Chapter 4 #2
“I looked them up online after your text about India.
They're gorgeous. There's a shop in Toronto, Devi's Silk House. I already bookmarked it for the next time I visit you.” She takes a sip from her mug with an expression of absolute serenity.
“So, tell me about the family. What am I working with here?”
“You're not working with anything. You're not coming to India.”
“Not this time. But eventually. Once you’ve enticed the boy with your boyish charms, and it's real.” She says it with the unshakeable confidence of a woman who has decided how the story ends and is simply waiting for the characters to catch up. “Now tell me about his mother.”
I tell her. I tell her about Meera Kapoor, about the estate, about the astrologer, about Dev the cardiac surgeon with the spectacular cheekbones.
I tell her about the aunties and the extended family and the eighty-person engagement dinner.
My mom listens with her chin on her hand, her eyes getting progressively wider.
“So, she hired a professional astrologer,” my mom says slowly, “to check if this other man's stars are compatible with your boy's stars.”
“Yeah.”
“And she booked a caterer for eighty people.”
“Yep.”
“Before asking Arjun what he wants.”
“That's the gist.”
My mother's expression goes through a very interesting sequence of emotions.
Surprise. Bewilderment. Something that might be reluctant respect for the operational logistics.
And then, settling into her features like a weather system moving in across a lake, a steely determination that I recognize from every parent-teacher conference, every hockey tournament, every single moment in my life when Brenda Welling decided that her kid was going to be okay and heaven help anyone who got in the way.
“You call me,” she says, pointing at the camera. “Every day you're there. If things get rough, you call me. And you tell Arjun…” She pauses. “You tell him that Brenda from Huntsville says he's welcome at the lake anytime. No astrologer required.”
I have to put the phone down for a second and press my face into Oliver's fur, because my mom is the best human being alive and I refuse to cry on FaceTime before 7 a.m.
“Okay,” I say, when I've pulled myself together. “I gotta go. I need to buy a suit. Arjun said they have a guy who will make me one, but I still want to have one ready just in case.”
“A suit! Casey, you look so handsome in a suit. Send me pictures. Send me all the pictures! I love you. Oh, and feed Oliver; he looks like he’s getting too skinny again. Call me tonight.”
“Love you, Ma.”
I hang up. Oliver licks my face. I sit on my couch in my Kensington Market apartment, with my seventeen browser tabs about Indian engagement customs and Rajasthani weather and sari-draping tutorials, and I let myself feel it for a minute.
The terror. The hope. The aching, ridiculous tenderness for Arjun, who clasps his hands behind his back to hide his tremors and has green eyes that look like they belong in an art museum.
I spend the rest of the morning showering, getting dressed in something that isn't covered in dog hair (a losing battle, but I still make the effort), and scrolling through the dossier preview Arjun sent as a teaser.
By the time the shops on Queen West are open, I've kissed Oliver on his enormous head, told him to guard the apartment, and headed out into the frozen Toronto morning to buy a suit.
The suit shopping is a disaster.
I know this going in, because suit shopping has been a disaster for me since I was fourteen years old, when I hit six feet and my shoulders decided to pursue their own independent growth trajectory.
Off-the-rack suits do not fit me. They’ve never fit me.
The shoulders are too tight, or the chest pulls, or the jacket fits but the sleeves make me look like I'm bracing for a flood.
I once tried on a suit at The Bay and the salesperson looked at me with an expression of genuine professional grief.
I go to three stores.
Store one: A mid-range American chain-store menswear place on Queen West. The salesperson takes one look at me, looks at his rack of size forty-four regulars, looks back at me, and says, “We could try the big and tall section.” The big and tall section has one suit in my size range.
It is olive-green. It has shoulder pads that make me look like a CFL linebacker. I leave.
Store two: A higher-end shop in Yorkville.
The salesperson here is more optimistic.
He pulls a navy fifty-two long, helps me into the jacket, steps back, tilts his head, and says, “The chest is... working. The shoulders are... ambitious.” The pants make it halfway up my thighs and stop with the definitiveness of a load-bearing wall. I leave.
Store three: A tiny, cluttered family-owned tailor shop on Spadina that a nurse at the hospital recommended once upon a time.
