by Lillie Vale
He shatters it like a toppling pane of glass and doesn’t bother to pick up the pieces.
“Hey, Mom,” he says, throwing open the door. “What a surprise!”
Chapter 26
Once everyone’s in the living room, our parents exchange curious glances with each other—and at us.
“Since we caught the first ferry of the day, and we didn’t see you on it, Milan, you must have spent the night,” says Aji, with her usual penchant for saying what everybody is thinking.
Milan’s dad visibly shrinks from secondhand embarrassment, but his mom perks her head toward us like she wants all the juicy details.
Dad coughs and gives a little shake of his head.
Aji, unperturbed, fixes Milan with a shark-eyed I’ve-got-your-number-buddy look.
Our families have spent a lot of time together since high school, but this is definitely the most awkward scene I’ve ever witnessed.
“Well, with the storm, ferries probably weren’t running last night, right?” Mom asks, breaking the silence.
“Yup,” I say, latching on quick. “He got drenched trying to make the last one, and had to turn back.”
Everyone looks at the wrinkles in Milan’s shirts as if they’re noticing them for the first time. His mother makes a dismayed sound and tries to smooth his collar, but it’s hopeless.
While they’re distracted, I cast a quick glance over the living room floor for my underwear. Try to peek in the crevice between the couch cushion and the armrest. How can a wisp of red fabric be so difficult to find?
Mr. Rao is taking in the room decor with undisguised interest. When he catches my eye, he gives me a broad, encouraging smile. What he makes of my squirrelly eye contact, heaven alone knows.
I swallow. On the other hand, thank god my red thong is hard to spot.
Then his eye travels to the fireplace surround, the beautiful blue tiles, the vintage poker stand, the ship in a bottle perched on the mantel . . .
Red thong wadded up in the corner of the rug where no one thought to look.
Please let no one see it.
Slowly, I start edging toward it, hoping I can swipe it before anyone’s the wiser.
Unfortunately, this is the exact moment that the conversation dwindles and everyone turns to look expectantly at me.
Dad looks toward the fireplace with a trace of desperation. “I’m glad you stripped first.”
I freeze in horror. I was wrong. This is the most awkward conversation I’ve had to date.
I follow Dad’s gaze to the two old bookshelves he had found discarded on the sidewalk.
Oh thank god. He’s talking about the finish.
Aji gets a Harrie-like gleam in her eyes. “Rita, chunnu, is that—”
“I was folding laundry last night,” I blurt out at the same exact moment Milan says, boisterously loud, “So that’s where my dust rag went!”
“Arey deva,” whispers Mrs. Rao.
Mr. Rao proudly claps his son on the back. “We taught him well.”
“Because I taught you well,” says his wife.
To the rest of us, Mr. Rao adds, “Since childhood, he’s seen me doing little jobs around the house. In my mother’s house, I was a prince, but when I got married . . .” He grins.
“Yes, I can see exactly where he’s been applying himself,” says Aji.
“Okay, then!” says Milan, slapping his thighs. “Time for a tour?”
I don’t know how we get through the next half hour of giving our families the full tour of Bluebill Cottage. Milan takes them from room to room, back in real estate agent mode, giving me another glimpse of the man he became when I wasn’t looking. He’s generous with praise, making sure to give me credit for every idea and addition I brought to the house, and is patient with our parents’ questions.
Mr. Rao avoids eye contact, focusing on a spot somewhere beyond my right ear when he directs anything to me, and Mrs. Rao keeps glancing between me and Milan with a feverish anticipation, trying to spy any affectionate gestures or touches that will give us away.
Little do they know we’re currently in a cold war (and trying so hard not to look like it that we’ve gotten marionette smiles on our faces and wooden stiffness in our shoulders).
His parents don’t know a whole lot about woodworking or restoration, so they’re content to listen and nod, wandering the rooms with naked interest. Dad, not Milan’s biggest fan after our breakup, quizzes him about things he doesn’t have the faintest idea about, and Aji demands chai, which I don’t have, but I grab on to it as an escape hatch.
“I don’t have any loose tea. Herbal okay?” I ask when Mom returns to the kitchen where I’m laying out snacks left over from Milan’s charcuterie board. We’ve gotten ridiculous mileage out of his extravagance.
She eyes the peppermint packet I tear into and pulls her mouth to one side in doubt.
Oh well. That’s what the old bat is getting.
“What do you think of the place?” I ask, sticking my only mug in the microwave.
“It’s the kind of house I could imagine you living very comfortably in.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was going for. A house anybody would be thrilled to call home.”
“Not just anybody.” She slants me a sharp look. “It has you written all over it.”
“Oh. Huh. Cheese?” I hold out a cube of mango-habanero cheddar.
She shakes her head. “Barely any glasses, but three different kinds of crackers and cheese,” she says mildly.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” I say, a little embarrassed that all we have to offer tap water in are two regular water glasses, two wine goblets, and a mug that up until a half hour ago was filled with coffee.
