One Good Friend Deserves Another

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “I know. That’s the point.” Sometimes trying to get Kelly to pick up on social cues was like trying to explain intellectual property law to a thirteen-year-old hacker. “I mean, he’s a computer genius too. That raises the chances that he’ll have a collection of Lego action figures like yours, you know what I’m saying?”

  “He’s a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m a fan of the original series.” She stared at Marta, waiting for her to make some connection. “Oil…water?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Hey, in the geek world, this stuff matters.”

  “C’mon, Kelly. Take Lee up on that invitation. For me, okay? Believe me, you never know what can happen over coffee.”

  It was over a cup of sweet, foamy café Cubano that Marta had first met Carlos. He’d been serving it to her, all six-foot-three-inches of him, while she was dining with clients at a chic little restaurant in the Village. The look he gave her with those black eyes was hotter than the sweet espresso. Her thighs had reacted instantly, going quivery and warm—oh, she’d been working so hard, and it had been so very long since she’d had a sweaty bout of sex—but she’d promised the girls and swore to herself to guard her heart carefully and never to get involved in meaningless and unhealthy hookups with baristas, waiters, and struggling actors.

  And anything with Carlos would have been meaningless, because she’d already passed the point in her Life Plan—first written when she was nine years old—when it was time to find an appropriate husband. For a law associate on her last chance for partnership in a white-shoe law firm, waiters were definitely not husband material.

  It was a week later, when Carlos served her another café Cubano—this time buck naked among the sweaty sheets of her king-size bed—when he boasted he was about to quit waiting tables at Cuba Libre to open a restaurant of his own. Wrapped in satin sheets, Marta had felt a moment of triumphant relief. Now she didn’t have to put on the mantilla and slink off to confess to the girls that she’d sheepishly slept with a hot waiter. She could tell them she’d started a relationship with an entrepreneur.

  “So?” Marta prompted, digging an elbow into Kelly’s arm. “Are you going to take Lee up on the coffee date or what?”

  “No promises, Marta.” Kelly gazed at the Manhattan skyline as the cab rumbled over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. “He’s just…Lee Zhao. There’s nothing there.”

  “Sometimes with guys, it’s a slow burn, you know what I’m saying? You never know, really, until you give them a try.”

  Kelly turned sullen eyes upon her. “Is that what it is for you and Carlos? You guys have been living together for what—a year and a half?”

  “Sixteen months,” she corrected. “Why? You going all Catholic on me?”

  Instantly, an image rose in Marta’s mind of her grandmother grasping the large gold medallion of the Sagrado Corazón, praying loudly to a legion of saints for intercession in the matter of her thirty-seven-year-old unmarried granddaughter, living in sin in Manhattan.

  “Marta, don’t you think something should have happened by now? Like meeting his mother in Miami?”

  Marta stifled the urge to swear in Spanish. She was tired of having to explain that she worked at least sixty-five-hour weeks at Sachs, Offsyn & Reed. Her ambitious, sexy, entrepreneur boyfriend also spent seventy-hour weeks at his restaurant. By living together, they had a chance to see each other for a few hours before they both fell, exhausted, into bed. A trip to Miami to meet Carlos’s family? Not so easy to arrange around the time bombs of her corporate calendar and Carlos’s need to be on-site, all the time.

  And as of two weeks ago, all those long hours had finally paid off. She and the girls had celebrated with mojitos in Carlos’s trendy new restaurant, Café Havana. She was the granddaughter of Puerto Rican immigrants only a step out of the barrio—and now she was also a junior partner.

  Junior partner!

  Partner!

  Sometimes, when she was in her office at night, breathing in the scent of paper and ink and Pine-Sol as the janitor cleaned the floors, she would listen to the thrumming hum of her laptop and the high-pitched whine of the fluorescent lights and just gaze out her tenth-floor window. She’d sit there taking in the long canyon view of Midtown—so very, very far from Washington Heights—and she’d feel such a thundering rush of glee that she’d leap up out of her chair and do a Sacred Heart basketball team victory dance all around the empty office.

  “Marta, what are you grinning about?”

