Emily shook hands with Josh. “Raj is probably right about that,” she said, laughing.
I bet Josh wished I wasn’t there so he could talk shop with someone at his level.
“I’d love to send you a copy of my book,” he said. “I think you’d find it very interesting. I’ll have my publisher send it out immediately.”
“That would be great. Do send it.” Emily turned to me. “Raj is going to show me the ocean before I need to head to my next appointment. It was nice meeting you.”
Josh was clearly waiting for an invitation to join us. Neither Emily nor I said anything.
“I’ll see you tonight at your reading,” Josh said. “I can’t wait to hear you read. And Raj, please be in touch if you need anything. Truly, absolutely anything.” He looked me in the eye to emphasize the offer.
“For sure,” I said, wanting to enjoy this moment a little longer. “I appreciate it.”
As we walked away, Emily asked, “Is that the guy who wrote the insecurity book?”
“The one and only.” I didn’t know what I would do if she said it was a smart book.
“It’s a stinking piece of shit,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and then repeated, louder and with glee now spilling out of me, “Thank you!”
“You didn’t always teach here, right?” Emily asked.
“Nope.”
“Is this a better job?”
“No. Decidedly worse.”
“What happened?”
My eye fell on a young man effortlessly skateboarding, as if the wind were ushering him along.
“It didn’t work out,” I said.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“It’s not some huge secret,” I said. “The work wasn’t going that well. And we wanted to move back to California.”
“I can understand that,” she said.
“What about you? Congratulations on all the amazing success. Truly. I’m tired of being envious, so I’m just going to be happy for you.”
She skipped a couple of beats, which surprised me.
“It’s amazing and it’s not,” she said. “I hate doing these public events. But I can’t say no to the money, or the fact that the university bought five thousand copies of my book. My god. When the book came out, I was hoping to sell maybe five hundred. I have a career that’s doing better than I ever could have imagined. And a husband who can’t deal with any of it. He keeps saying that our kids are poorly behaved because their mother is constantly distracted.”
“You have shitty kids?” I asked, trying to hide the small bit of delight I was feeling.
“I have the mother of shitty kids,” she said wearily. “And I’m the mother. I’ve tried my very best to be there for them. My husband thinks that we’ve always concentrated on my career and that it’s time to turn to his now. He wants me to quit my job—my fucking job at Princeton—so we can move to the Bay Area and he can break into Silicon Valley. He thinks Facebook is on its way out because too many people only post about the exciting things in their lives, that it isn’t real enough. He wants to replace it with a platform where people are more honest and call it Truthbook, where you can see the good and the bad.”
I must have looked confused. Couldn’t he have tried at least to make it sound like less of a direct rip-off ? Truthteller? TruthNow? TruthLeaks?
“I know. It’s insane. I don’t want to know the truth about people. I prefer the lies. He says he’s sitting on a unicorn. I feel like I’m being rammed in the back by one, over and over again. So yes, job, kids, and a mortgage for me too. But I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
I admired Emily’s willingness to be completely unfiltered about what she felt and said. Was that why she’d become such a feted poet? “Maybe your husband is on to something. You could post that as your status update.”
She grimaced, unable to mask the stress her husband was causing.
We stood at the end of the dirt path, the start of the beach. There were about twenty students on beach chairs and towels, doing their reading. A few were in the water, surfing.
“This is where these kids study?” Emily asked. I remembered she had been an undergraduate at the University of Chicago: very cold or very hot, depending on the time of year.
I pointed to a dolphin out past the waves. Several more breached the surface.
“You’re kidding me. Let’s go back. This is depressing me.”
We headed toward campus.
“What are you working on next? More poetry?”
“No,” Emily said. “I’ve written all the poems I’m going to write.” She quickly checked her watch.
“Are you expected somewhere?”
“The library,” she said, sounding tired. “I’m supposed to meet with students before my talk. I needed a little break and this was perfect. Thank you so much.”
“I’m sorry I can’t make it tonight.” I hadn’t been planning on going, and now I couldn’t because Eva would be home late. But it had been so nice catching up with Emily, now I regretted missing her event. “My wife is working and I need to be with the kids.”
“Don’t worry at all. It’s going to be miserable. I’m miserable at this.”
“I’m sure you’re not,” I said. “I bet they’ll be blown away. I certainly was. As I expected, your first book was smart. But this one—it’s something else altogether. Heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. I’m sorry you and your parents have had to go through so much. There was so much love, so much humanity, in the way you wrote about Tracy. I feel her absence now too.”
“I appreciate you saying that,” Emily said, her shoulders relaxing, as if she were fully letting down her guard. “It means a lot coming from you. I know we haven’t kept in touch, but I always enjoyed being in class with you. You made such thoughtful comments, while everyone else was peacocking. I’m so glad I ran into you. Stay in touch this time. This is already the best part of my trip. And please get that car washed.”
We hugged and she walked off, disappearing into the mill of students all around.
