For the first time, she noticed that he wasn’t just hot—he was dramatically beautiful. If you liked square-jawed model types who liked gyms. She herself was someone who went for skinny nerd types. And no, one bad experience was not going to make her rethink her type.
They stood there like that for a beat. The overheated blacktop smell of the parking lot mixing with the smell of the oleander blooming around them. The smell of home. Being able to register that smell was more relief than she could contain, and she sighed. It made him smile. Something he seemed to do often and widely. Possibly because he believed those dimples were making women everywhere swoon.
Now that she had noticed it, it jumped out at her. How full of himself he was. It was in how he carried himself, with loose-limbed confidence. As though he were someone.
“Why has your day been awful?” she asked.
The smile slid off his face. The proud shoulders slumped infinitesimally. “I came here on important business,” he said as though he’d been waiting to say those words to someone, to let them out. “But I think I’m going to have to go home—to Mumbai—without a resolution.” He looked so upset that Cullie was gripped by an unfamiliar urge to comfort him. Pat his shoulder, do something.
This was the second time she’d had the totally out-of-character urge. Maybe it was all those years of seeing her parents help people who’d just arrived from India. Taking them shopping, showing them around, trying to ease something they recognized and related to at a visceral level, the transition from outsider to local.
“Maybe I can help you,” she said, then realized they didn’t know each other’s names. “Cullie Desai.” She offered him her hand.
His eyes widened as he looked down at it, but then he grabbed it with both of his own. “That’s a pretty name. You have no idea what your offer to help means. Thank you. I’m . . .” Looking up to meet her eyes, he seemed to lose his train of thought. Cullie felt a blush warm her cheeks under his gaze. “I’m Rohan. Rohan Shah.” And then he smiled as though he’d been waiting his whole life to meet a girl who made him forget his name.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ALY
Bhanu once asked me, “Why are we supposed to be ashamed of our own nakedness? Doesn’t that turn the vessel we live in, our most precious possession, into an ugly secret?”
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Radha and Aly had been friends since sixth grade. They’d become friends when Rick Johansson—possibly the most handsome human being Aly had ever encountered in her earthly life—had tossed Aly’s cilantro-coconut chutney into her hair and told her that she and her food smelled “like ass.” It had been a bafflingly unintelligent insult, but it had stung.
The upside was that when the time had come to write her college essays, Aly had mined gold with that experience: a child of immigrant parents learning what being othered in her own country felt like and the journey she’d traveled from that feeling of helplessness to being the winner of the John F. Kennedy prize for promising American teens as a high school junior.
The other upside—the far more valuable one—was that it had given Aly her best friend. Radha Kambli had used the incident to start an anti-hate club at Washington Junior High.
Washington’s Activist Teen Coalition for Hate Interception and Tolerance. WATCH-IT for short. It had become known as the Watch-It-Rick-Johansson Club in school, because no one could ever remember what Radha’s acronyms stood for except her. It was certainly the last time someone had poured an ethnic food into the hair of the person of that ethnicity in the cafeteria （food fights for other reasons continued undeterred）。
To no one’s surprise, Radha had gone to Harvard and was now a human rights lawyer in Miami and still the best thing that had ever happened to Aly.
“It does make sense that Cullie told Ash that a man died in his mother’s home,” Radha said, turning around to face Aly as they crossed the bridge that led over the shrubbery from the downtown Naples parking lot to the beach. “You’d want someone to tell you if a man died in Karen Auntie’s . . . well, never mind. That’s absurd.”
“Is it horrible to laugh?” Aly asked, laughing. The blast of salty ocean air made a heady combination with the lightness she felt in Radha’s presence. “You’re the only person on earth who can make me laugh right now. And thanks for making me think about Mummy and sex at the same time, as though my marriage hadn’t completely turned me off it for life already.”
“Liar. That was the one thing that wasn’t broken in your marriage.” They stopped to slip off their sandals and leave them by their rock and then set off on their walk. Radha had several clients in the Naples area, and whenever she was in town, walking along the ocean the way they had done growing up in West Palm Beach was a given.
Aly savored the feel of cool sand between her toes and tried not to drift off into the past. “If you call getting stuck in a cycle of having horrible arguments, then falling into long silences, and then having makeup sex not being broken.” Because that’s where their marriage had ended up in its final years.
“Sounds fabulous, actually,” Radha said. “Not just fabulous, it’s genius! Taking the boredom out of marital sex by only having makeup sex.”
“Should we slap an acronym on it and start a club?” Aly said, still laughing.
“Hold on, I got it. MOAN—Marital Orgasm-Apology Network. I like the sound of that.”
The man running past them turned around and gave them a thumbs-up.
Aly was laughing so hard, she was in tears. “I hope you don’t mean for it to be a secret society. It might be hard to keep it quiet.”
“Good one!” Radha said delightedly. “MOAN, the sound of a happy marriage.”
When their laughter died down, Aly found herself frowning again. “The last thing I need right now is to deal with Ashish. I thought I was done with that. Isn’t divorce supposed to be the end of having to deal with your spouse?”
“Not if you’re roomies with his mother. To say nothing of coparenting. Coparenting takes divorce into the death-and-taxes category. There’s no escaping it.” That was Radha-the-lawyer speaking.
Radha-the-wife was as content with Pran as anyone married for twenty-five years could be. Which is to say, she believed he was the best thing that had happened to her, 40 percent of the time. She had married Pran in the most unexpectedly traditional arranged setup. After being dumped by her college boyfriend over email, she’d taken “things into her own hands” and told her parents to show her “what they could come up with.”
They’d done well. Not only was Pran one of the most solid people Aly knew, but he was also the most irreverently funny. Ashish and he were as close as Radha and she, and the loss of their four-way dynamic was one of the saddest casualties resulting from the divorce. Aly had lost the community of families Ashish and she had been part of after the divorce, but losing Pran and Radha’s couplehood friendship was the part that stung most.
“I still think Cullie shouldn’t have told Ashish. Is it weird that I feel betrayed?” A wave skimmed close to Aly’s feet, and she let it lick the tips of her toes without breaking stride.