cities around the country, or that same Unique New York as her college friends. It was just her, her best friend Cory, and Eloise at the knitwear store down the street from their high school group. The classmates she messaged on Instagram either replied with "no sorry" or left her on read.

The microwave beeped.

Nina's mom came in after she'd put her dishes in the sink, laden with fabric grocery bags. "Someone help me unpack all this," she demanded, shrugging the straps off her shoulders and onto the kitchen counter.

Nina put the fruit in the fridge while her parents had the same hushed arguments they had every week— why did Olga, who worked a 9 to 5 in an office, also have to get the groceries, when Peter had a lot more free time during the week to get groceries and help out around the house but didn't? Peter had other things he had to do, and just because he wasn't in his office didn't mean he wasn't working, and Trader Joe's was on Olga's way home anyway, and, and, and.

If Nina got the groceries out of sight fast enough, they would stop at that. Otherwise, it was anyone's guess which direction it would escalate. She picked up the empty totes and folded them into one compact bundle.

"At least someone does things around here," Olga finished, and gave Nina a kiss on her forehead. "Don't move out."

Nina shrugged her way out of the embrace. "You're lucky I can't afford to, then." 

"We're very lucky," Peter added, petting Nina's hair. "You're our precious daughter and we love having you here."

"But also why can't I be like Sasha Smolnikova and have a 6-figure tech job and a house in the Bay Area?" Nina finished. They'd gone over this before. They had this conversation about once a month, when Nina expressed dissatisfaction with living at home and/or working retail, or when Sasha Smolnikova posted something Olga saw on Facebook.

"You could try graphic design," her dad said.

"I really could not." Nina poured herself some tea from the pot cooling next to the sink and headed upstairs.

She finally settled on an outfit for the opening that seemed to communicate "professional Artist but not too much of an Artist for non-art professionals to approach": a thrifted black shirtdress with a big statement necklace from a craft fair, and a tote bag from a popular artist online. The necklace was cherry blossom themed, all gold and rose quartz and pink glass, and had matching oversize blossom petal earrings to go with it. Nina pulled a pale pink cardigan over the dress and grabbed her keys.

"I'm heading out!" Nina announced.

"Do you want me to drive you to the station?" Her father offered.

"I'll probably be back pretty late..." 

"So? It's better than having to pay for parking. Come on." 

She yielded. The drive to the station was short. The train station was the lifeblood of the greater Middlewater area, the same way rivers fed towns in the preindustrial period. Hundreds of people commuting into the city every day, to the state school up north, to the airports, all by train. It covered more space than the BART on the West Coast and was somehow both more and less provincial than the DC area rail system. 

A thin drizzle sprinkled on Nina's head when she stepped out of the car, stopped in the middle of a long line of cars dropping off train riders. "Thanks dad, bye!"

"Have fun!"