“She does need to eat. I brought her French toast for when she wakes up.” When Rima eyed the takeout box with suspicion, he added, “It’s one of her favorite things.”
“Then maybe it will help,” she conceded.
Watching her unpack the grocery items from her tote—fruits and tea and a jar of chutney—he realized a nap would be out of the question now. Part of him wanted to flee his own home and leave his wife to her mother’s care while he went off to lick his own wounds, but that was only because Rima had a way of taking over, reorganizing drawers, as she was doing now, and criticizing their lifestyle. In truth, he knew Tamarind wouldn’t mind. But she was his wife, and the sad loss belonged to both of them. He would stay and own the situation.
“I was just about to make some breakfast for myself,” he said, taking a pan from the hanging rack and placing it on the burner. “Would you like some eggs and toast?”
“No, but I’ll make it for you.” When he started to object, she pushed him away from the stove. “I’ll do it. It’s what I do.”
“Why don’t you relax?” Even as he said the words, he knew it was a ludicrous request for her. “You had a long drive down here. I can scramble my own eggs, Rima.”
“Of course you are able; I know this. But when you go to work, do you expect someone else to do your job?”
“No.”
“Of course not. So this is what I’m saying. This is what I do, taking care of my family. Please, allow me the satisfaction of doing my job, Pete.”
“All right then.” He surrendered the kitchen, moving over to a barstool. “This is great. I’m not very good at making scrambled eggs, anyway. Tamarind says I put too much heat on them.”
“I’ll make you poached. Less fat. Better for you.”
“Poached is great.” Pete smiled as she switched the skillet to a pot and started water heating.
Although his mother-in-law sometimes played to a stereotype, she was as complicated and textured as a rich tapestry. Rima had grown up in New Delhi, in a family with some privilege. Her fluency in Hindi and English had helped her land a secretarial job at the U.S. Embassy, where she had met Tamarind’s father, the son of a New York City cabdriver. To hear Tamarind tell the story, you’d think it was a fairy tale with the noble diplomat Karim Singh lifting Rima from the squalor of New Delhi, Prince Charming to her Cinderella, but having picked up on the details, Pete knew it was more complicated than that. Life always was. Karim was not a prince, but a hardworking young man whose ambitions had driven him through grad school at NYU and then to a series of positions at the State Department. And Rima, the daughter of a prosperous exporter, was no maid sweeping cinders, though it must have been challenging to leave her family and her safe world behind and come to America.
“Later, I’ll make roti,” Rima said as she cracked two eggs into a bowl. “That will make her feel better. When we’re sad, it’s good to be surrounded by familiar things.”
He nodded, wondering what familiar things could bring him comfort. To slip on his old, torn Nike shoes and go for a run by the river? To slip into the sterile hallways of the office and settle into his cubicle in front of the monitor . . . the screen that held past, present, and future in its infinite codes?
“You are sad, too,” Rima observed.
“I am, but in a different way, I guess. I can’t imagine a future in which we repeat this pain. I can’t imagine Tamarind going through all the things she’s endured all over again, the headaches and cramps. The shots. The entire insane dance.”
Rima turned away from the stove and positioned herself across the island from him. “She wants to give you a baby, a family.”
“And I appreciate that, I do, but I love my wife, and I can’t see why she should sacrifice so much for something that doesn’t have to happen. We are a family, with or without a child. I love your daughter, Rima, and she’s enough for me.”
Her brown eyes welled with concern as she pressed her palms to the countertop. “You’re a good man. I know this. But you need to understand what matters to a woman. My daughter, she’s a mix of old and new, traditional and modern woman. She wants to be a proper wife to you, to give you a son or daughter as a woman should.”
Pete knew it would be a waste of time to argue the vast changes in gender roles for millennials. There was no persuading this dear, devoted woman that he could be happy without children. He reached across the counter and placed his hand over hers. “Look at the toll this is taking on her, on both of us, but mostly her. The injections and mood swings, and now the pain. The physical pain and the emotional, too. Our hearts are broken over our baby.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” She patted his hand. “This I know.”
