Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ravi waits to open the Catcher rough cut until the following Tuesday afternoon, around when he’d usually be getting ready to head to Kennedy for book club.
The contract was reviewed, DocuSigned, and sent off to Jami without a single word exchanged between him and Yael.
The audio file has been taunting him from his email attachments since it reached his inbox. It’s seemed too painful to download it.
But now, with his thumb itching reflexively to swipe to TransitTracker, it’s clear that he’s going to be in pain tonight regardless. Might as well be productive about it.
He clicks Download, watches the blue line trace out the circle as it saves, then drops the file into his audio editing software. A deep breath, and he presses play.
The first phrase, a simple “In today’s episode, I’ll be discussing” that he’s heard from her so many times before, makes the hairs on his neck stand on end.
It’s difficult, listening now, to believe he ever didn’t realize this was her.
The edges are sanded off, her usual variations in speed tamped down, her vocal fry diluted, even her pitch is a whole level deeper.
But her cadence, her word choice, the way she ends up on tangents about sociological research when she’s just trying to land a joke? All Yael.
It makes him desperate to hear her real voice. It makes him mourn the fact that he won’t.
Ravi passes a throat clear followed by several seconds of dead air, and she’s halfway through her next point before he realizes. He has to scrub back and forth for a minute to figure out where he needs to start the split.
He rubs at the nape of his neck, telling himself to focus.
This one will be the first with the Renegade name attached to it.
It’ll be featured on their website, plastered across their socials.
The tens of thousands of listens Yael has rightfully accrued will multiply in an instant, and she can’t afford for him to be sloppy.
By the time Suresh and Mia get home, he’s only halfway through. He gives up for the night, hitting save and powering down his computer before heading downstairs to be swallowed up in the whirlwind that is Mia and give Suresh the space to make dinner.
Last night was the first since they returned from the vineyard that Mia hadn’t shown up at his door looking for comfort.
He’s happy she was able to sleep on her own.
He’s happy she came to him in the first place, because it was the reminder he needed for why he’ll spend tonight at home, miserable, instead of at book club with Yael. The misery will fade soon. He hopes.
He wins and loses at Connect Four a few times before relenting to Mia’s demands to rewatch one of the Field Museum videos (they’ve already exhausted the content available), and then they sit down around the table for Suresh’s curried channa and roti they got frozen from the closest Indian grocer.
“How was your day?” Suresh asks, passing Ravi an uncapped beer.
He’s surprised by the question—Suresh has grunted and three-word-answered his way through every dinner this week. “It was okay,” he says slowly. “I did some editing on the podcast I told you about.”
“I listened to it,” Suresh says before taking a bite.
Ravi tries not to gape at him. “And?”
“It’s funny,” he says. “I see why you like working on it.”
“Yeah,” Ravi says, watching Suresh take another bite. “How was your day?”
“Too many meetings, but otherwise good.”
“That’s … good.” Suresh keeps chewing, like the entire past week never happened. After a while, Ravi turns his attention to Mia. “How was your day, Mia?”
“Chew and swallow before you answer,” Suresh reminds her. She pouts at him but does as she’s told.
“So good. I counted all the way to one hundred, and I’m the first in the whole class to do it,” she says.
Ravi feels himself light up, and when he glances at Suresh, he sees the same expression on his face. “That’s amazing! Can you show us?”
She does. It’s slow, but she gets there without any major breaks. They give her a standing ovation, and she slides out of her seat to do the curtsy she learned from her short-lived stint in toddler ballet.
They finish dinner, and Suresh plays nail salon with Mia while Ravi washes the dishes, relieved of his Mia duties for the night. While they go through the bedtime routine, Ravi changes into a T-shirt and joggers and heads back out to the couch for FIFA.
After the first game, Suresh appears in the living room, motioning for Ravi to remove his headphones. When he does, Suresh says, “Can we talk?”
“Sure,” Ravi says, and exits the online queue for the next game. He waits, but Suresh just stands there, chewing his bottom lip. “It’s early for her to be able to count that high, isn’t it?”
Suresh nods, smiling nervously. “Very early. She’s so smart for her age.”
“Fruit doh fall far,” Ravi says. Suresh nods again, looking embarrassed. “You doing alright?”
“Can I sit?” Ravi gestures to the cushion next to him, and Suresh takes it, sitting stiffly. “I want to apologize for this week. I didn’t keep myself together the way I should have.”
Ravi sighs, rubbing his forehead. “Not something to be sorry for, Suresh. What Margot did to you—”
“I made my own choices,” Suresh interrupts.
“Yes, this weekend you did, and not all of them were good,” Ravi says. “But you didn’t make that choice in January. Margot did.”
Suresh swallows and clasps his hands together, working his thumb into his opposite palm. “She was always hesitant about marriage. Monogamy. But she said she was happy with me, and I thought it was enough. When Mia came, I was sure it was. I should have known.”
