“Honesty or coddling?” Radha matched her stride easily and threw Aly a sideways glance through the barely salt-and-pepper strands she refused to color, unlike Aly, who’d been obsessed with not letting her gray roots show since the ripe old age of thirty.
“Coddle me, please,” Aly said, knowing full well that Radha was incapable of not speaking her mind.
“I don’t believe for a moment that Ashish came down to check on Bindu. That does not sound like him at all. Although this is the first time a dead body has been involved in your ma-in-law’s shenanigans, so even I’m out of my depth here.”
Radha loved Bindu—even more than people usually did—so Aly laughed. The memory of dropping a wine bottle from shock was so mortifying, it made her cheeks burn. If Radha knew she’d done that, she’d smack her upside the head for giving Ashish’s ego even more oxygen.
But Radha was right. There had to be more to her ex showing up than taking care of his mother. Ashish and Bindu’s relationship didn’t work like that. Bindu showed up. Ashish expected her to always be there to make everything okay. Until Aly and Ashish’s divorce, Bindu had never reneged on that understanding.
The converse of that was not part of the equation. Her mother-in-law was almost pathologically independent. She’d never needed any taking care of.
“Ashish knows you’re here for whatever Bindu needs. You do realize it’s weird how you and Bindu are together. Pran’s mom is a whiny witch, and she gets worse with age.”
“Maybe guys are only nice to us when we don’t get along with their families, and when we do get along with their families, they take us for granted.”
“Who the hell knows,” Radha said. “Men want us to believe they’re uncomplicated. It’s such a lie. They’re like knots under wax. How do you ever unravel a hidden snarl?”
“Ashish doesn’t even pretend to not be complicated. He loves being complicated.”
For the first ten years of their marriage, Aly had worked herself to the bone, worked a job that sucked her soul dry, taken care of the home front, the cooking and cleaning, raising Cullie, building a healthy social life, though Bindu had helped. Aly had made it possible for Ashish to travel for work and establish himself as a respected professional, so his hard work had been financially rewarded. Without her, he wouldn’t have been able to do any of that.
It wasn’t until he’d built a career where he made enough money to cover both their paychecks that she’d taken the SFLN job. The opportunity to be on TV, chasing a story, bringing things to light for the audience: it made her feel alive. It gave her the kind of joy she couldn’t explain.
And yet she’d had to explain it over and over again, to everyone.
For the first couple of years, she’d even held down both jobs. Ashish hadn’t been happy, but so long as nothing changed in his life, he’d been patronizingly supportive. Then she’d decided that if she didn’t put more time into it, didn’t give all of herself to it, she wasn’t going to be able to get where she wanted. Another two years of staying on an intern’s salary but doing a reporter’s work, and she’d been able to move into reporting full time.
That was when Ashish’s gloves had come off.
Aly had started to get regular pieces where she got to be on air. It was only a few times a month, but friends started to introduce her as “our local celebrity” at parties. People started to introduce him as her husband. He’d laughed, exploding with good humor. He’d played at being a great sport, made jokes about how he planned to retire once they finally realized her talent and made her an anchor. He’d always had a ruthless tongue on him. She’d even found his irreverence funny. But then he had started to draw blood.
For years he’d done laundry, because he was only home over the weekends and that was the least he could do, because he knew how much she hated doing laundry. It was an act of love that had meant more than all the flowers in the world he could have bought her. As soon as she made reporter, he stopped helping around the house. Not completely: just enough that she felt it. He started praising the success of his friends’ wives.
When their friends took a trip to Europe, he’d say things like, His wife is a director at Google. Naturally they can afford it.
If someone moved into a bigger house, bought a nice car, he’d say, Must be nice to have the comfort of two real incomes.
At first Aly let the hurt flare into anger. Every spark he threw her way burst her into flames of temper. Then she started to grasp how badly their marriage was stretching under the strain of how differently they saw their situations. She tried to explain her side to him. Tried to show him how important this was. How the potential of it was huge. If she made anchor, she’d make up for all the income she’d lost.
For tracts of time he seemed to understand. Then she’d show up on TV, and he’d fall back into the precision cuts of his words.
I had a meeting, but I caught your piece in passing. It was blink and miss, but you did great.
Didn’t Bob get his anchor job at twenty-five?
The phrase “you’re misinterpreting everything I say” became easy currency in every argument. He used it to justify all the blood he drew.
Bindu’s support, Cullie’s struggles: it all piled up against her on the scales that became their marriage. Then Cullie dropped out of U of I, and Ashish stopped trying to be subtle, if he’d even tried before.
Naturally, your daughter thinks it’s okay to be flighty and to chase after things on a whim.
Aly had never chased a damn thing on a whim in her life. That was the moment when she realized that the man she’d fallen in love with because she believed he saw her—really saw her all the way to her soul—no longer did.
“So you have no idea why Ashish is here,” Radha said, pulling Aly back to the present.
“I don’t really care,” Aly said. “I have bigger issues to deal with right now. Joyce is hounding me to give her the Meryl contact. Thankfully, Meryl’s people are doing a great job keeping things under wraps. Your son is my favorite person on earth for getting Sam to make the introduction for me. I owe Bharat.”
“Well, I’m leaving all my wealth to him, to say nothing of my C-section keloid scar, so he’d better help my best friend. The fact that he’d help you even if I told him not to is beside the point.” Radha pushed her hands into her shorts pockets. She always got restless when she perceived an injustice. Probably why so many of her cases were pro bono and the thing about leaving her son wealth was a stretch.
“I can’t believe that Joyce is playing hardball with this,” Radha snapped. “It’s absolute horseshit. I have to agree with Cullie and Bindu. If she’s making you hand this over to Jessica, she’s never planning to give you your segment. There is such a discrimination lawsuit here—”
“No.” Aly needed this job. “I love this job.” She’d been miserable at the tech company. SFLN had given her a chance just when she’d thought she’d have to give up on her dream. “It takes time to change things. I want to do this on the basis of my work, not using legal action.”