I got in my car and tried to use the wipers, but all they did was smear the droppings across the windshield. No rose-colored glasses for me; I was seeing the world through streaks of shit. I drove straight to a car wash and got in line. When it was my turn, I stepped out.
“Regular or extreme wash?” the attendant asked. He was a young, skinny white kid wearing an oversized sweatshirt. He looked at the windshield and then at me. A large smile spread over his face. He pretended to shoot a skeet gun, and without waiting for my answer, he wrote Extreme on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “You can pay inside. We’ll work extra-hard on this one.” I went into the store.
“Anything else?” the young cashier asked, taking the slip from me.
“Do you sell lottery tickets?” I asked, remembering what Emily had said. Maybe bird shit really would bring me luck.
“How many do you want?” she asked, barely acknowledging my presence.
“Just one. I feel lucky.”
“I’m sure you do,” she deadpanned.
How many guys like me, thinking they were the lucky ones, did she encounter a day?
She rang me up for the car wash and one ticket. I took it from her, fished a coin out of my pocket, and scratched. Somehow, I matched three numbers and looked up at the cashier, trying to remain expressionless. And then I scratched the prize. Did a ten-dollar payout on a one-dollar ticket mark luck? I certainly thought so. I felt a slight uptick in my spirit as I handed her the ticket.
“I guess you are lucky,” the cashier said, allowing herself the slightest smile and handing me a ten-dollar bill. “You want this or ten more tickets?”
I froze. It was a difficult philosophical question. I hadn’t even considered getting more tickets; I knew that I’d just scratch and scratch and be left with nothing. But what if luck was a real thing? I was seldom at the receiving end of it.
“Can I have nine
tickets?”
The cashier watched me indifferently as I scratched ticket after ticket. After the first few, I still thought my chances were pretty high, but by the end, I was a lot more heartbroken than I’d expected. I handed the cashier the nine tickets to throw away.
“Next time, quit while you’re ahead,” she said.
I wondered if her father had also mailed her photocopies of quotes from the Wall Street Journal.
“I think you’re right.”
I walked out to my clean car.
I felt unusually happy whenever I got into my car after someone else had washed it. For the first hour or so, before the dust and grime made its way back in, life seemed ordered, contained. But it amazed me how little time it took for the dirt to reappear on the floor, for the back seat to be filled with empty water bottles.
I checked to my left before pulling out of the car wash. I noticed a car parked a little ways away. I couldn’t be sure, but the man in the driver’s seat bore a striking resemblance to Robert. Had it been an old beat-up Civic, I would have thought it was him. But what could he possibly be doing driving, of all things, a candy-apple-red Mini Cooper? I knew he couldn’t afford it.
As I drove away, I kept checking my rearview mirror, sure that the Mini was following me. It was there every time, hanging a couple of cars back.
I had to pick up the kids, but I still had an hour or so to kill before school got out.
I stopped at a sporting goods store to buy some tennis balls. I parked and looked around; I didn’t see the Mini. I checked my phone to see if there was a note from Cliff. My school account had at least fifteen emails from nonschool addresses that I didn’t recognize. The first one I opened had the subject line “We’re Coming For You.” The body read: “This is our country. There’s no place in it for people who hate us. Go home. You’re not welcome here anymore.” I so badly wanted to delete it, and all the others festering in my inbox. But I knew I should save them to show Cliff, and maybe also to the police, who I was thinking should be involved in this whole mess. I checked one more time for the Mini, got out of the car, and hurried inside.
My first job in high school had been at a store like this, and I’d loved it. It made me feel sporty and athletic, a feeling that carried over to the present, as I examined the weights, the new tennis racquets, the golf clubs. I palmed the footballs and basketballs. I grabbed several cans of tennis balls and headed to the register.
I walked past the gun section on my way to the checkout. In all the times I’d been in the store, I’d never paid much mind to the guns. I had no interest in them; I hated that they sold them. And yet, the gun section was a little like the porn section in a video store—back when video stores were still a thing—shameful yet inviting.
Once, a couple of years back, we’d had a young man come pounding on our front door, yelling, in the middle of the night. He was obviously high on something. We called 911, and until the police arrived and arrested him, Eva locked herself and the kids in the bedroom while I watched him through the thick glass of the door, clutching a cricket bat in my hand.
A few days later, when I spoke to the sheriff about what to do if something like that happened again, he suggested I buy a gun, to give myself some time before the police got there. The message I read into that: ultimately, I was responsible for my safety and the safety of my family. Others could help, but in the end it would fall on me.
I knew all the information about guns and how they escalated violence, but still, the fear from that night, that sheriff’s advice, stuck with me. I thought about the phone call I had received that morning. Whoever he was knew my landline; I assumed he knew where I lived, too. What would happen if he showed up at our house? Weren’t these the sort of extenuating circumstances that justified bending my moral compass a bit?
At the register I paid for my tennis balls, but hesitated before leaving the store. I went back to the gun counter.
