Big Summer(99)

“Mr. Acharya? I’m Darshini Shah,” I heard Darshi say. “This is Nick Carvalho, and this is Daphne Berg. We’re friends of Drue’s.”

“Of course.” Up close, I could see that his eyes were red-rimmed behind his glasses, and that he was twisting a dish towel in his hands, like he didn’t know what else to do with them and he had to hold on to something. His gaze traveled from me to Nick to Darshi, and he seemed to relax a little as he took her in. “Please, come inside.”

In his living room, he had a battered-looking leather couch, armchairs that didn’t match (one of them, I saw, had been patched with duct tape), a Persian rug of startling beauty, a desk piled high with textbooks, with a blue Medicine Buddha statue on a shelf above it. “Please, please,” he said, ushering us inside. I saw, on his wrist, the cheap-looking gold watch that I recognized from the pictures, and a gaudy class ring was on his right hand. He was a fashion disaster, the kind of guy Drue would have laughed at back at Lathrop, and his expression, his slumped shoulders and mournful eyes, said that he knew it; that he was not unfamiliar with being the object of mockery.

“I recognized you from the video,” he told me as we settled into a living room that featured a chipped wicker table and a sagging tweed couch.

“The video?”

“From the bar. With the man.”

“Ah.”

“Drue must have played it for me a dozen times. She showed me all of your Instagram posts. She was so proud of you. She said, ‘That’s my friend!’?”

“Oh,” I said, as my heart shuddered and my eyes filled. “I didn’t know that.”

“She would tell me, ‘I could never be that brave.’ She admired you a great deal.” Clasping his hands in front of him, he said, “I’m sorry that I ran from you. But I wasn’t invited. Not to the party, or to the service. It was… complicated.” He bent his head and said, very quietly, “But I wanted to be there. For Drue.”

Nick handed me a Kleenex that he’d gotten somewhere. When Aditya went to make tea, I looked around, at the cheap furniture, the profusion of plants in clay pots in the single south-facing window, a framed picture of Lord Shiva on the wall, and on a side table, a copper statue of Ganesh with his elephant head and a mouse at his feet. The mantel over the bricked-up fireplace held a single framed photograph, a picture of Drue and Aditya at Fenway Park. They were both wearing red Boston Red Sox caps and grinning from seats way up in the bleachers.

“Ah,” said Aditya, returning to the room and following my gaze.

“She looks so happy.”

“It was a wonderful day.” He handed out mugs and put a plate of Parle-G biscuits, the same kind that Darshi’s mother sometimes served, on the coffee table. I took a sip as he sat down in a battered armchair, laced his hands across his belly, and sighed. I knew that I was staring, but I couldn’t make myself stop. Part of it was how much he looked like my father, and part of it was how I could not picture Drue, glamorous, gorgeous, rich, beautiful Drue, with a guy like this. Had Drue climbed those stairs beneath the ceiling’s peeling paint, and breathed that musty, cabbage-y smell? Had she sat on this couch; had she slept on the futon that I bet myself was in Aditya’s bedroom, and cooked with him in the galley-style kitchen, and watched movies with him on this tiny old TV?

“You are wondering what she saw in me.” Aditya’s tone was good-humored, but his eyes were sad. Darshi started to say something, then stopped as Aditya shook his head. “No, don’t apologize. I wondered, too. Every day we were together, I felt the same way. Like it couldn’t be real.”

“How’d you two meet?” asked Darshi.

“Drue was volunteering two nights a week at a high school in Boston. She was helping the kids write their college essays, fill out their applications, prepare for their tests. That sort of thing.”

“Wait. What?”

Aditya nodded. It made my heart ache a little, seeing the pride on his face. “She would joke about it. She’d say that if anyone in her high school could have seen her, they would have thought she’d joined a cult. It was important to her, she told me, to give back, and do some good.”

Before I could ask what he meant by that, and what Drue was making amends for, he said, “I noticed her right away. Drue was impossible not to notice. She was lovely, and intelligent. One of the women who ran the program told me her last name and who her father was. We were all told to treat her nicely, because the business had a charitable arm, and maybe they’d give us a grant. I would have never approached her. I would have been content to just see her those two nights a week.”

“So what happened?”

“Drue asked you out,” said Nick.

Aditya nodded, smiling a little at whatever he was remembering. “We both stayed late to clean up one night, to return the desks and chairs to where they’d been, and she asked if I’d go with her to the Isabella Gardner Museum. It was May.” His eyes went soft. “A lovely afternoon. In the garden, there were lilacs and honeysuckle. We sat on a bench, beside a statue of a satyr, and we talked. I had no idea it was a date, of course. I thought she wanted advice, or a reference for a graduate school application. It was the only thing I could think of. I couldn’t imagine that someone like Drue was interested in someone like me, and when it became clear that she was…” He cleared his throat. “…interested, I assumed that she had to want something.” He smiled, a terribly sad smile. “She told me that she liked me. She liked how I was interested in her mind, not her money or her status. She said that I reminded her of someone she’d known when she was younger.”