And then I’m annoyed with myself, because these aren’t my in-laws and I’m not their hostess, but I’m stressing like I am, especially with my parents added to the mix. Who even shows up uninvited anymore?
But it’s not them I’m mad at so much as Milan. Who had an opportunity to talk through our issues, but chose to run from them. I grit my teeth together to keep my lips from trembling.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
“Honey, it’s fine.” Mom’s eyes soften. “We didn’t come here to be waited on.”
“Why did you come?” I hear how waspish it sounds, but it’s too late. “Sorry. I’m just a little cranky this morning.”
She lays her hand on top of mine. “Don’t be so suspicious. You weren’t answering your phone last night so Dad and I decided we’d come out here to see how you were doing. That storm got a little scary, and when we couldn’t get through to you—” She swallows. “Well. I worry.”
I pull her into a one-armed hug. She sinks into my side like she was waiting for it, but it’s more for me than for her. I take in the fresh, bright scent of orange-blossom shower gel and the smoky sweetness of sandalwood incense and for one outrageous second, I feel like I could tell her anything right now, even the history with Neil.
“Something is different between the two of you,” she states.
Panic flares down my neck that she knows, that there’s some weird post-sex glow that people can see sticking on my skin. Raj has a good instinct for it, but Mom? Can’t be.
Mom’s face settles into sympathy. “You’ve had a fight.”
“I—yeah.”
She clucks her tongue. “You’ve been working too hard.”
I make a noncommittal sound, plucking the mug out of the microwave when it beeps.
“No, it’s true,” says Mom. “When two passionate people work closely together—”
“This sounds creepily like the ‘when a man and a woman really love each other’ talk—which was totally heteronormative, by the way—you gave me when I got my first period.”
She pulls her gray wool cardigan around her and straightens to her
full height. “Rita.”
“Mom. I don’t want to talk about this. Okay?” I plead.
She doesn’t relent. “Let’s go outside for a minute.” There’s a steel in her voice that isn’t often there, and so, after a moment of hesitation, I follow her to the porch.
We sit on one of the benches, which was once broken and unloved, that I refinished with a deep walnut stain and plenty of Danish oil to bring back its shine. The seating cushions are too new and plump to be comfortable, but Mom doesn’t say a word.
In fact, she’s quiet for so long that I wonder if she forgot why she called me out here at all. She stares at the water, at the dreary gray sky, a tenseness to her mouth like she’s weighing what she’s about to say. Then she expels a breath so long and so heavy that I can’t help but wonder what demons have been exorcized with it.
“Sometimes people, even when they’re suited for each other, even when they love each other, scrape against each other in small spaces. Friction. Especially when—”
I lean toward her. “Yes?”
“—you live in the same place as you work. The way the two of you were just now in front of everyone . . . I recognized myself in you,” Mom says, sighing as though the admission costs her. “I knew at once we’d interrupted something. And no, not what Aji none too subtly hinted at. We’d walked into a moment that wasn’t over. From the way you two were so rigid, after all these weeks of working together, I knew, I just knew, that something had just happened before we arrived. That you two were waiting for us to leave to continue the argument.” She peers at me, worried. “Am I right?”
I jerk my head up down, up down.
Her eyes sadden. “When Milan’s mom and I got talking at the temple’s Holi festival last year—all about you kids and what you were up to these days—we didn’t set out to set you up together. We only became close again recently, and we thought we were doing the right thing by not involving you kids in our friendship. But then, when we chatted again at the potluck and she said Milan had a problem-house, well, it seemed like the perfect solution to give you both a second chance. Things were so awkward between our families those first few years when you broke up. His parents always acted so, now that I think about it, guilty.”
I know why. The failed grades that led to the voicemail that led to us breaking up. I can imagine how they blamed themselves—how Milan must have blamed them.
Mom purses her lips. “You were both so adamant about not talking to each other . . . But then when neither of you seemed to find anybody to get serious with, we thought, why not help you two along, if it meant you’d be with the one you love?” She clasps my hands between hers. “Did we do wrong?”
I stare at our joined hands. “No, you didn’t do wrong. I fought against it for so long, but I . . . I’m glad he’s in my life again. I just wish it was because he set all of this in motion.”
“What I never understood is,” says Mom, “if the breakup was mutual, why you didn’t stay friends afterward.”
I think about all the things we don’t understand about each other. The secrets we’ve kept.
Maybe it’s time to share one of my own.
“I told you and Dad that the breakup was both of our decision because I didn’t want to tell you what really happened. He dumped me.” When fire sparks in her eyes, I add hastily, “At least, that’s what I thought at the time. It turned out to be both our faults for assuming the worst of the other. He thought I dumped him; I thought he ended things with me.”
Mom still looks fiery. “What do you mean? When did this happ—right before your trip?”
“Don’t get mad at him. Some of it was my fault, too.”