“Yuh cyah put that weight on yourself.”
“I should have known,” Suresh repeats, making eye contact with Ravi. The look in his eyes almost makes Ravi believe him.
“I wasn’t in your relationship, so I can’t know. Maybe there were some signs she was unhappy that you ignored. But I know you, Suresh. If you were blindsided, there weren’t enough.”
Suresh rolls his lips together, looking at his hands. “What do you think I should be sorry for?”
“I don’t know. But not for being sad when you have every reason to be.”
“You do know,” Suresh says.
And Ravi does, but he’s not sure how to say it.
Suresh, apparently, grows impatient. “I shouldn’t have let my emotions affect you.”
“That’s what you should apologize about,” Ravi spits out.
“What?”
“This thing you do, where you act like I’m some—some interloper. A stranger who isn’t part of the family dynamic. I moved to Portland for you and Mia,” Ravi says, his voice harsh but quiet, always aware of Mia asleep on the floor above. “I upended my life for you.”
Suresh grits his teeth. “I didn’t ask you to. I said just for a month, and then I could find someone—”
“I know you didn’t ask! But you would have done the same, and you know it.”
“You think you owe me,” Suresh says. “That why you here?”
Ravi drags his hands down his face, frustration pulsing through him. “I’m here because I want to be. My entire fucking family is in this house. Don’t you know that?”
“Not your entire family.”
Ravi stares at him, and he stares back. “The part that matters most.”
Suresh sucks his teeth. “Doh talk that way.”
Ravi props his elbows on his knees and drops his forehead into his hands. “You so schupid sometimes. If you thought about how I felt for one second, last weekend would have been a lot better for you.”
“What does that mean?” Suresh demands.
“You and Mia are the only ones who love me for who I am, unconditionally. And you know that. But you preach about family to me like I don’t understand its importance without you explaining it.
I know how important family is, Suresh! I go home every year, even though the head of our family denies my existence.
The only way I can stomach doing it is if I remind myself that my family can be complete in a different way.
That Dad’s word isn’t the beginning and end of it for me. ”
He lifts his head, and Suresh is looking at him, his jaw slack.
“I am exactly who you should have asked about how to help Mia through this,” Ravi says, “and you refused to listen to me at all.”
Suresh clenches his jaw. “She did better than I did,” he says.
“She did. But she also slept in my bed half the night this whole week.”
Suresh snaps his attention back toward Ravi, his eyes wide in disbelief. Whatever’s on Ravi’s face makes his expression shift to abject sadness. “I was trying to do the right thing for her,” he says, starting to tear up.
“I know you were.”
“I try to do the right thing for you, too.”
“I know you do. But I’m an adult, and right now I’m co-parenting with you, and you have to accept my help if you want it to work.”
“I’m sorry, Ravi. It’s been—It’s been a difficult year.” Suresh releases a breath, almost like a laugh, and wipes at his cheeks. “Oh Lord, now I’m sorry for crying, too.”
Ravi reaches out and squeezes Suresh’s shoulder. “You don’t need to be sorry for that.”
They’re quiet for a minute, then Suresh walks over to the TV stand and digs out a second controller. “Think I could still cut your tail?”
Ravi grins. “No. You out of practice, old man.”
They get through the first game without talking.
Ravi wins, but it’s closer than it should be given that Suresh hasn’t played in years.
During the second, Suresh starts to trash-talk him like he used to.
After the third, he gets up to get them beers from the fridge, and Ravi is struck by how long it’s been since they’ve done anything like this together.
When Ravi first moved here, Suresh was still too depressed to do much more than the bare minimum. But he got a little bit better after a couple of weeks, and they could’ve been doing this … maybe not nightly, but often.
They should’ve been.
Suresh settles back onto the couch. “You didn’t go to your reading club this week,” he says—a statement, not a question.
Ravi sighs. “I’m not going to be doing that anymore.”
“Oh?”
He takes a swig of his beer. “The librarian who runs the club and I…” He shakes his head, not sure what to say.
“You slept with her,” Suresh says, and it’s not lost on Ravi that this is exactly what he’d said to Suresh when he got back last week.
Ravi swallows, looking away. “I became friends with the woman from the podcast. Then more than friends, and we broke it off because neither of us thought we should be dating right now. I thought she lived on the East Coast, and I only knew her by her stage name. But it turns out that she was the librarian who runs the club, and I didn’t know until last weekend. Until after.”
“You were upset it was her?” Ravi shakes his head, and Suresh winces. “She was upset it was you,” he says.
“No.” Ravi closes his eyes, his heart aching in his chest. He’s not upset it was Yael. In a different world, she’d be everything he could ever want. “I can’t be somebody’s boyfriend right now.”
Suresh’s eyebrows lift. “Because of Mia? