by Sonali Dev
No, he didn’t, because no one could possibly be that much of a delusional arse.
“He’s also the best living soccer player on earth,” Mishka said. She obviously shared Yash and Ashna’s love of the sport.
“You retired recently, I hear,” Ashna’s aunt said, “so where is home?”
“I’m kind of homeless right now.”
That softened the defensiveness in Ashna’s eyes and it made Rico wish he hadn’t said it.
He turned back to her aunt. “I grew up in Rio de Janeiro and I’ve lived in London for this past decade.”
“I read something about you living in the Bay for a few years. Is that true?” Yash asked.
“Really?” Nisha asked. “I didn’t know that. Ashi, did you know that? Where in the Bay?”
Rico knew there was a reason he’d grown so fond of this baby, because she chose that moment to grab his bearded jaw and let out a mighty grunt, which was followed by the most vile stench of all time.
The smell cut through the air before anyone noticed the expression on Ashna’s face. Groans broke out across the group along with choking laughter.
“Wow, that’s . . . um . . . potent.” Mishka pinched her nose. “Mom, is this what babies do?”
Nisha, who was obviously pregnant, laughed and tried not to wrinkle her nose. “Yup, and big sisters get first dibs on diaper duty.”
“Practice?” Rico held the stinky little thing out to Mishka and she made a gagging face. Everyone was flat-out laughing now. Nothing like basic potty humor to save the day.
Ashna still looked like she’d seen several ghosts.
As if the smell weren’t bad enough, the baby let out a godawful holler. Song and her sister ran over.
“I think she needs a change,” Rico said.
“Yeah, no kidding.” Song took the baby from him. Her sister apologized profusely as they left to tackle their honorable task, which Rico did not envy.
“Speaking of babies, we need to get Nisha to her doctor’s appointment,” Mina said, tucking an errant lock of hair behind Ashna’s ear, and a memory too clear and stark twisted inside Rico.
Ashna tracked her aunt and cousin as they walked away, her gaze filled with something between wanting to follow them out and the relief of having dodged a car while crossing the street.
It’s not because I’m ashamed, his pai had always said to his mãe about never publicly acknowledging Rico and her.
I don’t care, his mãe had always said.
Rico had wanted to believe them both. Now he didn’t know what he believed and he would never know for sure.
Yash turned to Rico. “What you said before about my health care plan, not many people get that. Not many people have even read the report on my website.”
Rico moved his focus to things that weren’t lost causes. “The first time I read it, I thought I was reading wrong. The way you address the disbursement of funds and removal of costs, I couldn’t quite believe it. You’re halving cost while doubling benefit by bringing in volumes to a single source and supplementing funding from corporations. It’s genius.”
“That’s an amazing way to explain it. Why didn’t I think of that? I get too focused on the details, and it gets too technical. Not effective for speeches.”
“Your speeches are great. It’s just this issue, it’s already complicated, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees.” Yash’s plan was seventy pages long. “And you’re passionate about it, mostly the public just wants to see the passion and know that there are viable details that are turning you on.” Rico smiled because, honestly, the details totally turned him on too. “Even if you just showed them the passion and stayed on message about reducing cost and supplying funding, I think they’d trust you with the rest.”
“You want to read through the rest of my policies and come up with bite-sized spins for those as well?”
Rico already had.
Ashna looked even more like she was going to hurl, so saying that was pretty much out of the question. “Come on, anyone can do that.” Which didn’t mean he didn’t want to be the one to do it.
The idea of helping Yash made Rico’s heart beat in that primal way it beat when he ran out to the pitch. Something he hadn’t ever expected to feel again.
“You were the face of your team for a reason, I see.”
He tried to avoid Ashna’s perceptive gaze. She looked distraught at what she saw. “A sports team is a PR nightmare waiting to happen. Especially today with the direct spotlight of social media. All the shit blokes pull, believing they can get away with it because their success makes them invincible, it’s all out in the open now.”
“And no one’s buying the Boys Will Be Boys Kool-Aid anymore,” Ashna said.
“Right,” Rico said, meeting her eyes. “About time.”
“Exactly,” Yash said. “But you kept them looking squeaky clean for almost a decade, and their image was quite a horror when you came in.”
“Thanks. It’s all about understanding and respecting the public’s interest in you. They want something from you all the time: either you feed them or they come after you for it.”
Zee had joined them again. “My man Rico was a master at keeping the media fed and focused. The No Cover-Ups policy worked well too. Once our blokes knew the team wasn’t in that business, they showed their arses less. Then it was all fiancées and wives and kids and fashion houses and charities. The man’s PR is ruthless.” Being Pablo Silva’s son and growing up an open secret, meant Rico had navigating his way around public opinion in his blood. That’s why disappearing in plain sight in high school had been so easy for him. A handful of people was all you needed to really see you. The rest was an illusion you managed. But that made the people you let see you everything.
As Rico introduced Zee to Ashna and Yash, Ashna pointed to the couch and they sat. He wished she’d stop doing that, but he’d been standing for hours and the stiff throbbing in his leg was back. She tried to pretend she didn’t see the relief on his face and shook Zee’s hand.
