_Sit at the right table on the right day on Nashville’s Nolensville Pike and they might tell you a story.

Centuries ago, before Nashville was Nashville and before the United States existed, Native American tribes lived off this land. Cane thickets shot up from the ground, and the local woods were filled with game and the smell of honeysuckle. The five tribes who shared the forest—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole—agreed to live farther away to let the woods breathe, and to ensure they could always hunt here. At the current intersection of Nolensville Pike and Whitsett Road sat a rock formation about half the size of a basketball court. When diplomacy was required, it is said that the five tribes sent representatives to parlay at the Flat Rock, where they lingered, discussed treaties, and smoked peace pipes.

The area has since withstood various episodes and interlopers: the Revolutionary War, plantations, mansions, railroads. But its original spirit remains the same. Today, Nolensville Pike occupies the former location of the Flat Rock. It’s a four-lane, traffic-choked artery that runs south from Nashville Soccer Club’s stadium all the way out to the suburbs. It’s now a hub for Nashville’s Kurdish, Latin American, and Asian communities. This area is where those tribes come to share the table, and find sustenance.

In a city that, when on its worst behavior, can sometimes feel like a parody of itself, Nolensville Pike feels like something true. I’m not here to tell you that people on this road are universally pure or free of artifice, or that Nolensville Pike is inherently more valid than the bars on Lower Broadway. It’s more that the places here—a Guadalajaran taco spot where construction workers in hi-vis vests sip Modelos after they clock out; a Kurdish restaurant where waiters bring pizza burgers to your table, then inject them with a syringe full of cheese; a garage storefront with a T. J. Eckleburg–style mural of two green eyes that screams, in all caps, BUY HERE PAY HERE—feel incapable of being anything but themselves. If Nashville ever seems provincial, Nolensville Pike is a reminder that you’ve set foot in a major city.

Most coverage of Nashville deals in clean lines, in Broadway and bachelorettes and gentrification. The following vignettes are about what takes place between those lines. This is not an explication of the socioeconomic, political, or cultural impact of Nolensville Pike. It’s a collection of stories about food—and also, love—set on that particular road.

House of Kabob
Thompson Lane and Nolensville Pike
(part one)

_House of Kabob, the original go-to spot for Nashville’s Kurdish people, used to be a Shoney’s. If you’ve never been to a Shoney’s, picture a country-fried Denny’s, with an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. When House of Kabob’s owners converted this particular Shoney’s, they added a prayer room but kept the nook that used to house the buffet, still a little haunted by the ghosts of chicken fingers and French toast sticks past. Most business deals that involve a Nashville Kurd go down within these walls. In the early aughts, there were rumors of an affiliation with Kurdish Pride, a possibly apocryphal group of Kurdish kids who flashed gang signs on MySpace and roamed South Nashville. But that’s probably because House of Kabob was the only place that served Kurdish food.

“You gotta remember, man,” says Delshad “Delo” Ebrahimzadeh, the man I’ve come here to meet, “Kurdish kids, typically, we’re bad. We grew up in a hood area, then we started getting knowledge and getting education.”

Delo stands about 5'10", with a trim, athletic build he probably owes to his diet and copious amounts of soccer. A full beard hangs from his chin, and his ink-black curls have started to fade at the temples. He grew up eating here with his family nearly every day, so much so that they paid their own discounted rate. Back then, he’d get the Joojeh—grilled Cornish hen—or the shrimp. A lot of people order the Kubideh, a thin, charbroiled skewer of Iranian ground beef. Many of the entrées come with green rice, tinged with dill weed and lima beans, and a charred tomato.

For the past five years, though, Delo has eaten entirely vegetarian. He says that meat messes with his emotions, and he’d like to be less aggressive. Now, he orders the Neesk, a lentil soup often spiced with mint, red pepper flakes, and sumac. He pairs it with a vegetarian sampler of hummus, tabouli, yogurt dip, and rice wrapped in grape leaves.

Whenever I interview Delo, the venue is never in question—we always come to House of Kabob. He’s known most of the waiters for a decade, and he typically brings along six or seven friends, whom he calls “brothers.”