  “It’s your fault.” Marta glanced at Kelly, knowing her face was hopelessly bright. “Now you’ve got me thinking about Carlos.”

  Carlos, whose sweet patience with her crazy schedule she would reward in abundance tonight. For now that she’d made partner—mission accomplished—she could turn her full attention to the next goal in her Life Plan.

  Marriage.

  After seeing Kelly off, Marta directed the cab driver to go back across town to her Tudor City condo. She checked her phone but saw no message from him yet. Sometimes it took him hours to text her because he was so crazed in the kitchen. He was usually home by eleven on Sunday evenings, and it was barely seven thirty, which would give her time to prepare for his arrival. A leopard-print thong, she mused, and five-inch red stilettos. He always liked her to keep those on.

  Once inside her apartment, she reflexively flipped the switch just inside the door, but the light didn’t go on. She frowned up at the fixture, remembering that she’d asked Carlos to fix it.

  Then she heard his laugh.

  She glanced down the narrow hallway and saw the blue light spilling into the hall from the bedroom door, partially ajar. His wallet and keys lay on the hall table, and his cell phone blinked with notice of her text message. He must have come home early to do some work on his computer, she thought. She hoped nothing had gone wrong at the restaurant.

  She went a little weak behind the knees. He was home already. They had a whole Sunday night—hours and hours of time. It seemed like months since they’d shared anything more than a quickie. With a growing sense of mischief, she shrugged off her suit jacket and laid it on the floor to muffle the sound of her purse as she set it on top. Flicking at the buttons of her crisp tailored blouse, she tiptoed down the hallway.

  Then she heard a voice.

  Marta froze. Her instincts bristled to high alert. All kinds of scenarios flooded her mind. She heard the voice again and realized that it sounded tinny, distorted, like it was coming through a speaker. Her relief was swift, but tinged with yet another suspicion. Carlos was video chatting. With a woman.

  A cold, prickling sensation flooded her. Marta muffled her footsteps as she drew near enough to see him through the crack in the door. He was sitting at the desk with his back toward her. His laptop lay open. On the screen bobbed the image of a young girl, chattering in Cuban-tinged Spanish. Then the girl opened her mouth to display a missing front tooth.

  The relief whistled out of her. She really was a distrustful little jerk. Here was poor Carlos, catching a moment to chat with his nieces and nephews in Miami, while she snuck around suspecting he was masturbating to the sight of that busty, twenty-two-year-old Staten Island waitress he’d recently hired.

  Then a new face loomed into view. Marta pressed her palm hard against the doorframe. This was a young woman, with a shock of glossy black hair and the full, dewy skin of a girl not yet out of her twenties. The woman’s eyes arced with humor as she gazed into the camera.

  “See? Now you have to come home, mi amor.” The woman pulled the child away from the camera and set her snugly on her lap. “You made a promise. And a father never goes back on his promises.”

  that weekend

  Dhara waved good-bye to her parents, her smile fading as the car rumbled away from the Terrace Apartments. She slipped into building number nine and climbed the stairs to the shared living area.

  They were all there, waiting for her, gathered around a
coffee table littered with Chinese food containers. Kelly sat cross-legged, ignoring the three sheets of paper on her lap. Wendy stabbed at her lo mein with disinterest. Marta perched on the couch clutching a paper bag that bore the logo of the local pharmacy. Dhara felt a tremor of dread for Marta, for what she knew was inside.

  Dhara kicked off her shoes; they all turned to her with stricken eyes.

  Marta was the first to speak, skillfully cutting off any chance for Dhara to ask probing questions. “Dhara, that guy your parents brought with them today. He’s not—”

  “Yes, he is.” Dhara sank into the chair with a broken spring. “You just met my potential bridegroom.”

  Wendy froze with her chopsticks in midair. “But your parents aren’t—”

  “Yes, they are. They can’t wait to make arrangements for the wedding. Apparently, our astrological charts are well matched.”

  Dhara drew her knees in tight. Her parents had taken her by surprise, arriving for a visit with a young stranger in tow. At the sight of him, her stomach had dropped. Her mother had filled the sudden silence with chatter. Sanjay was in his second year of medical school, her mother said. He had an opportunity to take the weekend off. Surely Dhara would enjoy talking to someone who’d made it through the first difficult year, a boy she must remember from her cousin’s wedding last summer.