“You need something to shoot those balls?” the young man behind the counter asked. He was wearing a cheap button-down shirt, maybe one he had taken from the back of his father’s closet. But there was something keen and bright about his manner.
“I’m just looking.” I couldn’t believe I was there.
The salesman explained that the handguns would require a background check, but a BB gun or a basic single-shot rifle could go home with me today. I assumed that they were less capable of doing major harm, and yet the ease of access to these guns was frightening. “Check them out. Full refund if they’re not good for you.” He pointed to a rifle. “This one here is perfect for squirrels and warning shots and maybe coyotes if they get too close. That’s all you need sometimes. A warning shot.”
He removed it from the case and placed it in front of me. I hadn’t mentioned why I needed one.
“My dad uses it for gophers,” the salesman said. “It gets a little messy, but it keeps them out of your lawn. And the fruit trees. You don’t want them getting to those trees that you’ve grown and nurtured for years.”
He was a good salesman. He knew all the right man buttons to push.
“Can I use it for snakes?”
“Of course. Just aim for the head.”
Half an hour and a brief tutorial later, I was driving to pick up the kids with a rifle, a box of bullets, a desk lamp, and several cans of tennis balls in the trunk of my car. As I stood at that counter, a gun had felt like a perfect fix. I’d felt out of control all week, and as much as I knew it was really a sign of the opposite, the gun gave me the feeling of wrestling the control back.
I decided to call my mother.
“Everything OK?” she asked. “You don’t usually call at this time.”
If I told her that I’d bought a gun, she would hang up, call my two sisters, and the three of them would be at my doorstep by nightfall, wanting to solve all of my problems. I appreciated this about them. But I was far too old for the Bhatt sisters to be holding my hand.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Before she could answer, I continued, wanting to turn the conversation away from me. “Any more calls from the saffron man?”
“Yes, we’ve been talking. And we’re going to have lunch next week.”
I didn’t say anything. I was a little uncomfortable talking to my mother about going on a date with someone who wasn’t my father, no matter how happy I was that she seemed to have found someone to keep her company. But also, to be honest, I was disappointed that she didn’t have a problem that needed fixing.
“But I’m not even sure it will be next week. By then, I’ll probably have changed my mind anyway.”
“I’m sure it will be wonderful. I’m glad you’re doing it. It’s important to get out.”
“Is Neel doing better?”
“He’s fine. He’s already talking about Thanksgiving. Both boys are.”
“Speaking of which, Swati suggested that this year we get the whole thing catered. There’s a new Indian place in Berkeley we could order from.”
“And?”
“And I think it’s something to consider.”
I looked forward to Thanksgiving more than any other holiday because my mother spent days and days cooking beforehand. I spent the entire day eating—idli sambar for breakfast, fresh samosas to snack on, three kinds of vegetables instead of the turkey, molasses ladoos throughout the day—and still came away with a cooler full of leftovers. But I knew all the work exhausted her; she deserved a break.
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “This way you can just relax the whole time, spend time with your grandkids.”
“I’m so glad,” she said, sounding relieved. “I’ll tell her to go ahead and order it.”
I hung up and went to pick up the kids.
When I got to the front of the car line at school, Neel and Arun ran up. Neel banged on the trunk. I reached for the button to pop it open and let them dump their backpacks in, but then stopped myself, remembering the contraband in the trunk.
“Just bring your stuff in
with you,” I said, lowering the window, trying to sound breezy.
At home, the kids took showers without too much prodding. Since our blowup earlier in the week, they had been doing things before I had to insist. Once they’d changed, they both sat at the dining table and did their homework while I made them snacks before dinner. Eva would get home after they’d fallen asleep. Whenever she was out, the three of us bachelored it a bit, eating in front of the TV, finishing pints of ice cream. They also listened to me a lot more when she wasn’t around—no extra parent to appeal to when I played bad cop.
Neel came into the kitchen to get some milk.
“What’s for dinner?”
“I don’t know yet. Any preferences?”
“I like whatever you cook.”
I was removing eggs from the fridge. A thin omelet with goat cheese sounded delicious. We could at least start with that and then move on.
“The phone light is flashing.”
Before I could tell Neel not to touch it, he pressed the button and a voice came on that I didn’t recognize. “Welcome home, Christian hater. How was your day?”
I slammed the stop button.
“Who was that?” Neel asked, worried. “What’s a Christian hater? Are you a Christian hater?”
It had been a different person than the one who had called that morning.
“Nobody,” I said. “A recording. They’re trying to sell us things.”
Neel was skeptical. He had never been very gullible. He’d finished with Santa Claus early and hadn’t even entertained the possibility of a tooth fairy. “It didn’t sound like a salesman.”
“I’ll listen to it later,” I said. “Go ahead and get back to your math.”
“Are you cold?” Neel asked, now sounding concerned. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine. I just haven’t been feeling well today,” I said. “I’ve had kind of a crummy week.”
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