I first met Delo for a piece I was writing about soccer in Little Kurdistan in the period leading up to the World Cup in Qatar. Kurdish people began to move to Nashville after a failed revolution in the ’70s, to flee Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons in the ’90s, and most recently following the rise of ISIS. Kurdistan encompasses small portions of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey alongside the Zagros mountain range, but its people are officially stateless. Many Kurds love soccer, but they have no national soccer team. They have few allies in the Middle East. The Kurdish people, an old saying goes, have no friend but the mountains.

Delo spent his childhood in the sun, roaming those mountains. He moved to Nashville at the age of ten. He was thirty when I first met him, in December 2022. During the pandemic, he’d picked up the Qur’an and, for the first time, read it cover to cover. When he finished, he fasted for several weeks and contemplated his life.

“I was like, ‘Man, I’m always chasing after money,’” he said at the time. “Why? I just want something straight authentic.”

At the end of his fast, he founded Kurdistan Football Club, which quickly morphed into the Nashville Knights. He envisioned the club as an entirely charitable venture, a semi-pro team that would provide lodging, work, and structure for its players. Upon joining, each player had to sign a contract: no drinking, no drugs. The Knights took over his life, and soccer pushed aside his family and career. With Delo taking in no income, his wife, Diana, and their two children, Osman and Oshan, stayed at her parents’ home, while Delo lived with his mother and father. Maleek, his firstborn, lived with his ex-wife.

I saw the Knights practice once, at the auto glass shop Delo started with his father. It was like a deleted scene from The Fast and the Furious—Delo and his friends worked on cars, lifted weights, and tried to nutmeg each other with a Nike soccer ball while “In Da Club” and reggaeton blasted from a little boombox. A few half-played games of chess were scattered across the room, and a gold-and-black Dodge Nitro Detonator, which Delo bought on auction in Salt Lake City and drove all the way back to Nashville, loomed in the back.

A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, I watched the Knights play in a six-on-six tournament at Rose Park. A few players bailed the day of, so they played a man down. Delo, normally a center back, played in goal that day. His style was reckless, his motor unrelenting. He played like everything was always on the line; each lunging tackle was like some sort of chaotic QED of the Knights’ right to exist. When he intercepted a cross, he dropped the ball and started the counterattack himself, dribbling well beyond the halfway line. He barked orders to teammates in three different languages. At halftime of their last game of the day, their sixth player ambled up from the parking lot, in no particular rush.

“Hurry up!” Delo screamed, veins etched into his neck. “You’re acting like you’re on time!”

My heart went out to Delo. To any observer, there was an uncomfortable chasm between what he dreamed the Knights could be and what they actually were.

Things spiraled in the following months. Many of Delo’s players left the Knights to join the team run by the league’s commissioner, Gift Ndam. When the two teams squared off, Gift dove to win a penalty from the referee, whose salary he paid. Delo was outraged at the conflict of interest. When the game ended, Delo’s father, the team physio, confronted the referee at midfield.

I’ll pay you whatever he’s paying you, he said, gesturing to Gift.

Immediately, he received a red card. Delo tried to defuse the situation, but one of the other officials gestured to Delo’s mother. Who the hell is that? the ref sneered. Delo, who’s deeply religious, couldn’t stomach the use of “hell” in reference to his mother. Delo got in his face. The ref shoved him. Delo slapped him with an open palm.

The Knights were kicked out of the league. Delo was blacklisted, pulled off the field when he tried to join other teams. He was miserable without soccer. A few weeks later, he got in his 2015 Toyota Tundra and drove thirty hours to San Diego, where he had a lead on a job and a soccer team. Diana and the kids were left in his wake.

The Suburbs
Concord Road and Nolensville Pike
(part one)

_I grew up in a house in a subdivision near the southern edge of Nolensville Pike, where the road exits Nashville city limits and melts into suburbia. My parents’ best friend, Arcelia, grew up in Mexico City—her family moved to the capital from Michoacán when she was five. In the late ’90s, there was only one Mexican place in town she approved of: La Hacienda on Nolensville Pike.

