The Candid Life of Meena Dave(69)

She squeezed his hands. “I know. I like your framing. Tell me why you’re not nice.”

“It’s a long story.” Sam moved to the couch and sat down.

She sat next to him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I have to finish up work.”

He’d dropped everything for her; she wanted to be there for him. “Work can wait. You don’t hate puppies, you let the aunties roll through your life, you help anyone that asks, so what’s the deep dark secret? Are you building killer robots in the basement? Do you litter? Hate recycling?”

“Are you done?”

She leaned back. “Yes.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“I know how to build robots, you know,” Sam bragged. “MIT.”

“Ah, you like to mention where you went to college,” Meena said. “You’re awful.”

“My parents would agree with you.” Sam’s voice softened. “About the awful part.”

She couldn’t imagine anyone thinking, much less saying, that about Sam, much less his parents. “You told me you weren’t close to your family.”

“We talk once a year,” Sam said. “My parents call me every January. The first Saturday after the New Year. They ask me one question. I say no. That’s the end of the call. I won’t hear from them again until next year.”

Meena didn’t push. She knew silence was more powerful than a stream of questions—Sam had shown her that.

“They want me to give this apartment to my younger brother,” Sam said. “If I was a nice person, I would. He got married young, right out of college. They have three kids. My parents adore him. It’s not an assumption. The reason the aunties take care of me, that Neha befriended me, was to make up for the lack of interest my parents had in me.”

Meena’s heart hurt as she listened to his matter-of-fact tone.

“The entailment of the apartments in this building says that it goes to the eldest child. At the age of twenty-five. That’s when I moved back from LA. My parents, brother, and his family were living here. They didn’t want to leave. I forced the issue.” Sam met her eyes. “What kind of man does that?”

“You kicked them out?”

“I told my parents they could stay, live with me,” Sam said. “But my brother and his family should find their own place, start their own home. They fought me. Wanted to take me to court. Lucky for me, Sabina does not mess around when it comes to preserving the ways of the Engineer’s House. She told my parents that the homeowners’ agreement was clear, and every time the apartments change hands, the heir must sign their willingness to uphold the rules of the entailment. She showed my mother her signature.”

“Way to go, Sabina.”

Sam shook his head. “I took this place knowing my parents wanted it for my younger brother. I took it early, did not wait for the norm of moving in when I had a family of my own. I live with that. I knew it would mean I would lose my family, but this was more important. I traded a family for an apartment. That’s the kind of man I am.”

“Why?” Meena asked.

He turned his head to look at her. “Does it matter?”

“Intent and motive say more about a person than their action.”

“Did a psychologist tell you that?”

“A prince who owned a Grand Prix race car. He liked power, said he needed it to protect his people. He led to keep them content. As I talked to him, I learned that his intentions were different. He liked to dominate, he liked that his people were afraid of him. Did you want this apartment as payback for your parents loving your younger brother more?”

Sam laughed. “Hell no. They are who they are, and I liked living three thousand miles from them, still do.” He rubbed the top of her hand with his knuckles. “I grew up knowing this apartment was going to be mine. Not through my parents but my grandfather. He told me stories of his father, how this place came to be theirs. You know the cliché home is where the heart is? This was home to me, just as it was to my great-grandfather. He came to this country, by boat, in 1930, to study in a place where he probably wasn’t welcome, even with his money. I was teased for smelling like curry when I was young; I can’t imagine what my grandfather put up with.

“But he had this place, and other people like him. They all made it into a home where they belonged. In this house they were just men who came to get an education so they could go back and rebuild their own country after the British pillaged and divided it. I’m a part of something bigger when I live here.”

“It fits you. This place.”

He smiled. “It’s my home. Even though it came at a cost.”

“My father used to say hurt begets hurt,” Meena said. “Your parents played a part in this by not stepping out of the way, by making you fight for a place that was rightfully yours.”

“I didn’t earn it.”

“You can say the same about me. About the aunties, anyone who lived here after they did.”

“Using logic against me?”

Meena squeezed his hand. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“You’re only saying that because you want me to go out with you.”

She shrugged. “You already said yes.”