“People think you just dismiss it and move on if the baby isn’t born, but there’s still grief. You feel the loss. One minute you have a baby on the way. The next, the little thing has died, and it’s so tiny and undeveloped and hidden away that it may as well be in another universe. It’s that far out of our control. We had a kid who died before it even made it into the world. I’m not sure I have the hubris, the selfishness, to do that again and again just so I can have the family I want.”
“I understand your sorrow.” Rima shrugged. “But maybe this isn’t all about you and what you want right now.”
Although she turned away to tend to the eggs, her physical retreat barely diminished the zinger she’d just landed. Oh, snap! Like her daughter, Rima didn’t pull her punches.
“This is about me and Tamarind, about what’s best for both of us. I love your daughter, Rima, and we have a wonderful life together. We both like our work. We go to shows and concerts. We can jump in the car on Saturday morning and drive to the coast if we want. Life is good.”
She turned back to him. “When you die, will you be thinking of walks on the beach and concerts? No, I don’t think so. It’s your children who will fill your heart in those last living moments. Your children. Your legacy.”
“But what if—”
“No.” She raised the slotted spoon, interrupting him. “No more talk now. You need to eat.”
As if she’d dosed him with her magic wand, Pete shut up. Rima hummed a meandering tune in her birdlike vibrato voice as she propped each egg on a slice of buttered toast and served it up to him. Pete knew he was being mothered, although he wasn’t the one who needed it.
Or maybe he was. In any case, he recognized there was no stopping Rima when she was on a path.
CHAPTER 11
“Another beer?” The bartender pointed at Winston, who nodded. What else was there to do on his day off in the middle of nowhere?
“So how long you been up here?” asked the guy sitting next to him at the bar.
“This is the seventh week,” Winston said.
Seven weeks in hell, he thought as the guitar solo from “Hotel California” twanged on the jukebox.
“You like it?” The beefy guy wore black glasses, a lumberjack plaid shirt, and a quilted vest that was puffy as a marshmallow. A white guy, of course. Everyone in Alaska was white. But the lumberjack and the bartender hadn’t seemed fazed when a black man came through the door.
“The work is good,” Winston said. “But I’d rather be back home.” He would have told the lumberjack that he missed his family, but he didn’t want to sound like a candy-ass. You couldn’t go round crying to strangers in saloons, showing them photos of your wife and kids, unless you wanted to be rolled in the parking lot. But that was the truth. He missed Glory and little Ruby. He felt like a dick that he’d never even seen Aurora in person.
What kind of a father was he?
A responsible father—that was what Glory always said when he brought up the problem. And then she’d go into the progression of how their life was supposed to go. After his ACL injury in college, he’d had to give up the dream of playing pro football. With his scholarship pulled, he’d dropped out of school and tried to get a job in construction. Welding or plumbing seemed to be the way to go, with plenty of
jobs, though he needed training. Since he hadn’t been able to get into the welding program at the community college, they had looked to Alaska, where he could be trained as a pipeliner and eventually get some welding experience on the job. And then he’d go back to Portland, start raking in decent money as a welder. Ka-ching.
Winston still liked Glory’s plan, though there’d been some obstacles. Jobs on the pipeline weren’t that plentiful, and some of the refineries had been shutting down. And now that he was here, the days dragged on, whether he was working or on a day off. The endless vistas of tundra and wild grasses depressed the hell out of him, and people told him that got worse once winter set in. He had that to look forward to.
He had driven thirty minutes to escape the mind-numbing boredom of the log cabin saloon with its mangy moose head hanging on the wall and the stale music from some Pandora station that seemed to favor Led Zeppelin. Thirty miles south of Livengood, he’d found a different saloon, this one a brick building with a couple of neon beer signs in the window. Same sour beer smell, same canned music, and a bartender just as detached as Bear.
Yeah, he was definitely breaking new ground here.
He stared up at the TV screen—a baseball game that seemed to be holding the lumberjack’s interest.
