Homeland Elegies(70)
“It’s okay, Asha.”
“No it’s not.”
“This stuff happens. It’s okay. I got the shot. I’ll be fine. Did you get one, too?”
“Why are you being so understanding?” she asked sharply. “I mean, if you’d given me something, I’d be pissed.”
“I just think it’s okay. I don’t think you should beat yourself up about it.” I heard myself say the words and knew they weren’t exactly true. I was trying to make the best impression.
“Well, I am sorry.”
“I appreciate that, but I’m just saying—”
“No, I mean about us. I’m sorry about what happened between us.” I felt my pulse quicken with an abrupt, unreasonable joy. “I was using you. To get back at him. And I got you sick. And he got Maryanne sick.”
“Maryanne?”
“My tenant downstairs. With the beagle. He’s a fucking son of a bitch. My mother’s right. He’s never going to understand what he has. He treats me like shit, and I keep going back for more. He treats me like shit. He treats my parents like shit. He fucks my friends. I mean, even Tucker hates him. And that’s saying a lot. There’s something wrong with me.”
“Tucker hates him?”
“Can’t stand him. Barks at him whenever he’s around. Always has. Won’t go near him. I always thought it’s because he’s so tall.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Maybe it’s not.”
There was a silence. I wasn’t sure what to say. It hadn’t been a surprise to hear her say she’d been using me, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.
“You in Milwaukee?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“How’s your mom?”
“Hospice nurse seems to think she’s got at least three weeks left. She’s sedated most of the time, so…”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m just glad they’ve finally got her on a morphine drip.”
“I’ll say a prayer for her,” she said. I didn’t respond. I heard her breathing on the other end, and then: “I should go. I’m sorry I got you involved in all this. I really am. I wish you only the best.”
“Funny. That’s what you said to me last time we talked.”
“I meant it then, too.”
“Mmm-hmm—well, anyway. I still love you. I know you don’t want to hear it, but I do. And probably always will.”
“I don’t think it’s me you love. I think it’s some idea you have—”
“Idea?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of idea?”
“I don’t know. I’m not you.”
“But you must have thought about it. If that’s what you felt, right?”
“I don’t know, that, like, I was a solution or something…”
“A solution?”
“Please don’t yell.”
“Are you kidding me? This is nowhere close to yelling.”
“I should go.”
“So go, Asha. Just fucking go,” I snapped. She didn’t hang up just yet, but my outburst poisoned that final silence between us. This wasn’t how I wanted us to end. But I didn’t say anything. She murmured goodbye, and the line went dead.
*
Three months after that call, once my mother was dead and buried, I saw photos on Facebook Asha posted from an engagement party in Pakistan: her own. Done up in a gorgeous gold-and-azalea-pink shalwar kameez and dupatta, her eyes rimmed with blue kohl, her hands and wrists covered with interlacing floral mehndi, she beamed alongside her glowing parents amid the delighted throngs I assumed were her various relatives, present and future. One picture showed her on a white couch, a Pakistani man in his early thirties kneeling before her, slipping a ring onto her finger. He was broad, with an imposing aquiline profile that gave him an air of potency only partly mitigated by his Coke-bottle glasses. The groom was tagged in all the posts as Rifaat Chaudury, but all I could gather from the attenuated public profile on offer was that he’d gone to the same medical school in Lahore where my parents met. My subsequent Google searches yielded pages of Rifaat Chaudurys in East Punjab—there were literally hundreds—more than a few of them doctors. Nothing more about the Rifaat in question, which meant nary a clue about how they might have met beyond Asha’s tersely captioned photos. I’d been seeing something among my various younger cousins here and abroad: dating sites like Shaadi and Ideal Rishta, where the proposals often came within weeks of first contact—a twenty-first-century version of the traditional Pakistani arranged marriage. My best guess was that Asha’s imminent nuptials were similarly self-concluded, though I would never know for certain.
In the months that followed, I would pull up her Facebook profile and scroll through the dozens of uploaded photos of her life back home in Houston after the betrothal. She was wearing that ring in every one, smiling against backdrops I knew: the park around the corner from her place, where we’d once walked Tucker together; the sushi place she loved in Montrose; even a snapshot of her hair-removal specialist at the Brazilian spa holding her ring finger, mouth agape with campy awe. Later, I would find photos of her husband-to-be’s first visit to Houston; the family trip to the Galleria and the Menil Collection; another set showing her father deep in conversation with his future son-in-law as both huddled over bowls of what looked like ramen. The album was captioned: “Our men.”