Naturally Yash was a fan and rattled off Zee’s stats in all his big matches.
“I hope you also follow American football, mate, because this soccer thing isn’t going to get you elected,” Rico said.
Yash responded with “Niners forever, baby.”
“Do you follow football, I mean soccer?” Zee asked Ashna.
“Don’t have much time for it, unfortunately.”
“My old woman doesn’t watch either,” Zee said dreamily. For the first time that day Ashna smiled, her flat-out smile, the one that crinkled her nose. “Tanya finds sports in general barbaric.”
“But not sportsmen, thankfully?” Ashna said, a hint of playfulness escaping into her voice.
“Zee just got married. He’s supposed to be on his honeymoon, but instead he’s here,” Rico said.
That seemed to shake her. “Everyone should have a friend like you.”
“Well, this slug’s not a bad mate either. Tanya and I wouldn’t even be together after all these years if it weren’t for him.”
Ashna didn’t look at Rico, but he knew she wanted to. “Sounds like you and your wife have been together a long time,” she said with the kind of genuine interest that would set her apart in an ocean of people.
“Since we were eighteen. You know how we men are. If we imprint on you young, you’ve got us forever. To do with us as you please.”
She smiled at Zee so sweetly that Rico braced himself for what was coming. “Or you men want us to believe that, so we can never let you go and you can use our dependence to do as you please.”
Zee looked delighted. “Are you saying men are more manipulative in relationships than women? That would go against the popular opinion, now wouldn’t it?”
Ashna mirrored his delight. “The popular opinion that men have floated through the years?”
“I know a lot of women who agree that women are more manipulative than men.”
“Just like you’ve heard w
omen say women gossip more, or pull each other down, or only feel loved when men shower them with material gifts. Patriarchal opinions that centuries of being called ‘the weaker sex’ and being given only the domestic space and our own bodies to claim our power with have had us internalize?” Her smile wasn’t quite so sweet anymore. “Your Tanya, would you be with her all these years later if you truly believed she’d manipulated you into it? What would that say about you?”
“Fair point,” Zee said with a laugh. “It would say I’m a bloody idiot, now wouldn’t it? I’ve actually never heard it put quite that way.”
“You should have spent a day in our house growing up,” Yash said. “Our mothers pretty much fed us shredded up pieces of the patriarchy for lunch every day.”
Ashna smiled, but she had that look again, as though something had soured her stomach. A look that got particularly pronounced every time her mother came up. Another thing that hadn’t changed.
Rico looked at his watch. Since Zee had only taken a few hours off from his honeymoon in Hawaii, it was time for him to head back. “Well, time for me to save your marriage again. If you don’t take off now, you’ll miss that flight. I’m not taking you in if Tanya throws you out again.”
Zee hugged Ashna. “I’m so glad I flew in. Meeting you was totally worth leaving my honeymoon for.”
That brought Ashna’s smile back as she returned his hug. Yes, her nose crinkled again and crushed up parts of his heart filled out with emotions he hadn’t experienced in years.
As Rico walked him out, Zee had the most sanctimonious smirk on his face. “So she’s the reason.”
Rico didn’t respond, hoping to nip Zee’s filterless musings in the bud. It didn’t work.
“She’s the reason why you’re here. Everything makes sense now.”
They waited for Rico’s driver to pull the car up. “Does it? Because nothing makes sense to me,” Rico said.
“How long ago were you together?” Zee asked with uncharacteristic gravitas.
“High school. But I barely know her anymore. She doesn’t even acknowledge that she knew me, mate.”
“Why is that?”
“Hell if I know.”
George pulled the car up. “I very much doubt that. I’ve never heard you say that about anything. You do realize that your need to be a know-it-all is the most annoying thing about you, right?”
“No!”
Zee grinned. “The Rico I know would try to find out why. Because from where I was standing, it looked like she would very much like to acknowledge knowing you.”
With that half-assed wisdom, his best mate drove off to his own simple life.
Chapter Twenty
Rico didn’t care that Ash was hiding him. At seventeen, the one thing he knew for sure was that there was no connection between being hidden and being loved. His father had hidden him and his mother his entire life. Even after the car crash that killed both his pai and mãe, the press had only reported that Pablo Silva had died and that a friend had been in the car with him. They were buried separately, his pai in his family’s plots, where his wife had joined him a few years later, and his mãe by herself. Rico didn’t care. Once you were dead you were dead.
“Hindus are cremated. Thank God,” Ash had said when he’d told her that his parents were buried separately. “So no one can keep my ashes from being sprinkled over your grave.”
It was a bit crazy for teenagers to talk this way, but it had made him laugh. It was the first time anything about his parents had made him laugh since the accident.
It didn’t matter that Ash had never introduced him to her tangle of cousins—all of whom he knew she loved with the kind of intensity that made her her. Meeting her parents or her aunt and uncle was out of the question. The idea of meeting anyone’s parents made the memory of his parents in caskets come alive. He could barely stand to be in the presence of his own aunt, and he lived in her house.
He had never been to either of Ash’s homes—not the one she lived in during the week and not the one she went to over the weekend. He had never been to her father’s restaurant either.
None of that mattered.