“This time of year, someone somewhere is playing baseball,” the lumberjack said. “Come November you get a lot of dark days between football games. My money’s on Atlanta for this one. I lived there once.”
“How was it?”
“Too much traffic. You follow baseball?”
“Not much. Portland doesn’t have a team, and football’s my game. I like the Seahawks. I used to play football in high school.”
“Really? Everybody’s got a story.”
In his pocket Winston’s phone buzzed. Probably Glory, and he wasn’t going to be the wuss husband who interrupted a conversation to text his wife from the bar. She would want to Skype, knowing it was his day off. But she didn’t need to know he was spending the afternoon in a saloon. He would call her when he got back to Livengood.
“So what position did you play?”
“Running back, until I blew my knee out.”
“And now you’re stuck here. You like Portland?”
Winston shook his head. “Too much traffic. But I got my girls back there, so it’s preferable to this place.”
“Everything is preferable to this shithole.” The lumberjack eased off his stool and headed to the men’s room.
Winston took a sip of beer and pulled out his cell phone. Yep. Two calls from Glory and four text messages. He could go out to the parking lot and Skype her from the car. The sound of her voice would help take the edge off the uneasiness welling in his chest. But then she’d have a million questions, and she’d be pissed that he was out drinking, when it was his right. The only way to kick back when you lived thousands of miles from any sign of home.
I’ll call you soon, he typed, then sent the message. There. Can you leave me alone now? he thought.
The saloon seemed to be darker as he glanced toward the parking lot. The door was like miles away. The flashing beer sign in the window caught his attention and held it, thrumming on and off, making the room teeter like a ship on the waves.
What the hell was the ABV on this beer? He didn’t remember ordering anything too potent. He shoved the half-full mug onto the bar, sloshing the liquid onto the shiny wood.
Suddenly the bartender was there, his yellow eyes like sour onions in a meaty face. “Time to go, Kanye.”
The jab stung, but it was nothing compared to the tight coil of nausea strangling Winston’s body. They’d drugged him. Bastards. He flung a twenty at the bartender and held on to the bar to steady himself for the long walk to his car.
“You’d be smart to stay with your own kind.”
“Right.” Winston knew that. He’d lived his life avoiding situations like this. How had he been so stupid to think that a neon sign that said OPEN only applied to certain types of people? Stupid.
For a second the doors at the rear of the bar confused him, and he wondered if his room was back there. He could make it. Just a few steps.
But then the lumberjack emerged from the shadows of the back hall, his grim smile a reminder that Winston didn’t belong here. He had to get out. Now.
Bracing himself against the darkness licking at the edges of his vision, he moved toward the door. The parking lot. His car. He had to get there. Swaying and listing like a damaged ship, he started the hardest journey of his life, out to his car.
CHAPTER 12
“Where is your daddy?” Glory said aloud as she paced across the living room juggling a fussy Aurora and an endlessly ringing cell phone. No one answered, of course, though Ruby would have said something about him coming home soon if she weren’t in the bedroom, lining Goldfish crackers up on the nightstand. That girl came up with the oddest games sometimes.
After a text message yesterday, Winston’s day off, he hadn’t called or gotten in touch at all. That was Monday, today was Tuesday, and he was back to work, though she didn’t know his hours. The worst scenario that came to mind was that something terrible had happened. Her second fear was that he’d gone on a bender. Winston could usually control his drinking, but sometimes, when things were bad, she’d seen him go off the deep end. Not that things were that bad, with his job and the regular money, but in recent conversations she’d picked up on his loneliness. Much as she tried to get across that they were “two lonesome stars stuck in distant parts of the sky,” she wasn’t sure she’d been reaching him lately.
