“Oh.” Tanvi’s eyes welled up.
“What am I?” Uma jabbed her thumb into her chest. “Chopped liver?”
“She’s the nicest one.” Meena shrugged.
“I really am.”
“So what does all of this mean? With Sabina. I don’t want you to stop being friends,” Meena said. “I also want to join in, be a part of the events here. I might even attend another post-Thanksgiving day of fun.”
“You do know that we’re all family,” Uma explained. “In our culture there is no cousin; we don’t even have a word for it in Gujarati. It’s brother, sister, niece, nephew. That’s how it is in the building. Sabina is our sister. We’re angry, but we will work it out.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“We have a process for this,” Uma said. “If one of us does wrong, they get put in friendship jail. The time is arbitrary, based on the offense. Sabina is going to be in there for a long time.”
“What about you?” Tanvi asked. “How are you and Sabina?”
Meena shrugged. “She doesn’t want me here, and I’m not going anywhere. Which is fine. Honestly, I had the best mom I could have asked for. I don’t want or need another one.”
“But you need your aunties, right?” Tanvi asked.
“Now that I have them, I don’t know how I managed before.”
Tanvi and Uma laughed, and Meena joined in. This was enough. More than. With Sam across the hall and these two in her life, she had built herself a home.
EPILOGUE
From her bedroom veranda, Meena looked down at the lush garden. The heat of June bore down on them, but the aunties were not deterred as they tended to the trees, plants, and flowers.
“I don’t understand why this is growing here.” Sabina pulled up a weed from the grass near the footpath.
It was from the wildflower patch Meena had planted. It seemed the seeds had been carried, either by birds or wind, and spread throughout the grass. And some of what she’d planted was invasive and beginning to take over a chunk of the backyard. Meena felt slightly guilty. But only slightly.
“It’s from my wildflower bed,” Meena called down.
“You need to replant it where it belongs,” Sabina ordered.
Meena nodded. The two of them weren’t friendly, but they were getting to be more civil. The other aunties and Sam were good buffers.
“I think it looks nice like this,” Tanvi observed. “Like little accents on the lawn, a little purple here, some yellow there.”
Meena took the steps down. “What if we turn the whole thing into a wild garden?”
“No,” Uma and Sabina said in unison.
“Yes,” Tanvi said at the same time.
“I vote yes too.” Sam, Wally, and Huck came down from his apartment.
“No digging.” Sabina knelt and grabbed Huck by the face, scratched behind his ears.
Where Sabina refused to show even an impersonal fondness for Meena, she had the opposite relationship with Huck. Whenever Meena’s dog wasn’t with Wally, he would run up the steps to find Sabina. Meena suspected that Sabina kept a jar of treats for him, but she never asked.
Satisfied with getting love from everyone, Huck ran to her and leaned against her leg. She reached down and gave him a few pats. She breathed in the summer air laced with honeysuckle and roses. It was a scent she would forever know as the scent of home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful and blessed to be surrounded by so much love and support. It hasn’t been easy to get here, and I wouldn’t have kept going without all who helped in small and large ways.