What to Say Next(9)
“I can see how that would be confusing,” I say, and find myself smiling.
“I’ve considered whether some of the guys find it homoerotic, but most of them have girlfriends, so probably not.”
I laugh.
“I’m only half joking,” he says. He looks at me and then his eyes dart away again. “We can stop talking if you want. I assume you left class to get away from all that noise, though my assumptions usually have only a thirty percent accuracy rate.”
“I did, actually,” I say. I can see the grocery store parking lot from up here, where my dad taught me to drive not so long ago. We went there at odd hours on weekends and even some weeknights for the three months leading up to my birthday. He was patient with me, a good teacher, only getting annoyed in the beginning, when I got confused between the gas and the brake. I passed my test on the first try, and my parents and I celebrated with sparkling apple cider in fancy champagne glasses. My dad toasted to “all the roads Kit has yet to travel.” He took a picture of me holding up my license, and then he teared up a little, because he said he was already starting to imagine what it was going to be like when I left for college, how his life would have a Kit-shaped hole.
My dad was supposed to miss me, not the other way around. That’s how things were supposed to go.
I don’t want to think about that.
After a while, quiet settles between David and me, and surprisingly it’s not awkward at all. It’s actually kind of nice to sit up here, away from school and the shitstorm that awaits at home, away from the terrifying concept of one whole month. It’s nice to sit with someone and not have to think about what to say next.
—
I don’t go back to class. Instead I go home and spend my time lying on the couch and watching Netflix. Though I’ve been here for hours, I did not study for tomorrow’s physics quiz. I did not read fifty pages of Heart of Darkness and think about its thematic relevance to my own life (though that should have been an easy one) or start that essay for world history on migration. I also didn’t write that article about the debate team for the school newspaper even though the deadline is tomorrow by three. We’ll probably have to run a picture in its place. Clearly this is not the way to make editor in chief, which has been my goal for the past three years, but I can’t seem to motivate.
“Egg rolls, scallion pancakes, General Tso’s. All the bad stuff,” my mom says, dropping a bulging bag of Chinese food onto the counter. She kicks off her shoes. “Does grief make your feet swell? Because these things are freaking killing me.”
“I don’t know.” I get up and set the table for two, not the usual three. I need to stop noticing details like this.
“How was your day? As bad as you expected?” My mom kisses me on my head and then decides I need a hug too.
“Not really. I mean, it wasn’t good.” I don’t tell her I skipped class. No need to freak her out. “But you were right. I needed to go. Yours?”
“I kicked ass, took names, even landed a new account. Not bad for a Monday.”
“That’s cool,” I say, and we toast with our glasses.
“I need to up my game on the financial front.” Wrinkles I haven’t noticed before bracket her mouth. She shouldn’t have to up her game. She already works too hard as it is. Bangs on her laptop after dinner and dashes off emails late into the night. When I was younger and brattier, I used to complain that she loved her work more than she loved me. Now that I’m older, I realize that’s not true. My mother is just one of those people you miss, even when she’s sitting right in front of you.
“I didn’t think about the money thing,” I say, and my stomach cramps with guilt. Soon there will be my college tuition, and what about when I leave? My mom will come home every day to this big empty house. A team of three knocked down to two, and then, finally, just one. Will she sell this place? I hope not.
“Don’t worry. No one’s going to starve. But you know what’s really stressing me out? How do I know when to change the oil in the car? Or what the name of our home insurance company is? And all our online passwords. I don’t have any of them,” my mom says. “Your name? Birthday? I feel completely in over my head. Work I can handle. It’s the rest—it’s real life—that’s the problem.”
I think about how my mom doesn’t really have lots of people around to help other than me. My grandparents retired and moved back to Delhi like a million years ago. She and her parents have this complicated relationship anyway. When my mom was a kid, her parents did everything they could to make sure she assimilated into American culture—paid for her to go to a fancy-pants, mostly white private school they could barely afford, even packed PB&J in her lunch box because the other kids used to tease her that her Indian food was too stinky. The way she tells it, they raised her as an American and then were surprised and resentful when she didn’t turn out to share their old-school values. I’m pretty sure “old-school values” in this case actually means “not cool with the fact she fell in love and married a white dude,” because otherwise, she’s totally on board with the rest of their beliefs—well, except for the fact that she’s a straight-up, unapologetic carnivore and gets her hair cut and colored every six weeks. Still, we go to gurdwara in Glen Rock one Sunday a month, and my dad used to come with us sometimes, though less for a religious awakening and more for the homemade Indian food, which admittedly, now that I’m old enough to have a choice in the matter, is why I go too. At my grandmother’s request, my mom keeps in touch with all the relatives, even though they are in Delhi and Vancouver and London and distantly related and kind of a pain in the ass. And though I’m not quite fluent, my mom has taught me enough Punjabi that I can get by. My mother may be American-born, but she’s never forgotten we’re Indian too.