The Vibrant Years(17)
Bindu had apologized. This has nothing to do with our fight. And promised to stay connected. Nothing will change; I’m moving less than a mile away.
Aly had finally sold the house that had turned into a bleak mausoleum to her marriage and moved into a smaller place, but she still didn’t understand Bindu’s decision.
If it was just the fact that the money had suddenly and mysteriously become available, then did that mean that Bindu had been waiting to move out all these years?
Asking meant risking what they had. And even if it wasn’t what it had once been, it was still something Aly couldn’t imagine life without.
“You could have continued to live at home with me,” Aly said. “What’s the point of trying so hard to get thrown out of Shady Palms now?”
If she’d meant to leave all along, Bindu could easily have joined Ashish in Mumbai, where he’d upped and moved to after he left Aly. Even more baffling was the fact that Bindu seemed to love that blasted community, even though she hated the coven that ran it. If anyone in the world had the ability to endear herself to people, it was Bindu. Why stop at these women whom she was obviously trying to emulate?
“You needed to move on with your life. A mother-in-law in the house couldn’t possibly bode well for that.” Bindu never added the prefix ex to their relationship.
She wasn’t entirely wrong. Aly was starting to love the simplicity of her life. The ability to do whatever the heck she wanted whenever the heck she wanted was only a small part of it. Until Ashish left, Aly hadn’t realized quite how much work marriage was. Actually, during her marriage she’d sometimes grasped it in flashes and fought to grapple with it, but she’d never considered that she had a choice.
Unlike her ex-husband. Obviously, it had always been a choice for Ashish. Because the moment things hadn’t gone his way, he’d neatly exited the scene.
Bindu pursed her Gina Lollobrigida lips, stained an elegant yet risqué shade of ripe raspberries. “You’re forty-seven, Alisha. Your life is just starting. The earlier you stop worrying about other people’s opinions, the better.”
Bindu was not usually the lecturing type. That job belonged to Karen Menezes, who could never let a teaching moment pass by without squeezing it for everything it was worth. Bindu had never been a conventional mother-in-law, but she’d only ever lived on the precarious line between living life her way and conforming, never pushing all the way into one side or the other. Until now. Now she was pushing against conformity with all the force of true regret.
Which meant she believed she had suddenly earned the right to dispense this particular life advice as though she’d always embodied it.
Not that this was a conversation for a quick lunch on a workday. “This isn’t about me, Ma. I’m not asking you to be what the HOA wants you to be. But you insist you love living at Shady Palms. You love your Sunny Widows. So can you please stop annoying the Grumpy Wives for sport?”
With another scoff Bindu picked up the chocolate mints the waiter had left them, four instead of the usual two, and popped a couple in her mouth at once.
“I’m not your child, Alisha, so I owe you no explanations, but you know I don’t sleep with married men. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to have fun.” She held out one of the remaining chocolates to Aly, but Aly had already exhausted her calorie quota for today, so she waved the offering away.
“You know that I would never create any real trouble. But if you are going to be swayed by that coven and try to get in the way of me enjoying what’s left of my youth, then I must ask you to stop.” With a shrug Bindu popped the spurned chocolate into her mouth and closed her eyes as she soaked up the taste, making Aly’s mouth water. Then, with a smug smile, she fed the last remaining piece into Aly’s mouth and stood. “It’s time you took a page out of my book. You’re not going to look like this for too much longer. I know I make it look easy, but gravity is not forgiving, beta.”
A smile broke across Aly’s face. “You do make it look easy.” Rising, she followed Bindu past a throng of tourists to her car. The happiness of the chocolate on her tongue warred with the failure to stick with her calorie count. This was such a perfect metaphor for how she felt about her mother-in-law that it made her laugh. “Also, I’m a bit terrified of what you think causing real trouble might mean.”
Bindu threw her perfectly highlighted head back and gave a throaty laugh, making every man within a twenty-foot radius turn toward them. “You don’t want to know. Shady Palms is filled with opportunity.”
Her mother-in-law was right. She didn’t want to know. What she did know when she got back to the station was that she was smiling for the first time that day, and she felt oddly filled with hope as she got ready to tell her boss that she’d thought about letting Jess do the interview and she’d decided against it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BINDU
I knew she would be the death of me. I knew it the first time I met her. That she’d end me, burn down everything I believed about myself before I met her, before she showed me my soul and then took it.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
I bought you penis,” Richard said when Bindu opened the door for him.
Her shock must’ve shown on her face, because he cleared his throat and held out a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers, each bloom a profusion of petals coalescing to form almost perfect globes.