Rosalie is silent, arranging pink peanuts around a stack of socks. Her face heats. It is inexcusable, she thinks, that the exchange agency failed to include this information.
“How terrible,” she says gently. “It must be very difficult not to have your father.”
The girl nods. There are two older sisters, she says, who help their mother and who looked after Nayana when she was younger. Her sisters and mother worked in a rice mill, but lost their jobs when the mill went automatic. Now they are in the city, where Nayana goes to a special girls’ school. Her family refuses to let her work. She is better than the boys in math and science, and they hope someday she will go to the polytechnic college and become an engineer, that she will move to America and bring them with her. This fulfillment of stereotype is exciting to Rosalie. The student will be, as she had hoped, an example of diligence and ambition to her own girls.
“That’s exactly what America is for,” she tells Nayana firmly. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t achieve your dreams here. You should start looking at colleges. I’ll help you with your applications when the time comes, and serve as a reference or sponsor, or whatever you need.”
Rosalie feels a swelling of thanks to God for choosing her as His servant for this task. Its significance is more than she can comfortably process, and she is humbled by it. She thinks with a knot in her throat of that mother, on the other side of the world—of the incredible flash of fortune that has sent her daughter to the United States. What a tangled gratitude that woman must feel. How awful to not be able to provide opportunities for her own children, to be forever occupied with the basics, with paying for sustenance, keeping the house from falling apart. Rosalie knows that she is among a lucky percentage of the world’s women whose husbands go to work and return.
Of course, there are drawbacks. Michael stays late at the hospital and is rarely home for dinner. You would think he was a martyr, the way he talks about sacrificing for the family. Obviously, she’d known life with a brain surgeon would be like this. She’d managed her expectations from the start, filled her days with activity. She is not the type of woman who depends on her husband for constant companionship and emotional fulfillment. The ideal wife of a professional is able to provide much of this for herself, and does not begrudge her husband the scraps of personal space he needs, the odd hour or two he takes in his workshop: a detached tool shed outfitted with hammers and wood, out of which no construction ever emerges.
Autumn progresses. Hannah is abandoned by her best friend; Rachel can’t shake off a clinger. Ethan falls on the field with another ACL tear, benched for the season. Rosalie scraps her varsity football column and rewrites it on sports injuries, the need to guard our children’s long-term health while promoting victory on the field. Noah and Nayana quietly ride bicycles around the neighborhood and collect bugs. It gladdens Rosalie to see that he has taken her under his wing. She is touchingly young, much less sophisticated than the girls in town. One evening, Rosalie notices that the door to the den is closed, but she cannot imagine her son being interested in a girl like this. Rosalie knocks and opens the door to find them sitting primly together, watching Nova.
For Halloween, Rosalie solicits Nayana’s help in creating the family costume. She has thought that, this year, they might all go as Bollywood stars. Nayana seems glad to accompany her to the fabric store, where they select jewel-toned silks and gold trim. After Nayana has finished her homework and the other children are visiting friends, they sew glittering saris and head scarves for the girls, tunics and turbans for Michael and the boys.
On Halloween, Rosalie reserves a table for eight at Gulliver’s. The other patrons look up from their meals as the Warrens enter like a dinner-theater performance troupe. Rosalie and Nayana giggle together, and Rosalie feels hot, as if in a spotlight. The boys position themselves at the table so that they face the football game on the television screens above the bar.
“Fifteen dollars for a burger?” Michael grumbles.
“Oh, we only go out a few times a year,” Rosalie says.
By the time the drinks and the plate of onion blossoms come, they have forgotten their costumes. Rebecca Lamb and her family stop by the table, her boys dressed halfheartedly as astronauts.
“You guys look amazing,” she exclaims, “even better than last year. What were you, crayons?”
The burgers come, and Nayana’s bland-looking penne primavera. The girl is especially talkative tonight, perhaps more at ease in East Asian garb. Hannah sits transfixed as she animatedly describes an amusement park near her home.