Then those impostors had been beaten out of her by the battering ram of consequences （as her mother had so neatly summed up her disastrous youth）。 She’d made a fortuitous escape from having to walk the streets selling her body （as her mother had so ominously predicted） and landed instead in the safety of matrimony （which her mother had so graciously taken credit for）。
All through her marriage Bindu had worked hard to force her nights into dreamlessness. The practice had served her well, bringing her peace where restlessness could have corroded her mind. In widowhood it had helped her keep her mind where she was instead of letting it get lost in the past or wander off into the future.
Now her restless dreams were back, with a vengeance over forty years in the making. Ever since she’d heard the ghost of Oscar’s voice on the phone, ever since his grandson’s obvious affection for him had filled her heart with unreasonable warmth, even as the boy threatened to destroy everything she’d built, all of it was back. Subterranean lava that had been nudging for fissures too long.
What she’d felt for Oscar Seth had been volcanic. Untempered, destructive. What she’d felt for herself when the camera turned on had fanned her very being into an inferno. Oscar had used that, then abandoned her. Left her burning in those flames.
Bindu had not pulled herself out and rebuilt herself to let someone shove her into it again.
Nothing would touch the life she’d built. It wasn’t a lie. Her family wasn’t a lie. She watched as her granddaughter pushed a piece of chocolate painted with twenty-four-karat gold into her mouth.
Between Cullie and Bindu, they’d made their way through half the too-large, too-ornate box of assortments. Alisha, on the other hand, had allowed herself only one.
“So, you and I went on dates from hell, and Binji met a man who sent her flowers that look like they were harvested in paradise by celestial beings.” Cullie made a pleasured sound even as she glowered affectionately at Bindu. “And chocolate that was definitely crafted by celestial beings, probably from the organs of magical creatures.”
She was not wrong. Bindu had never tasted anything quite so delicious. Cullie reached across the table to pluck the card from the flowers that took up more than half the dining table. It was even more elaborate than the flower arrangements in the clubhouse run by the coven.
Alisha tried not to smile as Cullie mimed a gag reflex and skimmed the words on the card. Love so strong it was almost painful tightened around Bindu’s heart for these two. The world would never see them like this, entirely comfortable in their skin. This was a world they had created, the three of them, because of who they were. This belonged to her, to this version of Bindu.
Since the Richard tragedy, the tension between Bindu and Alisha had receded to the background. Bindu could only hope that it would disappear entirely from there.
It had been weeks since Jane and Connie had been able to make their weekly wine o’clocks or pickleball. It wasn’t just their fault. Bindu had canceled first, the day after Richard’s death. Truth be told, with Cullie and Ashish here and everything she had going on, she’d been more than a little preoccupied. The fact that neither of her Sunny Widows had reached out much had barely registered.
Now, if only Weaselly Leslie would stop hounding her about Richard’s will, they could just leave the entire incident behind. Bindu had stopped taking his calls or answering his texts after he’d refused to let her sign away the inheritance. At least Rishi Seth had left her alone since the phone call.
Then there was Cullie’s app. It had given the three of them a joint purpose. Alisha had come over after work, and it was just the three of them for the first time since Ashish’s return.
He had left town to meet with some concert organizers in Miami. When Alisha arrived and saw that he wasn’t here, her relief had been loud enough that she might as well have smashed another bottle on the floor.
Cullie was still rolling her eyes at the card. “How I pity these flowers. For I expect them to survive not a day in the shadow of your beauty,” she read out loud.
Alisha laughed.
“Does he work for Hallmark?” Cullie asked.
“If Hallmark existed in the seventeenth century,” Alisha said. “For who starts sentences with prepositions but the most pretentious.”
“Is it bad?” Bindu asked, trying to suppress the prickle of irritation.
She was not going to think about the parijat flowers from her garden or how she’d picked them for Oscar. It had been too many years since she’d smelled the intoxicating scent or thought about how he had looked at the fragile garland of the orange-stemmed white blooms as she held it out to him.
Leaning over, Bindu smelled the expanse of roses packed together to create an ombré effect, from a deep red to a pure white in an almost perfect fade. “It seemed sweet enough to me. Albeit a bit grandiose.”
“Grandiose is one way to put it,” Alisha said.
“Cheesy is another,” Cullie added.
They were in fine form today.
Bindu ached to join in their laughter, but she couldn’t seem to find her way there. “Maybe you two need to be a bit more generous.” She tried not to snap.
“Sorry,” Cullie said, looking anything but apologetic. “I didn’t realize the difference between a date who sends you two hundred roses and one who exposes you to biohazardous conditions was a matter of generosity.”
“I’m not asking you to be generous to Noseless Veterinarian.” In fact, if Bindu got her hands on the man, she was going to knee him in the gonads. “I can’t believe you went to his house with him,” Bindu said. Usually, she worried that Cullie trusted no one, but knowing whom to protect yourself from and whom to trust: that was the vital thing. A thing Bindu had learned a little too early in life. Or maybe too late.
Alisha and Cullie exchanged a look that said Bindu couldn’t possibly understand their plight. Why, because of some chocolates and roses?
“It’s easy for you to judge, Binji,” Cullie said. “You’ve never done anything stupid in your life.”
Bindu knew Cullie meant it as a compliment, but her words fell on Bindu like the slice of a knife. She turned to Alisha but found no understanding there either.
“This comes easy to you, Ma. Making friends, men, dating. It’s a good thing. We wish we could be like you.”
“Dating? Until six months ago, I’d never been on a date in my life!” They knew this.
“And yet look at the flowers littering this place,” Cullie said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be stuck in a humiliating situation, to not know how to get out of it.”
Bindu swallowed back the laugh that threatened to burst from her. If she didn’t swallow it back, she was going to cackle like someone who’d lost their hold on reality.
“Remember the man who packed up my leftovers, including my half-eaten bread, and took it home? After he’d made me pay for dinner,” Alisha went on. “And the one who spent the entire time filling me in over coffee on all the foods that gave him gas. I get scavengers and flatulents, and you get extravagant gifters and Hallmark poets.”
Bindu looked from one teasing face to the other. Her girls, who were her whole life, the two people in the world who knew her best, knew nothing about her.