“I don’t know.” I get up and set the table for two, not the usual three. I need to stop noticing details like this.
“How was your day? As bad as you expected?” My mom kisses me on my head and then decides I need a hug too.
“Not really. I mean, it wasn’t good.” I don’t tell her I skipped class. No need to freak her out. “But you were right. I needed to go. Yours?”
“I kicked ass, took names, even landed a new account. Not bad for a Monday.”
“That’s cool,” I say, and we toast with our glasses.
“I need to up my game on the financial front.” Wrinkles I haven’t noticed before bracket her mouth. She shouldn’t have to up her game. She already works too hard as it is. Bangs on her laptop after dinner and dashes off emails late into the night. When I was younger and brattier, I used to complain that she loved her work more than she loved me. Now that I’m older, I realize that’s not true. My mother is just one of those people you miss, even when she’s sitting right in front of you.
“I didn’t think about the money thing,” I say, and my stomach cramps with guilt. Soon there will be my college tuition, and what about when I leave? My mom will come home every day to this big empty house. A team of three knocked down to two, and then, finally, just one. Will she sell this place? I hope not.
“Don’t worry. No one’s going to starve. But you know what’s really stressing me out? How do I know when to change the oil in the car? Or what the name of our home insurance company is? And all our online passwords. I don’t have any of them,” my mom says. “Your name? Birthday? I feel completely in over my head. Work I can handle. It’s the rest—it’s real life—that’s the problem.”
I think about how my mom doesn’t really have lots of people around to help other than me. My grandparents retired and moved back to Delhi like a million years ago. She and her parents have this complicated relationship anyway. When my mom was a kid, her parents did everything they could to make sure she assimilated into American culture—paid for her to go to a fancy-pants, mostly white private school they could barely afford, even packed PB&J in her lunch box because the other kids used to tease her that her Indian food was too stinky. The way she tells it, they raised her as an American and then were surprised and resentful when she didn’t turn out to share their old-school values. I’m pretty sure “old-school values” in this case actually means “not cool with the fact she fell in love and married a white dude,” because otherwise, she’s totally on board with the rest of their beliefs—well, except for the fact that she’s a straight-up, unapologetic carnivore and gets her hair cut and colored every six weeks. Still, we go to gurdwara in Glen Rock one Sunday a month, and my dad used to come with us sometimes, though less for a religious awakening and more for the homemade Indian food, which admittedly, now that I’m old enough to have a choice in the matter, is why I go too. At my grandmother’s request, my mom keeps in touch with all the relatives, even though they are in Delhi and Vancouver and London and distantly related and kind of a pain in the ass. And though I’m not quite fluent, my mom has taught me enough Punjabi that I can get by. My mother may be American-born, but she’s never forgotten we’re Indian too.
Everyone pretends things are okay with my impossible-to-please grandparents—we go to visit them in Delhi every other year, though my dad always stayed behind because “he had to work.” We pretended this was true and that it had nothing to do with the fact that my grandparents didn’t approve of him. Whenever my mom talks to Bibiji on the phone, she always puts on a voice I associate with her work, the advertising-executive voice. My mom’s conversations with her parents have mostly consisted of a recitation of our small accomplishments—my grades, my mom’s landing an account, my dad getting a local business award—as if these things are part of some campaign pitch that she made the right choices. And whenever I wear a lengha or a salwar kameez for some second cousin twice removed’s birthday party, which requires three hours in the car to the middle of Pennsylvania, my mother makes sure to take a picture and email it to Bibiji immediately. See, she seems to want to say, nothing’s been lost here. I’m passing it all along.
Here’s the sad and horrifying part: The second I put on my Indian clothes, an alert goes out to her parents, yet when my dad died my mom didn’t even call them until the day after the funeral. My mother explained to me that she knew they were traveling to a wedding that weekend and couldn’t get back to the United States in time, so there was no point messing up their plans. Honestly I think my mom didn’t want to know if they would come to pay their respects.
Of course I like to believe they would have. They may not have approved of my mom marrying my dad, but they’re not monsters. They’re just backwards. And, okay, a little bit racist. Oddly enough, though they may not like the fact that I’m half white, they always compliment me on the color of my skin. So fair, Bibiji always says, like that’s a wonderful, important thing, the fact that I’m a couple of shades lighter than my mother. And I can see you enjoy your food.
“I’ll help you figure it all out,” I say to my mother. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, honey, don’t say that. It’s going to be fine. You have nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
I make myself busy dishing out the food, spoon out huge piles onto our plates. There are people who don’t eat when they are sad, who lose their appetite and get crazy skinny. My mom and I are not those people.
“I love you, Mommy,” I say. As soon as the words are out, I feel bad again, because it makes her eyes fill. I want her to know that I realize just how lucky I got in the mother department. That if I had to pick anyone in the whole world to go through this with, to have as a mom, it would be her. Only her. This is partially grief talking. Before all this, my mom often annoyed the crap out of me. She’s master of the subtle criticism disguised as a suggestion: Why don’t you straighten your hair? Don’t you think your nails would look so much better if you didn’t bite them? That shirt is a little frumpy, no? Now, though, I feel stupid for caring about that sort of thing. She could die tomorrow. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“No. Good crying, I promise,” she says, blotting under her eyes with a paper towel. It doesn’t look like good crying. She looks on the verge of unraveling into a mess of tears and snot. Nothing like the woman she must have been at work today: fierce and tucked-in and totally under control. “I’m just so grateful that I have you, Kit.”
I know she doesn’t mean for her words to sting, but they do.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I promise, and hold up my finger for a pinky swear.
“A whole month without him,” she says, ignoring my outstretched finger. “How is that even possible?”