The set of her mouth tells me she disagrees. “How did both of you think you’d been dumped and not talk it out further?” Her laugh is mirthless as she says, “Rita, my love, when you’ve been dumped, trust me, you’ll know it.”
Somehow the subject has become more sore for her than it is for me.
If I didn’t know she was thinking about Amar right now, I’d snark back Yeah? You and Dad were such great role models about talking out problems, I guess? That’s why you moved out for a month? Why we never talk about the fact you lived in the New Bern house without us, like you were trying it on for size, leaving us forever? Talk it out like that, Mom?
But this is another thing my mom and I never discuss. The past is whisked out only when it suits her. It hurts her enough; it’s not for me to use it against her.
“Your aji will be wanting her tea,” Mom says abruptly, standing up and taking the mug out of my hands. She gives my shoulder a squeeze, and I get it; I get that she’s trying to give me all the strength and love that she can’t put into words without feeling too much.
I give her enough time to go back upstairs, readying myself to go back “on,” too.
Tap, tap tinkles out behind me.
Oh no. My insides writhe like a pit of snakes.
The tapping becomes more insistent.
I turn, coming face-to-face with Aji on the other side of the window.
She crooks her finger. Come here.
Stomach sinking, I go back inside. Aji’s sitting in the plaid cream-and-green armchair to the right of the fireplace, feet propped up on a woven belt footstool.
Her wrinkled hands are empty. No mug.
“Esha didn’t see me sitting here,” she says, answering my unspoken question. She points to the armchair opposite, a denim-blue fabric patterned with white, bell-shaped snowdrops. “She went upstairs looking for me.”
I cross my arms and raise an eyebrow. “You could have told her you were right here.”
A pained expression flashes across her face. “Your mother,” she says, “would not have liked me to overhear any of that.”
I should let it go, but I’m still in a fight-y mood. “You could have left the room.”
Aji doesn’t even dignify that with a response, just gestures at me to sit again. “I am going to tell you,” she says when I do, “something that should have been obvious. I don’t like people who treat the women in our family badly.”
She gives me a pointed look. “Your Milan should have fought for you. Amar should have fought for your mother. And both of you should have fought for the men you loved. Do you know how much your father fought me and your aba to marry Esha?”
Out of all the family stories I’ve heard, this one is new. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” says Aji. “I told your father not to pursue a girl so freshly heartbroken.”
I startle. The idea that my grandmother opposed Mom feels like a betrayal.
“I told him he would never be first in her heart,” she continues. “That her parents were pressuring her to marry so the family wouldn’t look bad, so her younger sisters could marry instead of waiting for the eldest to have her shaadi first.”
“And Dad didn’t listen?”
She smiles. “Would you be here if he had?”
I duck my head and blush. “Right. But he . . . he knew about Amar and stood up to you two, anyway? He didn’t care that he was a rebound?”
“Your aba and I were arranged. We thought we knew what was best. But your father, your stubborn, stubborn father,” she says, shaking her head, “he insisted on Esha and no one else. He spent years convincing her of his love. Brick by brick you can build a house. I saw that when he called me here to help with you when they were going through”—she darts me a look as if to gauge what I know—“some troubles.”
“When Mom left,” I say flatly.
Aji shakes her head, impatient. “Yes, she left, but she also came back. I told your father to offer her a divorce if that’s what she wanted. Esha refused. She said she had what she wanted.”
“And time alone made her realize she loved him after all? That’s why she came back?”
My throat tightens, grows scratch
y as a sweater. I’m eager for the answer I want.
If Mom loves Dad, it means she didn’t come back just because of me.
It means I wasn’t the reason she felt forced into staying.
Aji studies me for a long moment. “Your mother loves the life they’ve built together. Ruthvik standing by her side and giving her strength when she needed it, and loving her enough to give her solitude. Of raising a strong, beautiful daughter.”
I frown, trying to keep the wobble from my voice. “But that’s not what I asked.”
“Is that not love also?” asks Aji, voice level.
Her comment makes me feel childish. Like I’m missing an important point that’s glaringly obvious to everyone else.
“But what happened? She must have said something when she came back. You would have asked. You wouldn’t have just accepted it. It was a month.”
Her face takes on a mulish, cranky set. I can tell I’ve annoyed her. “You’re asking the wrong person,” she says. “But if you ask me, you shouldn’t be asking at all. A child doesn’t need to know everything.”
That’s bullshit.
Maybe she reads it on my face, because she sighs and stands up, looking older and more weary than I’ve ever seen her. “I’m thirsty,” she announces. “Get your mother, Rita. I’ll take that horrible tea you made me now.”
* * *
—
“Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” I say, forcing a heartiness to my voice the moment we wave our parents off. With the sun out it’s a balmy seventy-seven degrees, but there’s a coolness to the air that has nothing to do with the weather.
“Yeah,” says Milan, lips pursed and rounded, as if he’s about to say something, but doesn’t.
