To help her understand, and maybe even to convince myself, I said, “Even if I wanted to come back now, I couldn’t. With everything that has happened with Neel and Dipti, I need to be here.” After a long pause, I said, “With my family. And Jared made clear that staying any longer wasn’t an option.”
Saying the words aloud, putting my family before my job, was new ground for me. In some ways, Carrie was right that I should go back to the life I knew. Even if I started prioritizing my family above my job, there was no guarantee that they were ready to accept that from me. People fell into patterns, and they had gotten used to limited contact with me as much as I had with them.
She sighed. “It’s probably good for you to sort out whatever you need to with your family. Just remember you have family here too.”
Her words made me smile. Carrie was my family in the way I’d often wished my parents had been. Open, honest, not afraid of disagreeing with my decisions, but still always supportive. Like she was doing right now. Both of us knew that regardless of those choices, we were still there for each other.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back right after the wedding. Job hunting, so I don’t burn through all of my savings!” I sipped from the cold bottle of Limca I had brought up with me before the call.
“Okay. I’ll talk some sense into you then.” She glanced down at her watch. “Crap. I have a conference call starting. I’ll tell Jared you’ve been going through hell and need some space to sort things out . . . temporary insanity, or whatever. Just in case you change your mind.”
I managed a small laugh. “Thanks. But I think it’s done.”
The conversation ended on a more lighthearted note than it had begun, but I couldn’t stop my thoughts from wandering to the last weekend my parents had visited LA. They had come seven months ago to meet Alex for the first time. And I hadn’t known that the weekend would be the beginning of the end for my relationship with Alex and my parents.
I didn’t realize my mother was standing in the doorway to my bedroom at Lakshmi until she moved her arm and the jingling of her bangles caught my attention.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I’m not sure if it was the stress of the past few days or the jet lag, but I answered her honestly, something I rarely did because it wasn’t worth the fight. Today, I didn’t care.
“I was just thinking about how hurt I was when you left my apartment in LA.”
Her jaw set into a hard line. “Not this again.”
“What do you mean, ‘again’？” I said. “We never talked through this. You stormed off, and it was done.”
My mother stared back at me. “You made your decision. You knew how we felt. What was there to talk about?”
I threw my hands up. “Everything! Normal families don’t act that way.”
“Who exactly do you think is this ‘normal’ family?”
We both knew that by normal I meant American families. White families. Families like Carrie’s. Families that wore shoes in the house, ate turkey and gravy on Thanksgiving, always had dessert after a meal, had pets, and had parents who kissed each other in front of their children. Since we had arrived in America, I had been pushing my family to be more American so that we could fit in, and my parents had pushed back just as hard, always saying that we didn’t want to be like American families.
I cast my eyes downward. “I’m just saying this, what we are doing, can’t be normal.”
She shook her head. “It’s not always about what you think, Preeti.”
“No shit. I—”
“Watch your language!” Her eyes grew wide. “I didn’t raise you to speak that way to your mother.”
This was not an argument worth having, so I started again. “Mom, when you and Dad stormed out of my apartment, I stared at that closed door for over an hour, hoping you would come back and we could talk things through.”
She sighed. “You know how our culture feels about damaged girls. You weren’t even trying to hide it to protect yourself! Living with that boy before marriage and for the entire world to see. The only people you kept it from were me and your father, taking us for fools.”
“I didn’t tell you because I know you feel that way. But I don’t. There’s nothing wrong with what Alex and I were doing. I thought if you could see we were happy together, you could understand that sometimes the right people can find each other even if the biodatas don’t match.”