This had all happened in the past hour.
Cheryl was right: Ranjana deserved a treat. She took the brownie and bit off half of it. Cheryl’s eyes widened, and she half-rose out of her seat while a smile flickered on her face.
“What?” asked Ranjana after swallowing. There was a strange taste in her mouth—dense and plantlike.
“Bottoms up!” Cheryl said as she took the other half of the brownie and popped it into her mouth.
“Are these mint brownies?” Ranjana asked, though the flavor was clearly too rough to be mint.
“No—not mint.” Cheryl got out of her chair and flopped onto her bed. She lay on it as if she were about to make a snow angel.
Something slithered up Ranjana—a scent memory. Prashant ducking into the house on a Friday night in high school and hugging her briefly, then swerving upstairs to his room and shutting the door. “Cheryl. What was that?”
“Come and lie down on your bed. This is your celebration.”
“Cheryl. You didn’t.”
Ten minutes later, Ranjana felt as if her own mouth were telling her a story.
“It’s just that—I’m—he’s my husband, but even I don’t understand how he could do this to me. I do everything for him. I raised his son! I’ve done—I’ve—I deserve good things. And who knows what things he’s up to while I’m here?”
“You do deserve good things!” Cheryl said, several seconds or several minutes later. “You deserve all the good things in the world! You’re going to be a famous author.”
Even in her hazy state, Ranjana found these words unlucky. She rolled over, turning her back toward Cheryl, and shook her head. “No. No. I don’t want to curse myself. Just because she said she liked the pages doesn’t mean she’ll represent me.”
“Loved the pages—not liked them. She loved them. You’re as good as gold. You’re as good as gold!”
Suddenly, Cheryl was flailing around, almost dancing. “You’re as good as gold, good as gold!” Cheryl kept saying. Ranjana writhed with chuckles.
Obviously, she had never tried pot, but even in this state, she could see the appeal of being high. Her limbs were loose, her head expansive, and she allowed herself to be legitimately, unobtrusively excited about the prospect of being represented by Christina Sherman. She had worked hard and endured so much. She deserved to be successful! She deserved to be seen as an important and unique writer! All the other people at this conference were slow-moving farm animals compared to her, a literary steed, and she would charge ahead, hair billowing in the wind, and claim the success that she deserved.
“Fuck Mohan,” her mouth was telling her. “Fuck him.”
“Yes—fuck him!” Cheryl screamed. “Fuck him! Wait a second—what did your husband even do?” Cheryl asked.
Ranjana realized that she had begun her tirade against Mohan without having divulged the details of his transgression. The pot was making her jump forward in her thoughts. This is what pot did, apparently: it made you race toward a lofty conclusion, leaving all nuance behind.
Ranjana found this luxurious. She was glad that she hadn’t stated outright what Mohan had done because, truthfully, she didn’t want Cheryl to know the truth. Ranjana was hot off a great success—Christina’s interest in her writing—and to reveal the cracks in her marriage was to relinquish this crown and open herself to Cheryl’s criticism. Instead of letting the pot push the truth out of her, she would harness its comforting messiness and roll on this bed, rub the tough fabric of the comforter against her cheek and move her legs as if riding a unicycle. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing through the knots until some of the strands came free.
THERE WERE OVER TWENTY GAS STATIONS within five miles of Mohan’s house, and they were all owned by bastards.
The stations in his area collaborated to plot against everyone. They knew how to control prices so that no customer could ever feel satisfied. Constant innovations in wireless technology made it all the easier for them to communicate with each other. Mohan lay awake some nights and imagined the cellular signals flying like silver bats through the air, all of them working to mask which station had the lowest gas price at any given point in time.
Perhaps this was true of establishments everywhere. When Mohan visited other parts of America, he looked at the crooked black letters or red digital clicks of their gas station billboards and wondered if the men who controlled them were equally odious.
Today, the first four stations he visited were all on the same intersection. He glided among their entrances. The Sunoco and the Marathon were both down five cents, whereas the Shell was down seven and the Mobil down eight. Although they were all lower, they were still too high. Then he drove to the BP, which he always assumed, ever since that catastrophic oil spill years ago, to have the lowest price. Nope. So then he drove another mile to the Speedway, which, down ten cents, was not a blessing from God but at least tolerable.
During the first year of their marriage, Ranjana would join him in this pursuit. In fact, she had been more enthusiastic than he. They would pass a billboard, their necks craning in sync, and she would chuckle with exasperation or delight as the price revealed itself to be too high or acceptable. Mohan would think of how valuable pennies could be: they could lead to a joyful game shared by spouses.
It wasn’t this fact alone that propelled him to love the game so dearly. It was that Ranjana was participating in a game that he had created.
When Prashant was a baby, he would tap his toy car against the window and cry out at the billboards. When he was a teenager, he began to voice his disapproval. By this time, Ranjana had grown tired of the game, too, and although mother and son didn’t always see eye to eye, Mohan could tell that their shared annoyance with the game was one of their most enduring bonds.
Mohan thought that his wife and son were very, very wrong to ignore his obsession with gas stations. After all, one of the main things that anyone discussed in polite conversation was gas prices. The local news, the national news, people in line at the grocery store—they talked about this subject as often as they did the weather.