The man behind the counter looks to be at least seventy years old, four-foot-eleven, and looks at me over his glasses with the calm assessment of someone who has personally wrestled with every body type the human species has to offer.
“Wedding?” he asks.
“Engagement. Sort of. It's complicated.”
“It always is.” He walks around me in a slow circle, pulling a measuring tape from around his neck with simple confidence. He measures my chest, my shoulders, my arms. He makes a small, knowing “hmm” sound. “Big boy. Hockey?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“The shoulders. The thighs. I've dressed half of the Marlies. You need a custom cut.” He pats my arm. “Come back tomorrow afternoon. I'll have something for you. What colour?”
“I don't know. Something... good? Something that looks like I belong next to someone really elegant?”
He looks at me for a long moment, his eyes softening behind his glasses. “Charcoal. Trust me.”
I give him a deposit, and I walk back out onto Spadina feeling slightly less like I’m walking to my own funeral and slightly more like I might, conceivably, pull this off.
The rings are harder than the suit.
I know this going in, because a suit is just fabric and measurements and a seventy-year-old man on Spadina who pats your arm and tells you to trust him.
A ring is a promise. Even a fake promise is still a circle of metal that goes on someone's finger and stays there, and there's something about the permanence of a circle that makes my chest do complicated things I am not prepared to unpack on a Monday afternoon on Queen Street West.
I've been walking. The cold is brutal, the kind of Toronto February cold that crawls inside your jacket and sets up camp in your bones, and my ears are burning and my nose is running, and I should go home. I should go home and eat another Uncrustable and lie on the couch with Oliver and stare at the ceiling and quietly spiral about the fact that I’m flying to India in just a couple days to pretend to be engaged to a man whose forearms I think about with a frequency that would concern a licensed psychologist.
But I told Arjun I'd handle the rings. And Casey Welling doesn’t say he'll handle something and then not handle it. That’s the one thing I have going for me in this entire catastrophic operation: I’m reliable.
I’m the guy who shows up. I’m the guy who splints the fracture and mops the vomit and holds the crying kid and says, “I've got you,” and means it every single time.
I will not be the guy who shows up to a fake engagement in India without rings.
So I walk into a jewelry shop.
It's a small place, tucked between a vintage bookstore and a ramen restaurant that I've been meaning to try for months because someone at the hospital told me their Tonkotsu is transcendent.
The shop window is modest, just a few pieces on dark velvet, nothing flashy, nothing that screams money or high fashion.
It looks like the kind of place where things are made by hand, with care, by someone who pays attention to the details.
The bell above the door chimes. The shop is warm after the street, and it smells like metal polish and something faintly woody, and the cases are filled with rings and bracelets and pendants arranged with the kind of thoughtful precision that reminds me, with a pang, of the way Arjun arranges his surgical tray.
The woman behind the counter looks up. She is somewhere in her fifties, with reading glasses pushed up on her head and silver rings on every finger and the calm, steady energy of someone who works with her hands all day and has made peace with the world's chaos.
“Hi,” I say. “I need rings. Two of them. Engagement rings.”
She smiles. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. It's, uh.” I almost say it's fake.
The words are right there, sitting on my tongue, ready to launch.
But something stops me. Maybe it's the warmth of the shop.
Maybe it's the way she's looking at me, patient and kind, the way people look at you when they can tell you're nervous and they're giving you room to be nervous in.
Maybe it's the fact that saying it's fake out loud, in a place that smells like hand-polished metal and care, feels like a lie that's bigger than the one I'm actually telling.
“It's complicated,” I say instead.
“It always is,” she says, and I almost laugh, because that is the exact same thing the tailor on Spadina said, and apparently every small business owner in Toronto has arrived at the same philosophical conclusion about love.
“I'm Maria,” she says. “Tell me about the other person.”
And this is where it gets dangerous. Because Maria asks the question simply, the way you'd ask someone what they want for dinner, and my brain, which has been running a background process labelled ARJUN KAPOOR: COMPREHENSIVE EMOTIONAL CRISIS for approximately two years, takes this as an invitation to crash the entire system.