  Their eyes had brimmed with hope.

  “Dhara!” Kelly leaned forward, her gaze incredulous. “You’re not considering this, are you?”

  She laid her cheek against her knees. The knocking noise of her parents’ eleven-year-old Hyundai still rattled in her mind. Faded ink stained her mother’s elegant fingers, a reminder of the part-time job her mother had taken in a dentist’s office just to help pay Dhara’s way through college. Now Dhara was about to graduate, and the time had come. In a moment alone, her mother had bubbled over with talk of silk saris and jeweled bangles and all the wonderful chaos of a Hindu wedding.

  Dhara wanted all that. She really did. She would marry, someday. She’d just imagined that she’d marry a man she loved.

  “My sister wants to marry,” Dhara explained, “and it’s tradition that I marry first. I told my mother I’m not ready. I told them to let her jump the queue.”

  Wendy exchanged looks with the girls and said, “But that means they’ll try again soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s medieval,” Marta added. “No offense, Dhara.”

  “None taken. The tradition is older than that, actually. But, right now, it’s feeling pretty archaic to me, too.”

  “This sucks.” Kelly hugged her own arms, though the room wasn’t the least bit cold. “There should be rules about all of this.”

  “Yeah,” Marta said. “And rule number one is a no-brainer: choose your own man.”

  An image rose in Dhara’s mind of Cole, sprawled in a chair across from her at the library, absently thumbing the cleft in his chin. Cole, with his long hair combed back, tamed at the nape of his neck with a rawhide tie. Breathlessly beautiful Cole. Forbidden Cole.

  Dhara’s heart tightened. She loved her parents. She adored her whole sprawling family. She respected the Hindu traditions.

  But in this, she was wholly American.

  She would choose her own husband.

  chapter two

  From the moment Dhara was old enough to walk about town unattended, she and her girlfriends would spill out of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and wander the sprawling business district, squealing over wedding saris displayed in the various shops. Gazing into the windows of the beauty salons, they argued over the henna designs, hair extensions, and head pendants draped over Styrofoam wig models, planning their own glorious weddings.

  And now, as Dhara stepped out of the taxi in front of the Mysore Sari Emporium—one of the biggest sari shops in Jackson Heights—she realized that even thirty-seven-year-old cardiologists could still experience girlish thrills.

  She slung her purse over her shoulder and pushed into the store, clanging the bells hung on a string. The place smelled of tandoori smoke from the next-door restaurant. She toed off her low-heeled shoes and lined them up on the shoe shelf, craning her neck in search of her mother.

  The shop was the old-fashioned kind, a little taste of old Delhi in Queens. The store had no tables, only miles of shelves and cabinets along the walls. The cabinets with the most expensive saris were locked with tasseled keys. As she shuffled her way up the aisle toward a cluster of familiar figures, she noted with amusement that her mother had brought Dhara’s aunts along on the hunt for the perfect wedding sari.

  “Nisha, stop making the salesman pull the gold silks.” Dhara’s mother elbowed her younger sister as the salesman left to fetch more saris. “You know Dhara will wear red to the wedding.”

  “But she looks so darling in gold!” Nisha, the youngest of Dhara’s aunts, looked like a Bollywood star just stepped off the screen, in a brilliant, turquoise sari. “And she won’t need a sari just for her wedding, Roopa. She’ll need one for the Sangeet Sandhya, and for the Mehndi ceremony and for after the wedding, when they come back to visit you as a couple.”

  Indira, Dhara’s older aunt, gripped the price end of a sari and leaned into Dhara’s mother. “Sixty-three per yard, Roopa, for this scratchy thing.” Indira always looked as if she’d just taken a bite of a lemon. “Now the saris in Jhalini’s shop—”

  “Jhalani’s shop doesn’t have silks from Rajasthan,” her mother countered, “nor Banaras brocades.” Her mother turned as Dhara danced up behind her. “Ah, Dhara! You’re finally here.”