I retained a six-year-old’s palate well into my teens, but even now, nothing beats the clear, bracing taste of mandarin Jarritos in a glass bottle. My sister and I would eat plain shredded-chicken tacos wrapped in corn tortillas they made in house, while Arcelia and my parents opted for something more adventurous. La Hacienda closed in 2023, but not before Barack Obama visited (after a speech in 2014). Per the Tennessean, he ordered chips and guac, five tacos, and five flautas, all of which he took back to Air Force One.

In 2021, when the Bitter Southerner needed a journalist collaborator for celebrity chef Maneet Chauhan’s Nolensville Pike food tour, they chose me. I’d grown up near the road, so I had some context.

We met at Patel Brothers, the Indian supermarket chain, then spent the day driving south on Nolensville, which isn’t like Flushing or Little Tokyo or any walkable, big-city international cluster you might be picturing. It’s more like Houston’s Chinatown—one road lined with strip mall after strip mall of restaurants and markets, with a vape shop or auto lot or Popeyes sprinkled in here and there. You need a car to see it all. Our crew included Maneet; a co-pilot, Alyssa; two photographers, Diana and Ryan; and me. Within a few hours, we’d sampled Indian chaat, quesabirria from a food truck, pan dulce, and baklava.

I was living on a freelancer’s salary, so at each stop, Maneet let me bag up all the leftovers. At the end of the afternoon, we all shared some hot pot vegetables. Everyone else ordered a drink, but I’d left my driver’s license in the car. Maneet ordered two Sapporos, and when they arrived, slid one my way.

Drink up, she advised. It wasn’t my first beer on Nolensville Pike, and it wouldn’t be my last.

Geodis Park  |  Edessa Kurdish and Turkish Cuisine
501 Benton Avenue  |  2631 Nolensville Pike
(part one)

_Edessa Kurdish and Turkish Cuisine, located two miles north of House of Kabob in a Nolensville Pike strip mall that locals call “Little Kurdistan,” is a place you go with friends. Look around on a Friday night and you’ll see big groups sharing food off elevated wooden slabs that run the length of the table, piled high with bone-in cuts of beef, chicken, and lamb. The appetizers—white haydari, red ezme, golden hummus—are laid out on smaller plates beneath the slab. Chicken kabobs arrive on silver contraptions that look like paper towel holders, poultry and veggies speared on dangling skewers. People sip Kurdish yogurt drinks from those copper mugs that bartenders typically use to serve Moscow Mules.

The communal element built into these Kabob Festivals evokes the slightest feel of a sushi boat, or maybe even a shot-ski. It’s a loud and busy place, Edessa, but the waiters, dressed in all black, never seem hurried or bothered. Soothing, ambient Turkish music plays at a low hum beneath the chatter.

Edessa is an unkept secret, and most everyone in town has heard of it. Two of Edessa’s biggest fans, Handwalla Bwana and Hany Mukhtar, play for Nashville Soccer Club.

Drive four miles north from Little Kurdistan along Nolensville Pike and a looming, midnight-blue structure rises up on your left. At a distance, Geodis Park—aka “the Castle”—looks a bit like a giant spider, with beams that descend like legs from its steel canopy. This is where Nashville Soccer Club plays their home games.

On a still, humid night in September 2022, people screamed and the Castle shook. Club América, Mexico’s most storied club, had come to visit and their fans were showing out.

!Águilas! Clap clap clap. !Águilas! Clap clap clap. !Y dale dale daaaale, Amé!

Meanwhile, Handwalla Bwana sat alone in the home locker room. The bubbling over emotion of the stadium closed in around him. Moments earlier, he’d limped off the field and into the training room, where the physios told him he’d strained his adductor.

Handwalla, a twenty-three-year-old with a sinewy build, a high fade, and the green shoots of a goatee, wasn’t easily rattled. He grew up in the Kakuma refugee camp in northwest Kenya. Gunshots were the soundtrack to his dreams, and a bullet once whizzed by while he prayed at the mosque. Most days, he ran miles to the camp’s bulletin board to see if he and his mother and brother had been chosen for resettlement.

He ate, he ran, and mostly, he waited. To pass the time, he played soccer with friends in the arid lanes outside his hut. People in Kakuma knew Handwalla as the ball boy, the one who’d build soccer balls out of wound-up plastic bags and blown-up condoms. He stored ten or twelve balls in his hut at once, in case one broke.

