“What about you?” Tanvi asked. “How are you and Sabina?”
Meena shrugged. “She doesn’t want me here, and I’m not going anywhere. Which is fine. Honestly, I had the best mom I could have asked for. I don’t want or need another one.”
“But you need your aunties, right?” Tanvi asked.
“Now that I have them, I don’t know how I managed before.”
Tanvi and Uma laughed, and Meena joined in. This was enough. More than. With Sam across the hall and these two in her life, she had built herself a home.
EPILOGUE
From her bedroom veranda, Meena looked down at the lush garden. The heat of June bore down on them, but the aunties were not deterred as they tended to the trees, plants, and flowers.
“I don’t understand why this is growing here.” Sabina pulled up a weed from the grass near the footpath.
It was from the wildflower patch Meena had planted. It seemed the seeds had been carried, either by birds or wind, and spread throughout the grass. And some of what she’d planted was invasive and beginning to take over a chunk of the backyard. Meena felt slightly guilty. But only slightly.
“It’s from my wildflower bed,” Meena called down.
“You need to replant it where it belongs,” Sabina ordered.
Meena nodded. The two of them weren’t friendly, but they were getting to be more civil. The other aunties and Sam were good buffers.
“I think it looks nice like this,” Tanvi observed. “Like little accents on the lawn, a little purple here, some yellow there.”
Meena took the steps down. “What if we turn the whole thing into a wild garden?”
“No,” Uma and Sabina said in unison.
“Yes,” Tanvi said at the same time.
“I vote yes too.” Sam, Wally, and Huck came down from his apartment.
“No digging.” Sabina knelt and grabbed Huck by the face, scratched behind his ears.
Where Sabina refused to show even an impersonal fondness for Meena, she had the opposite relationship with Huck. Whenever Meena’s dog wasn’t with Wally, he would run up the steps to find Sabina. Meena suspected that Sabina kept a jar of treats for him, but she never asked.
Satisfied with getting love from everyone, Huck ran to her and leaned against her leg. She reached down and gave him a few pats. She breathed in the summer air laced with honeysuckle and roses. It was a scent she would forever know as the scent of home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful and blessed to be surrounded by so much love and support. It hasn’t been easy to get here, and I wouldn’t have kept going without all who helped in small and large ways.
To my parents, Arvind Ambalal Patel and Pushpa Arvind Patel, who instilled a love of reading and learning in me from an early age and taught me to never give up. To my sister, Amy, who pushes me to do better, be better, and climb higher.
To my friends who have been on this journey with me for decades, read early drafts of bad writing, and still believed I would get here one day: Kathleen Conlon, Stephanie Crane, Laura Holton (who is also real-life Wally’s human), Sean Rudd, Colleen Skeuse, Elizabeth McDonough, Patrick Gallagher, and Sonal Patel.
To Cindy Lynch, who told me to not get in my own way and believed I would be an author one day. I did it, Cindy!
To my writing friends, for being in the trenches, celebrating success, commiserating, gossiping, and all the things in between: Jennifer Hallock, Jen Doyle, Caroline Linden, Farah Heron, Nisha Sharma, Falguni Kothari, Sonali Dev, Annika Sharma, Alisha Rai, Suleena Bibra, Kishan Paul, Sophia Singh Sasson, Sona Charaipotra, Sulekha Snyder, and Sarah Cassell (who gets credit for this title).
To my extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as my friends in Boston, Spokane, London, New York, and New Jersey. You’ve heard me talking about this at one point or another, and well, here we are.
To Christa Desir for seeing the potential in my raw manuscripts and helping me become a better writer.
To my editors, Megha Parekh and Jenna Free, who push me to keep growing as a writer.
To my agent, Sarah Younger, who has this unique ability to offer unyielding support while always speaking the truth. I can’t imagine being here without you.
To the team at Lake Union Publishing: S. B. Kleinman, Haley Swan, Jim Poling, Nicole Burns-Ascue, and Kellie Osborne.
Finally, Holly Pickett, whose photojournalism and bravery taught me perseverance and a deep belief in telling the stories that need to be told. This is for everyone who is fighting for their dreams: don’t stop practicing, be patient (to a degree), and keep going, especially when traveling against the current.