“That’s actually lovely, Ma,” Mom said. They were so much better at this, knowing what to say to each other in the wake of death. All Cullie seemed able to do was make inappropriate jokes about her grandmother having couch coitus just to make her grandmother laugh.
Binji put her chopsticks down, that sadness in her eyes turning to purpose. “You and Cullie have that too. You know that, right?” Suddenly Binji’s eyes were burning with something Cullie had never seen there before. Her gaze moved from Cullie to Mom. “Love for what you do. Work that feels as essential as breathing, that lets you dig into yourself, makes you feel alive. Hold on to it. Everyone doesn’t have that.”
“I’m sorry, Binji,” Cullie said before she could stop herself. Sometimes she forgot that Binji had spent her life taking care of other people, and it made Cullie livid.
If Cullie had punched her grandmother, she would have looked less hurt. But the blast of pain was gone in a flash. If there was anything that could keep her grandmother down for long, Cullie was yet to discover it. Binji was like the endless earth, and calamities and adversity mere bolts of lightning swallowed up into its grounding soil.
Mom patted Binji’s hand. She, on the other hand, was thrown so hard by things, she never got back up. Case in point: the divorce. Good thing Cullie had already been an adult when her parents decided to give up on their marriage out of the blue, because if Cullie hadn’t been, she would have found it impossible to navigate never saying Dad’s name in Mom’s presence.
“Did you ever have something like that?” Cullie asked. “Something that made you feel alive?”
Binji opened her mouth, then shut it. “You,” she said finally. “Taking care of you.”
Instead of making Cullie feel better, that made her feel worse. But before she could say more, Binji threw her another fierce look. “How is your new app coming along?”
It was Cullie’s turn to shove a humongous clump of noodles into her mouth. For the past few days Cullie had continued to struggle with a mock-up. One corner of Binji’s bedroom floor was carpeted with sheets of paper containing Cullie’s dud ideas.
Emails from CJ filled her inbox, along with a few from Steve.
How had she ever thought of him as Hot Steve? Now the only thing hot was the anger that gripped her every time she thought about him. How stupid did you have to be to let a married man lie to you about being divorced? It was the oldest con in the book, and Cullie would never, ever let herself forget how easily she’d fallen for it.
The incentive of rubbing Steve’s lying face in the success of a new app was a powerful force. But how did one code something they didn’t understand? Coding wasn’t just typing out a string of numbers and letters and symbols; it was solving a problem, creating from nothing what you wanted to bring into existence.
As someone who sucked at everything in the general vicinity of romantic relationships, there wasn’t a less qualified person in the world to do this. Falling in love, being in a functional relationship: all those things she’d sold to CJ were basically Greek to her. Scratch that. For the price of off-the-shelf language-learning software, she could learn some Greek by the week’s end. What’s more, she found the idea of learning a foreign language mildly exciting. With dating . . . nothing, and consequently no idea where to even start with this program.
“Cullie?” Binji said, studying Cullie as though she knew exactly what had just passed through her brain. “Why are you frowning at those poor prawns like that? Don’t take your smooth forehead for granted, beta.”
When Cullie didn’t smile or respond, Binji and Mom exchanged the Look.
“What’s going on with Shloka?” Mom asked the question for both of them.
When Cullie looked surprised, they exchanged another look.
“The child is hilarious, no? Who does she think raised her?” Binji asked Mom, pointing her chopsticks at Cullie’s face.
“You only get that look on your face when something is happening with Shloka.” Mom circled her chopsticks around Cullie’s face too.
Suddenly they were two artists working on one painting, with chopsticks for paintbrushes.
“I thought the app was growing,” Binji said, washing a mouthful of shrimp down with the last bit of wine in her glass. “What’s wrong?”
“You have enough of your own stuff to worry about right now,” Cullie said. “More wine?”
“What stuff of my own do I have to worry about?” asked the woman who’d just had a friend die on her couch. “If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m tired of thinking about what happened. We can’t change the past, but we can fix what’s wrong now. Stop deflecting.”
Fine.
So Cullie told them. Not about Steve’s betrayal. Because she wasn’t ready to watch Mom’s heart break in her eyes. But she told them how the board was breaking their promise and planning to slap a subscription fee on Shloka. Destroying the thing that so many people relied on. She told them how she’d panicked and thrown Binji’s words at CJ in the form of an idea for a dating app.
For the first time today, Binji beamed. “You’re welcome!”
“I’m not hearing the problem,” Mom said. “Having something new to work on is great.” She opened her mouth to say more, but then another look passed between her and Binji, and she didn’t.
It wasn’t like Cullie didn’t know what Mom wanted to say. It had been a few years since Shloka went to market. There was a team of developers working on it now, not just Cullie.
At least neither of them tried to explain to her why a subscription wasn’t such a bad thing. They got why it would be devastating, and knowing this eased the mountain Cullie had been feeling buried under.
“I’ve been trying to come up with a plan to send CJ. She keeps telling me to send her what I have.”
Naturally CJ didn’t doubt Cullie’s ability to execute whatever idea she came up with. Problem was, there was no idea. And Steve had to know this. He knew exactly how much relationship stuff was not Cullie’s thing. How long before he convinced CJ that Cullie was lying?
In his last email, he’d accused Cullie of being vicious. I needed a woman who felt more for me than physical attraction. A woman who could access other feelings.
The asshole.
“So send her what you have,” Mom said with all the cluelessness of a mother who’d never had to deal with her child struggling with homework or bad grades.
“I’ve got nothing, Mom!” Cullie snapped. “I pulled this out of thin air because of Binji. I have no idea where to even start.”
“You came up with the design for Shloka when you were sixteen. This is so much more tangible.” Mom looked baffled.
It wasn’t tangible to Cullie. Not even a little bit. Sometimes her mother really didn’t get her. The mountain burying her piled right back up.
Thankfully, Binji was right there with her. Their three-way dynamic. Binji translating between them. “The reason Shloka came so easily to Cullie was that she understood the problem she was trying to solve,” Binji explained.
Mom looked like she always looked when the topic of Cullie’s mental health came up. At once disbelieving and completely convinced that she understood it better than anyone else, simply by virtue of having birthed Cullie.