The ball became an extension of Handwalla. Dribbling became his personality. And the ball took him places far away from Kakuma. His family was resettled when he was eleven, and eventually they landed in Seattle. Before long, the Sounders, Seattle’s Major League Soccer team, had signed him to a Homegrown contract. They traded him to Nashville in the fall of 2020.

“You can never teach a kid to be technical,” Handwalla is fond of saying. “It’s the (love) affair between the child and the ball.”

From most people, this line would sound too pat. Too rehearsed, too gift-wrapped for consumption. When Handwalla talks about his love for the ball, you picture the child in Kakuma dribbling garbage with his bare feet. And you believe him.

Nobody questioned Handwalla’s resilience. He’d survived things his teammates could scarcely imagine. But here, at his locker, he couldn’t beat back the doubts.

This place has been terrible for me.

Once, Handwalla was a promising prospect, Seattle’s next great hope. But things had been going awry since he’d moved to Nashville. He didn’t play much. His mother still lived back in Washington. Nashville SC’s coaching staff focused on defensive solidity and didn’t appreciate Handwalla’s soloist tendencies.

He didn’t know for sure—but he could sense he’d played his last match in Nashville.

King Tut’s Food Truck and Patio
3716 Nolensville Pike
(part one)

_Before Ragab Rashwan was the chef of King Tut’s, he spent his days on his family’s farm on the east bank of the Nile. A nearby orchard was filled with grape vines, as well as fig, orange, date, and guava trees, and when he was seven years old, Ragab and his cousin bought a mango tree, which gave them the right to pick its fruit to sell at the market.

When he wasn’t working, Ragab latched a hook and rope to a tree and swung out over the Nile, pretending he was Tarzan. In January, when the Nile’s waters dwindled, he waded in and caught fish with his bare hands. After spending the day outside, he returned to the family farm, where his mother boiled heavy cream from the milk of their cows and water buffalo over an open fire. After she scooped out the ghee, Ragab took the remnants from the bottom of the pan. To this day, that residue is the most delicious thing he’s ever tasted.

Local snakes craved milk, so Ragab and his cousin hunted with sharpened sticks carved from tree branches. Once, they saw a giant cobra near where the family stored its milk. The cobra saw their approach and ducked into a hole. Ragab caught it by the tail, but the snake flexed its muscles, lodging itself in place.

We have to kill him, Ragab told his cousin. Cobras have really good memories. He will never forget us. He will come for revenge.

At mealtimes, everyone around the house pitched in. Ragab’s mother was the main cook, and his father was the local butcher. Like most families in the area, the Rashwans only ate meat on Fridays, as a treat. Ragab learned basic techniques, like how to make a stew, and felt a key turn within him. He wanted to build his future around food.

At around twelve years old, to chase that feeling, Ragab moved to Cairo, where he lived with an aunt. He worked in food carts and coffeehouses, and met Jennye, who became his wife. In his twenties, unrest began to simmer around the Mubarak regime. As Ragab saw it, he had two options: fight for his freedoms and end up in jail for the rest of his life, or leave.

Just before the Arab Spring kicked off, Ragab and Jennye moved to New Jersey, and he found a job at a Manhattan food cart. On his first day of work, Ragab set up in front of the Penn Station subway entrance on Seventh Avenue, grilling up chicken and rice. He soon graduated to a full-on truck in front of Bellevue Hospital on the East River, where he added hot dogs, burgers, gyros, and cheesesteaks to his menu.

Almost immediately, Ragab looked for an exit strategy. He couldn’t ignore the pistols that the other vendors carried on their hips. In Manhattan, Ragab claims, the food cart scene was a mafia operation, each corner controlled by an Egyptian, Moroccan, or Bangladeshi organization. Vendors bought their spots from these groups, then relied on their benevolence for protection. As soon as he could afford it, Ragab bought his own truck and worked in New Jersey as much as possible.

Outside of work, Ragab began to feel increasingly isolated. Egypt was in tatters, but he still missed home, where he could ride the bus and befriend anyone he sat next to. Here, it took a while to build trust. Whenever he fell ill in Egypt, it seemed like everyone in his life drifted through his home. When he got sick for the first time in New Jersey, it was just him and Jennye.