When he dried up like this, Glory saw that her life was an empty shell without him. She tried to maintain a stable environment for her kids. She tried to engage in adult conversation, though she worried that she seemed needy. That morning she’d lingered at the classroom door, wanting to engage the teacher, Miss Mandy, who greeted them every day with a cheerful smile. Mandy Reynolds seemed to be in her twenties still, with streaked brown hair that curled to her chin in a precision haircut. She favored bright, flowered dresses and dusky pink lipstick that reminded Glory of the pale roses in her mother’s garden. Standing beside her, Glory always felt a bit goth in her worn jeans and black T-shirts.
“How’s Ruby doing?” Glory asked.
“She’s adjusting well,” the teacher said. “It’s quite a change for all these children, but they’re more flexible than they seem.”
“I was worried about Ruby because she can play alone for hours. She makes up her own little worlds, with toys or crackers, and—”
“We’ll have time to talk more at parent-teacher conferences.” Miss Mandy’s voice was cool, maybe even a bit stern. “We don’t want to discuss the kiddos in front of them.”
“Of course,” Glory said as a boy let out a wail in the corner. Some dispute over a toy truck. While the teacher intervened, Glory’s attention shifted to Ruby, who was lining blocks up at the edge of a bookshelf, talking to herself, probably counting. Was that normal? None of the other kids seemed to be doing it. She would ask Miss Mandy about it at the conference. Hitching the baby higher on her hip, Glory wished she were allowed to stay and chat with Miss Mandy, who seemed eternally cheerful and in control. That was the kind of friend Glory needed.
“We’ll see you at pickup time, Mrs. Noland,” the teacher said, obviously trying to get Glory out the door. Women like Miss Mandy didn’t need to make new friends, and no one wanted to listen to a poor, lonely mom whose husband wouldn’t even answer her text messages.
But she did have the sisters. Their company was limited to afternoons at the mall, but it was better than nothing.
Glory was about to dial Winston’s number again when Aurora let out a wail, her pinched face turning bright red. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Glory said, rocking her gently. They’d already been out in the stroller twice as they’d walked Ruby to preschool and back. How did you soothe a baby who’d napped and eaten and was being walked around like a princess?
; “Why are you a cranky pants, Rory?” Ruby asked, appearing at the bedroom door with the paper sack of crackers.
Glory laughed. “She is being a cranky pants. You’re a good big sister to understand that.”
“Do you need Huggy Bear?” Ruby picked up Aurora’s favorite comfort toy and jiggled it in front of her. “Huggy, huggy, huggy!”
The baby let out a crisp cry, perplexing Ruby.
“Let’s get Rory some fresh air. Leave the crackers here, and let’s find your jacket.” Grabbing some hoodies for the girls, she corralled them outside, maneuvered the stroller down the front porch steps, and set the baby inside. The pale sunshine of the late afternoon held some lingering warmth, though the breeze was a reminder that autumn was on its way.
“Hi, Miss Ellen!” Ruby called to the landlady, who stood talking with a young woman at the front gate. The stranger seemed semi-professional, wearing khaki pants and a dark blazer and holding a notebook. Probably some city planner or pollster or solicitor whom Ellen had snagged. As the self-appointed neighborhood watch, Ellen Carlucci seemed to enjoy shooing away people who did not live on the block.
“There they are.” Ellen held her arm out in an awkward wave.
Glory nodded before ducking under the stroller awning to buckle in Aurora, who had gone silent and wide-eyed with the first blast of cool air. “That’s better, isn’t it?” Glory soothed, grateful that she wouldn’t have to push a crying baby past the landlady. Ellen claimed to love children, but she seemed to enjoy complaining about Aurora’s crying time in the afternoons.
“Glory?” Ellen called.
Glory stood up, glancing toward the gate.
“Come join us a second.”
Thank God we’ve paid most of the rent, Glory thought as she shrugged on her own jacket. It had been awkward trying to avoid their landlady when they’d been so far behind, but now Glory could come and go with her head held high. With next week’s paycheck, they would have enough to pay the remainder of their October rent.
With Ruby standing in the rear of the stroller, Glory pushed toward the gate. “Looks like a beautiful afternoon,” she said, returning the smile of the woman with the clipboard. A forced smile on both sides.
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