They had been together for a year. They had met in the middle of sophomore year, and junior year had gone by in a strangely alive haze. All Rico knew was that his need for Ash was constant. She was with him even when she wasn’t with him. Sometimes it felt like everything he did was just so he could recount it for her and make her smile, or be outraged. Because her caring about things, about him, made him matter again, made him alive. Rico liked feeling alive again.
He hadn’t joined the football team, but between Ashna and the coach, they had convinced him to help with training. He assisted the coach during soccer season, mostly because he liked coaching her. Ash had convinced Coach Clarence that if he stopped badgering Rico to play, he could at least get him to help the team this way. Rico had never had to tell her that he just couldn’t play, not when his mãe and pai would never get to watch him.
His father had been a football legend, a god, they called him back in Brazil. Rico had no idea what he would have done with that legacy, after his pai’s death, had their relationship been public. When Rico was very young, he had barely seen his father. His mãe had been a single parent for the most part. Back then Rico had hated football. His mãe loved to tell the story of how Rico had been afraid of the ball—how he’d run from it when someone kicked it to him. When she’d told his pai, he had taken that as a personal insult and started to make time to play with him, and Rico had fallen in love with the sport. Football had given him his father.
“The fruit doesn’t fall too far from a tree, no?” His pai loved to say anytime Rico won his league games for his age group. It was true; everything he knew about the game he knew because of Pablo Silva.
Rico hung up his smock in the back room and left Smoothie King. His shift had been canceled because the smoothie machine was broken. His boss had given him the rest of the day off and paid for his shift. Finding reliable teenage employees in Woodside was apparently not the easiest thing. Tests, sports, musical instruments, volunteer hours, their own start-ups—all of that took priority over a job serving yogurt mixed with wheat germ and coconut milk to other teens.
Rico was possibly one of the only students at GB High who had no idea what he was going to do with his life. A sin in this part of the world if there ever was one. From the age of thirteen he’d known he was going to play league football. Now he couldn’t even imagine it. Ash wanted to go to UCLA on a soccer scholarship. Her father wanted her to go to cooking school, a laughable idea, because: Ash in a kitchen? Ha! If she wasn’t training and sweaty, she was always moving and restless, as though she were still playing in her head.
Rico was also possibly the only student at their school who needed to make his own money. Being the love child of a football legend meant his financial support had died when the legend did, and Rico hated asking his aunt for money. He hated that she had to support him on her housekeeper’s salary and make space for him in the cramped back house of the estate she worked at. Auntie Lena tried hard to make him feel at home, but he’d lost the only home he’d ever wanted to live in when he left Rio. The fact that Ash’s uncle’s house was just half a mile from Lena’s meant he’d gladly live there forever. Being near Ash was a matter of survival.
Another reason the Smoothie King job worked so well was that Ash lived with her father Friday through Sunday. Ash had never told him that in so many words, but the weekends were hers. Which meant Rico needed his work to drive away the restlessness of being without her.
When he’d asked her what she did at the restaurant, she’d shrugged and said, “Everything. Except working in the kitchen.” Her mouth had twisted as though tasting something foul. “I hate how crazy everyone gets about cooking. It’s just throwing ingredients together.”
His mãe had been obsessed with cooking; their lives had orbited around mealtimes. Taking Ashna out to eat was like taking someone unmov
ed by art to a museum. Food fell under that untouchable part of her life locked up in the vault where everything about her family sat.
The last time Rico had expressed an interest in visiting her restaurant, she’d turned to him with the first flash of fear he’d ever seen in her eyes. “My father is very old-fashioned. He isn’t even comfortable with me being friends with boys. He can’t know that I have a boyfriend.”
This had struck Rico as odd. His parents had teased him constantly about any girls he was friends with. He’d brought home all the girls he’d gone out with since his first girlfriend at thirteen. He barely even remembered any of them; mostly they’d been friends, pretty girls in his grade who liked to say they had a boyfriend, especially a boyfriend who played football. They had maybe held hands and gone out for ice cream. Mostly, he’d done it because it had been what everyone expected of him.
Truth be told, his mãe had been more excited about the fact that he had a girlfriend than he was.
Now there was Ash, whom she would never meet.
Just the thought of Ash made his heart race. The darkness inside him from losing his parents became bearable when she held him. The sense he’d had since he’d lost them—that nothing would ever feel right again—eased when he made her laugh. If he could have one wish, it would be that his parents had met her. They would have fallen instantly in love.
Before he knew what he was doing, he had jumped into the Honda Civic he was slowly paying Auntie Lena back for and found himself on 280 heading to Palo Alto. He’d done this a few times, driven by Ash’s restaurant on the nights she worked. He’d never told her, because frankly it was embarrassing to be needy enough to drive half an hour for the chance of catching a glimpse of the girl he spent every possible moment with on schooldays.
He pulled the car into a spot across from Curried Dreams just as someone left. The mansion-like restaurant building reminded him of the grand houses in Humaitá where his pai’s family lived. It was all festively lit up. They were a few weeks from Thanksgiving and Ash had told him that they had put up holiday lights for Diwali, the Indian festival of lights. Seeing them now felt like one of their inside jokes.