What to Say Next(10)

Everyone pretends things are okay with my impossible-to-please grandparents—we go to visit them in Delhi every other year, though my dad always stayed behind because “he had to work.” We pretended this was true and that it had nothing to do with the fact that my grandparents didn’t approve of him. Whenever my mom talks to Bibiji on the phone, she always puts on a voice I associate with her work, the advertising-executive voice. My mom’s conversations with her parents have mostly consisted of a recitation of our small accomplishments—my grades, my mom’s landing an account, my dad getting a local business award—as if these things are part of some campaign pitch that she made the right choices. And whenever I wear a lengha or a salwar kameez for some second cousin twice removed’s birthday party, which requires three hours in the car to the middle of Pennsylvania, my mother makes sure to take a picture and email it to Bibiji immediately. See, she seems to want to say, nothing’s been lost here. I’m passing it all along.

Here’s the sad and horrifying part: The second I put on my Indian clothes, an alert goes out to her parents, yet when my dad died my mom didn’t even call them until the day after the funeral. My mother explained to me that she knew they were traveling to a wedding that weekend and couldn’t get back to the United States in time, so there was no point messing up their plans. Honestly I think my mom didn’t want to know if they would come to pay their respects.

Of course I like to believe they would have. They may not have approved of my mom marrying my dad, but they’re not monsters. They’re just backwards. And, okay, a little bit racist. Oddly enough, though they may not like the fact that I’m half white, they always compliment me on the color of my skin. So fair, Bibiji always says, like that’s a wonderful, important thing, the fact that I’m a couple of shades lighter than my mother. And I can see you enjoy your food.

“I’ll help you figure it all out,” I say to my mother. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, honey, don’t say that. It’s going to be fine. You have nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I make myself busy dishing out the food, spoon out huge piles onto our plates. There are people who don’t eat when they are sad, who lose their appetite and get crazy skinny. My mom and I are not those people.

“I love you, Mommy,” I say. As soon as the words are out, I feel bad again, because it makes her eyes fill. I want her to know that I realize just how lucky I got in the mother department. That if I had to pick anyone in the whole world to go through this with, to have as a mom, it would be her. Only her. This is partially grief talking. Before all this, my mom often annoyed the crap out of me. She’s master of the subtle criticism disguised as a suggestion: Why don’t you straighten your hair? Don’t you think your nails would look so much better if you didn’t bite them? That shirt is a little frumpy, no? Now, though, I feel stupid for caring about that sort of thing. She could die tomorrow. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“No. Good crying, I promise,” she says, blotting under her eyes with a paper towel. It doesn’t look like good crying. She looks on the verge of unraveling into a mess of tears and snot. Nothing like the woman she must have been at work today: fierce and tucked-in and totally under control. “I’m just so grateful that I have you, Kit.”

I know she doesn’t mean for her words to sting, but they do.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I promise, and hold up my finger for a pinky swear.

“A whole month without him,” she says, ignoring my outstretched finger. “How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“Kit?” I wait for her to finally say it, to just go ahead and mention the accident outright, and then maybe murmur a few empty words that are supposed to be comforting. I brace myself to talk about all the things she’s refused to talk about until now. “You have a little scallion in your teeth.”





She sits at my table again. I didn’t expect her to. Told myself it didn’t matter. That I’ve sat alone 622 times, and that I like my ritual—the way I wait for Disher, the lunch lady, to be the one to serve me because she always wears gloves and, on good days, a hairnet; the way I spread my food out in front of me in the order I want to eat it, one bite from each plate, small to large and back again; the way I switch my music over the second I sit down, from Mozart, which is best for hall navigation, to the Beatles, which is social in the way the midday meal should be. That it would be okay too if we didn’t ever talk again. I have two new Notable Encounters to add to my notebook now, one in which I made Kit Lowell laugh.

Out loud.

She even threw back her head.

“This okay?” she asks, though she’s already sitting down. She doesn’t wait for my answer and instead reaches into her backpack and takes out an elaborate assortment of what appears to be leftover Chinese food. Probably from Szechuan Gardens, which is both the number-one Yelp-rated Chinese restaurant in Mapleview and also the only Chinese restaurant in Mapleview. I’m particularly fond of their hot and sour soup.

“You are always most welcome.” From the look Kit gives me, I surmise this must be a weird thing to say. Usually the truth is. I can’t think of many people I would actually welcome to my table—maybe José, who wears bifocals, or Stephanie L., whom I’ve never heard speak out loud. On second thought, maybe not. José would ask me to join the Academic League, which has happened twenty-six times in the past three years. Stephanie L., though on the plus side decidedly nonverbal, looks like someone who would be a loud chewer. I have misophonia and would prefer not to be enraged by her rabid mastication.