“Over there (in Egypt), people are into each other’s lives,” Ragab says. “Here, everyone needs their space. I can meet you when we schedule an appointment. In Egypt, you can walk to anyone’s house. You can eat any food they’re eating, and it’s fine.”

King Tut’s Food Truck and Patio
3716 Nolensville Pike
(part two)

_In 2014, when Ragab and Jennye had their first child, they decided to move to Nashville, where some of Jennye’s family lived. They shipped their food truck down south in an empty trailer. Instead of gyros and kabobs, Ragab began to cook the food he’d grown up on, like fava beans with tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and cilantro. His childhood at the farm on the Nile—the fights with cobras, the fruit orchards, the bottom of the ghee pan—made him partial to local, organic ingredients.

“I care about people’s health,” he says. “I might not have as strong a business, because I’m not serving fast food. I don’t have this crazy crowd, but I appreciate my customers. They know my food before they come here, so they trust you.”

During the pandemic, he found a brick-and-mortar spot he could afford along Nolensville Pike. He parks the truck outside, and customers can sit and eat on a patio or an indoor dining room with a full kitchen. You place your order at the truck, which is graffitied with pharaohs’ heads and scarab beetles, and Ragab cooks your meal in the kitchen. He makes falafels, hummus, and tabouli, usually accompanied by a prismatic salad of green, orange, and purple vegetables. On the screened-in patio, string lights hang from wooden beams that crisscross a tin roof; potted plants and tapestries of the ankh hieroglyph, the ancient Egyptian representation of life, line the walls. This patio lends itself to meandering conversations, slow afternoons.

“I have friends who run restaurants that are busy like hell,” Ragab says. “This is not my lifestyle. I don’t want to be, you know, on the clock. It’s nice to have a break in between and enjoy your life.”

Ragab still misses Egypt, but he’s rediscovered some of his traditions here. Each morning, he takes a walk at the agricultural center that borders his neighborhood along Nolensville Pike—not quite a rope swing over the Nile, but it’ll do. He’s located some of the community and interdependence he sought. Each November, he holds a Friendsgiving at the restaurant. This past year, he cooked an entire lamb for around fifty friends he and Jennye have met since they moved here. He served it along with a side of avocado, celery, cilantro, onions, and green tomatillos—a riff on a dish he learned from Spanish-speaking neighbors on Nolensville Pike. The kids sipped Egyptian mango juice—made of the same fruit Ragab once picked and sold—and chased each other around the parking lot.

“With food, especially,” he says, “it’s like your personality can affect how it tastes. So if you’re cooking while you’re sad or angry or depressed, the food will not taste great. So you have to choose that.”

“Just take it easy. Enjoy what you’re doing. Do it right, and be happy with it.”

Geodis Park  |  Edessa Kurdish and Turkish Cuisine
501 Benton Avenue  |  2631 Nolensville Pike
(part two)

_At the end of that fateful fall 2022 match against Club América, Handwalla’s teammates drifted back into the locker room. They checked on him, then returned to their lockers and grabbed their phones. Handwalla tried to determine how he’d get home—he would need crutches to walk and couldn’t drive.

Hany Mukhtar, then twenty-seven years old and the future MVP of Major League Soccer, had been given the night off. In street clothes, he sat down next to Handwalla and put an arm around him.

Come stay at my house, he said.

In the spring of 2021, Ramadan had aligned with the start to the MLS season. Hany and Handwalla, the two Muslims on the team, ran through the Tennessee heat without water or food. At sundown, they broke their fasts at Hany’s townhome.

Hany, the son of a Sudanese father and German mother, grew up in south Berlin steeped in different cuisines. The first time he cooked for his now wife, he rolled carrots, chicken, and sprouts into perfect little spring rolls. Throughout Ramadan, he cooked pasta, chicken, and his signature Thai peanut salad for Handwalla. After dinner, they wandered into the living room for marathon FIFA sessions on Hany’s Xbox.

