Back to the apartment I’d dreaded going to since Alex moved out. It still hurt not to see his slightly crooked smile and dark-brown hair framing his pale skin when I came home after a twelve-hour day at the office. Even with Alex’s stuff gone, I could feel him there. There was a black smudge in the hallway from when we moved in his dresser and my end had slipped. And a hard patch on the rug in the living room from when he knocked over a beer while waving his hands at the television during a baseball game. That apartment was full of happy memories as much as my parents’ house was full of difficult ones.
The pain was even more acute because I had no one to blame but myself. Alex had asked me to go with him when he’d found out he had to move to New York for production of the independent film he had written. But I’d been too scared. Not of him or of us. But of the life he was proposing. Him working on his movie, me leaving my law firm job and pursuing photography. The bohemian-chic lifestyle he’d painted was romantic, and idealistic, and completely unstable.
I knew it wouldn’t work out the way he envisioned. My family had been crammed into a three-bedroom town house with three other families when we first immigrated to America when I was seven years old. My parents had struggled from paycheck to paycheck. There was nothing romantic about it. I knew it wasn’t smart for me to give up the security that came with my awful job without having a backup plan for after we burned through the money he’d been paid for the screenplay. My parents had taught me early in life that love wouldn’t pay the bills. And it wasn’t just my bills to worry about. Neel and I were our parents’ greatest investment. Their financial struggles had put Neel and me in a place where we no longer had to worry. And in our culture, the “we” had to be the four of us. Five, when he married Dipti, and soon to be six.
My fingers brushed over a tiny chip on the edge of a plate. The thin white Corelle dishes with the blue flower pattern along the edges were the first ones my parents had bought in America. Over the years, my brother and I had bought our parents new dinnerware sets. Even though the gifts were prominently displayed in the china cabinet my parents had purchased at a garage sale twenty years earlier, they were never used. My mother said the old dishes were perfectly good, so why “waste” the new ones? My parents lived cautiously, assuming financial instability was always around the corner. During my childhood, they’d often been right. But now that it no longer threatened our family, they still couldn’t let their apprehension go. It was as though the stress had become so much a part of them that it defined them.
I felt a tug on my ponytail.
Neel hoisted himself onto the counter, his long legs dangling almost to the floor. Like me, he was more legs than upper body. “Did we get some good loot?”
“A bunch of these.” I handed him the stack of checks I had collected from the cards Dipti had opened earlier. Each was for twenty-one, fifty-one, or one hundred and one dollars.
He glanced through them and smiled wryly. “I’m sure Mom and Dad would be appalled if they knew when we give money to our friends we give them”—he paused for effect—“even amounts.”
I laughed. We’d grown up hearing that gifts of money had to be in odd amounts. An even number meant bad luck. No one would dare take that risk. And people never dropped down a dollar. That would be cheap. But adding a dollar was generous. If I’d learned one thing from my mother, it was that perception was everything.
He placed the checks back on the counter. “The aunties try to marry you off to a nice Gujarati boy?”
“No. Turns out I lost my luster when I turned thirty.”
Neel laughed and then pretended to study my face. “I thought there was something different about you.”
I threw a towel at him. “I had to fly to Middle America to be at this party because you knocked up your wife. You can finish the dishes.”
“But dishes aren’t men’s work.” He imitated our mother’s nagging tone while he grabbed a dirty bowl. “Seriously, I’m glad you’re here. But I wish you were coming to India with us.”
“I can’t.” My gaze shifted to the pale-green linoleum floor. “It’s like being in a sea of brown people who all seem to be judging me for not being brown enough.”
Another voice said, “What does that mean? India is home.”
Neel and I spun around. It was just like our mother to sneak into the room and start eavesdropping. Her arms were laden with platters, but she somehow still moved as silently as a ninja. My expression was as sheepish as Neel’s, both of us hoping she hadn’t heard him making fun of her.