  “So sorry—emergency at the hospital.” Dhara folded into her mother’s embrace, breathing in the scent of incense her mother burned every night in the hopes of a smooth wedding. “I see that you brought reinforcements.”

  “We wouldn’t miss this for the world, darling. We’ve been waiting for it for a very long time.” Nisha took Dhara’s face in her hands and then frowned. “You look so tired! You need to get more sleep, to look your best for your new husband. A little kohl might help—”

  “Leave the girl alone, Nisha,” Indira said, pushing her aside. “She’s a doctor. She has more important things to think about.” Indira gave her a dry peck on the cheek and then whispered in her ear. “Talk some sense into your mother, Dhara. This place is—”

  “Indira-didi.” Her mother’s voice was a warning. “You did not have to come.”

  “Of course I did. Do you think I let them do to you what these thieves did to me? Embroidering in silver rather than gold, and—”

  “Oh, look, Roopa!” Nisha intercepted the returning salesman and pulled a length of muted gold silk from his arms. “Can you not see your daughter circling the sacred fires in this?”

  “Nisha, really”—her mother gestured to a pile of red silks on the mattress—“it’s red she’s wearing. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

  Dhara met Nisha’s teasing gaze and suppressed a smile. Her mother and Nisha were often at loggerheads. Nisha was the kind of woman who shocked distant relatives by opting for cocktail dresses rather than saris at family events. During last year’s Diwali celebration, instead of bringing Kaju Pista rolls as she was bidden, Nisha showed up at the house with a box of cannolis.

  Dhara let the argument flow right over her. Once she’d made the decision to agree to an arranged marriage, it had been a relief to cede the details to her ecstatic and enthusiastic family.

  “Have a seat, Dhara,” her mother ordered, pulling at the various reds on the mattress. “Let us show you what we’ve found.”

  Dhara lowered herself to the padded white ticking. She probably should have worn jeans instead of coming directly from the hospital in her straight black skirt, but she hadn’t expected this place to be quite so old-fashioned. As she curled her legs to one side, she soon forgot any discomfort in the thrill of the moment—the unaccustomed luxury of having a salesman unfurl bolt after bolt of silky fabric on the cotton batting, a scarlet-and-gold rainbow of te
xture and hue.

  As she watched her mother and aunts rooting through the piles of cloth, Dhara suddenly remembered one of the first family gatherings to which she’d invited Cole. He’d stood in the doorway of her kitchen running a nervous hand over a head freshly shorn of its usual mop of curls. He watched her mother and aunts arguing as they chopped a mountain of vegetables.

  “Now I know where the image of the goddess Kali comes from,” he’d whispered. He pointed to an idol of the goddess sitting on a shelf nearby, waving her multiple arms—half raised in blessing and the other half gripping swords.

  Dhara smiled at the memory, a smile that softened almost as quickly as it came, doused, as usual, by sorrow.

  “You like, Dhara?”

  Dhara blinked up at her mother. Her mother leaned in, displaying a length of silk over her arm. Dhara gave herself a quick internal shake. It was best not to remember Cole. Especially the better days, before it all went so very wrong.

  She ran her fingers over the smooth silk. She placed her other hand beneath the cloth to gauge the transparency. The fabric was cloud-soft, so deep a red it was almost plum, and slipped across her fingers like water. “Oh, it’s gorgeous, Mum.”

  With a flip of her arm, her mother draped the fabric over Dhara’s shoulder. Dhara’s aunts approached on either side, peering down at her, blocking out the harsh fluorescent light.

  “Too dark.” Nisha wrinkled her nose, and her nose-stud winked. “It makes her look old.”

  Dhara laughed. “Thanks, Aunt Nisha.”

  “Dhara, you’re a young girl getting married. You should look your age!”

  Dhara resisted the urge to remind her that she was a doctor who’d spent the morning administering stress tests, studying imaging data, and discussing a particularly critical patient’s situation with a cardiothoracic surgeon. Or that her youngest sister had jumped the queue years ago, much to her mother’s dismay, and all but one of her buddies from high school had long circled the sacred fires.

  “I think it makes her look lovely,” her mother said, squinting. “We could order a border, embroidered in gold.”