From then on, they shared dinner two or three times per week. After a home win on a Saturday night—in a hazy cloud of “Wagon Wheel” and “Mr. Brightside” covers, amid the slick, syrupy aroma of Bushwackers and Busch Light—they often treated themselves to a chicken kabob and fries from a gyro stand on Broadway, much like the one Ragab once ran in Manhattan. On a day off, their first choice was Edessa.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone among Nashville’s 20,000-strong Kurdish population who’d take any sort of issue with House of Kabob—they were the pioneers, the original version. But given truth serum, a Kurdish Nashvillian might admit that Edessa, which opened in fall 2018, makes better food. Handwalla stuck with chicken kabobs, but Hany would explore the whole menu—cuts of lamb and beef rubbed with sumac, cumin, thyme, and Kurdish and Anatolian spices; yogurts and eggplants; mattresses of pita; and balloons of lavash.

Hany loved food, so much so that Handwalla would shit talk him at weigh-ins. Nashville SC likes to see its players at under 10% body fat, and after watching Hany eat at Edessa, Handwalla could scarcely believe he’d meet that threshold. You’re gonna fail this, bro. Hany would grin, lift his shirt, and flex his abs. See this six-pack?

As the locker room cleared out on the night of the Club América match, Handwalla limped out of the stadium on crutches, and Hany drove him to his townhouse. When they arrived, they ordered pizza. For hours, they lingered over their food, and Hany shared his story—how tough it had been at the start of his career away from his family, how he never played, and how he’d finally found a home in Nashville. Handwalla mostly listened. They talked about religion, and why God put obstacles in their lives. Handwalla grew tired, so he climbed the stairs and fell asleep in Hany’s guest bedroom.

Handwalla’s premonition came true—that night against Club América was his last game in Nashville. When the season ended, he signed a contract with Charleston Battery and steeled himself for a new challenge.

On one of Handwalla’s final nights in town, he and Hany drove across town to Nolensville Pike. They shared one last meal at Edessa. Over the Kabob Festivals and soft Turkish music, the chatter and the tea, Hany doled out one last bit of brotherly advice.

Take care of yourself, he said. Make sure you’re getting stronger in the gym so you can stay injury free.

Once more, the boy from Kakuma was on the move, seeing where the ball might take him next. Nashville didn’t go how he’d hoped, but Handwalla takes no issue with his time here. He met Hany.

“I cherish every single moment with him,” says Handwalla.

The Suburbs
Concord Road and Nolensville Pike
(part two)

_When I was in preschool, Arcelia labeled the items around our house in Spanish and spoke to me in her mother tongue whenever she could. In high school, I got good grades while being an almost entirely unremarkable student. The only class I really stood out in was AP Spanish.

It was Arcelia who gave me my first job—counselor at her Spanish summer camp. I filled the watercooler, sliced watermelons and pineapples, and typed up a few Word docs. Arcelia structured the camp based on her childhood in Mexico City—lots of playing outside, lots of eating fruit. On Wednesdays, we competed in a scavenger hunt at Centennial Park. On Fridays, we hopped on a bus to Nolensville Pike, where we shared a meal at Fogatas, a newer Mexican restaurant that passed Arcelia’s sniff test. After the kids finished eating, my co-counselor Esteban and I wolfed down leftover tacos, then passed out on the bus ride back.

My senior year of college, I went to a Halloween party at my friend Marcus’s apartment. The night’s activity was True American, the drinking game from the 2010s sitcom New Girl, where you make up the rules and stomp around on the furniture. Late in the evening, I had a conversation—in Spanish—with Natalie, a Spanish major I’d been noticing a lot lately. We talked about sandals.

¿Te gustan los Chacos?

Sí, me gustan los Chacos.

A couple months later, on New Year’s Eve, I was sitting at home. I’m pretty sure I was reading Looking for Alaska. I had no plans for the evening. Around 8 P.M., I got two texts within a few minutes of each other. One was from Philip, a friend I’d made at Governor’s School one summer in high school. The other was from David, whom I’d known since we went to the same Montessori preschool.

