—With a doughnut. You said.
Tomas was feeling wary and overprotective, to say the least, so it came as a relief when they entered Gas ’n Donuts and were greeted by a smiling woman wearing a knitted scarf and a white apron over a yellow sari. She seemed amused by the sight of this bearded father and his big-eyed daughter, holding hands in winter coats, stomping snow from their feet. At one of the booths along the back wall a chubby boy wearing a red down vest and a matching knit hat was reading some plucky adventure story with a shark circling a sailboat on its cover. He didn’t budge when they entered, nor did the few figures hunched over ashtrays and newspapers at the counter. It was late in the day and the display-case trays were mostly empty, their wax-paper sheets holding little footprints of frosting. When Tomas turned to ask Lydia which of the remaining treats looked good she wasn’t standing next to him anymore, but rather strolling toward the booth where the boy was reading. Tomas took a seat on a swiveling stool and watched as his daughter tugged off her mittens, cleared her throat, and knocked on the hard cover of the boy’s book. The boy lowered the book with half-lidded eyes, far enough to peer over its top, then rested it facedown on the table.
—Nobody’s home, he said with exaggerated grumpiness, then started cracking up.
A smile filled Lydia’s face as she slid in next to him. A chocolate doughnut waited for her on a plate at his table, just as she’d predicted.
Tomas ordered a cup of coffee from the woman behind the counter. Maybe it was the flowy fabric of her sari, or possibly the drape of her woolen scarf, but as the woman shifted trays and dumped coffee grounds she moved with such fluidity that he immediately pictured her dancing, eyes closed, alone on a colorful floor. He was somewhat ashamed of this exotification, yet as he studied the way her hair was pulled into a bun and speared with something that looked like a painted pencil, his shame was not great enough to halt his fantasy of sliding that thing out with his teeth and letting her thick black hair gush down her back. Beyond the bank of coffeepots, behind a swinging door, the metallic clunk of kitchen work sent Tomas into a mild panic. A man back there coughed.
Of course she was married, he told himself. Just goddamned look at her.
—Your daughter? the woman said, nodding toward the corner booth as she filled Tomas’s mug.
Tomas rubbed his beard, embarrassed. He’d been expecting an accent, but other than a certain softness and calm, the woman’s voice was as crisply generic as that of anyone else from the mountain West.
—Lydia, he said. Your son?
—Raj, she said.
—Little Flower?
—Little Flower.
The icy windows dripped.
Raj Patel was a sorrowful kid with a shaggy bowl of black hair and an array of polyester jumpsuits with built-in buckles that, from that day forward, would always remind Tomas of zookeeper outfits. Tomas would soon learn that the boy’s parents, Maya and Rohan Patel, were second-generation Indian Americans who had been running Gas ’n Donuts for over ten years. When they were teenagers in Southern California their relationship and eventual marriage had been carefully coordinated by both sets of parents—the families had been in the States long enough to avoid using the word arranged, though all parties involved knew that was exactly what it was—and ironically, the financial conditions of the marriage were precisely what allowed the young couple to move to Denver, far away from the reach of their families, to buy this deco gas station and replace its repair bays with an unassuming doughnut shop. For all of her immediate warmth, Tomas noticed during their early meetings that Maya’s eye contact was typically brisk, offered in passing as she moved between tasks, and when he met her husband, Rohan, he understood why. Whenever Rohan stepped out of the kitchen, his thick hair bursting against a hairnet, his thick gut bursting against a stained white apron, customers shifted up and down the counter and Tomas felt himself shrink. When he learned that Rohan had once chased an early-morning burglar away from the flower shop next door, and another time had grabbed the old Montgomery Ward .22 rifle the previous owner had left in a storage closet—good for popping rats in the alley, but not much else—and thrown himself into the thick of a carjacking at the stoplight up the block, receiving for his valor a zipper of stitches and a reputation as the neighborhood’s cranky guardian angel, he felt better about letting Lydia hang around his shop.
From the start, Lydia and Raj found great companionship in their after-school routine of walking together from Little Flower to Gas ’n Donuts, where they would frost and sprinkle their own doughnuts, then sit in the corner booth, playing games or drawing with markers or quietly reading with their sneakers bumping beneath the table. After an hour or so, they’d finish their little bottles of OJ with an enthusiastic Cheers!, then complete the triangle of their journey by walking the eight or so blocks to the library to do homework and explore the stacks until their parents were done for the day. Early on, Raj and Lydia had been escorted by a parent on these walks—usually by Maya, who held their hands without realizing the enormous maternal comfort she emanated, especially to the motherless Lydia—but from about third grade on the kids were given permission to walk alone, as long as they promised to stick together and always announce their arrival with an immediate phone call to whichever parent they’d just left behind. Tomas, who had a hard enough time remembering to pack Lydia’s lunch box, not to mention her various vaccinations and school events, particularly appreciated the safety and efficiency of this system. He would sometimes look up from the library window and see the two kids walking arm-in-arm and his gratitude would nearly floor him. He was single and reclusive and growing grayer by the hour, yet never in his life had he ever imagined feeling such a fullness of being.
His daughter was happy. His daughter was his life.
And then, deep in the spidery crawl space below Gas ’n Donuts, between mildewed soil and a crusty concrete foundation, a cross-threaded water pipe that had been dripping into the ground for years gradually eroded far enough to begin to trickle, then to drizzle, then to fully flood the rank earthen space. At its worst, the mud pooling below the shop seemed thick enough to swallow them all.