The three of us hopped in Philip’s SUV and drove up Nolensville Pike to Santa’s Pub, a cash-only karaoke bar housed in a trailer that now sits in the shadow of Geodis Park. If you’re over the age of twenty-four, it’s hard to exist in Santa’s without being in some kind of altered state. The bar is lit by a dim red light that evokes Amsterdam. Floors are slick, tables are rarely available, and an ATM hums out front, beckoning when you inevitably forget to bring cash.

We have to sing something, Philip said.

We tried to think of a song that wouldn’t ask too much of us, something the crowd could carry. We were the first people on that stage in the brand-new year of 2015, and we sang “Sweet Caroline.” From the stage, Philip and David took Snapchats. I pulled out my flip phone, took a grainy video, and—emboldened by PBR—texted it to Natalie. Despite this, we are now married.

We fancied ourselves main characters that night as we flew home down Nolensville, soundtracked by an EDM remix of “L.E.S. Artistes” by Santigold. I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up. We stopped at Tacos Y Mariscos El Amigo, this little brick-and-glass building attached to a gas station, and I slathered my tacos al pastor in the avocado and cilantro salsa that comes in green squeeze bottles. It was hard to believe I’d been sitting on my parents’ couch a few hours earlier. At the table, we all agreed. We did New Year’s right.

A few weeks ago, Arcelia, Natalie, and I tried to eat at Fogatas. When we arrived, the interior had been stripped clean, and the restaurant was permanently closed. We got back in the car and turned up Nolensville Pike. We knew we’d find something else to eat.

House of Kabob
Thompson Lane and Nolensville Pike
(part two)

_T  his is ridiculous, Diana said as she looked Delo in the eyes. Just get it together.

It was New Year’s 2024, more than a year after the confrontation that got the Knights banned, and Diana and the kids had flown out to San Jose. Delo had driven north from San Diego to look into an auto glass business. He still wasn’t making money, and he still lived across the country from his family. Delo could feel that Diana was on the verge of leaving him.

When Delo had arrived in San Diego, he’d made a deal: his Toyota Tundra for a thirty-two-foot boat, which he lived on. During the day, he fixed windows on boats, and at night, he played soccer with Temecula FC, a semi-pro team. Soccer still ruled his life. He would be lost without it.

In San Jose, Delo rented a black Chevy Malibu, and for two weeks, he and his family drove up and down California’s Route 1. In each city, he played soccer, then hit the beach or hotel pool with Diana and the kids. For the first time, Delo could make out the faint outlines of a different way forward. At the end of the trip, they all flew home to Nashville. While Delo had been away, his father had kept their local auto glass shop open.

Come home, his father said. You can run the business.

Delo returned to San Diego to deal with his affairs. He could feel the pull of his life there—he had two windshields to fix, he played another game with Temecula FC. It would be so easy to fall into old habits, like slipping into a warm bath.

Then one night, he had a dream.

He woke at two or three o’clock on the morning of January 22 with a premonition—something awful was going to happen. He checked the weather radar, which he often did. A flood was coming. He got into his car and raced the storm east. The clouds chased him out of town, through Dallas, and all the way home to Nashville.

Back in his adopted hometown, Delo flipped the switch. He showed up to work every day—the family business is called Delo Auto. He started making real money. He saved up enough to rent a three-bedroom townhome next to a Kurdish café, where he, Diana, and the kids live together for the first time in years. They’re expecting their third child soon.

“These guys, literally all of them will tell you, man,” he says at our long table at House of Kabob, gesturing to his friends, “I changed. Like, my mindset, the way I move, the way I do things—it’s completely different.”

“Nothing is more important than family.”

As he creeps deeper into his thirties, Delo hasn’t given up on soccer, but it’s much lower on his priorities. He’s been working on a business plan for a youth academy that’s geared toward Kurdish kids. Hany Mukhtar showed up at a recent tournament Delo played in, and Delo took a picture of Major League Soccer’s MVP holding his son, Osman.

Delo doesn’t do regrets. If his dream deferred is a raisin, it is golden. A few weeks ago, he took Diana, Osman, and Oshan to House of Kabob. They sat at his favorite corner table, and Delo ordered his usual—the Neesk, and the vegetarian plate with an extra veggie skewer. After dinner, they all returned home, together.

This story was published in the print edition as “An American Road.” Buy the issue this article appears in here.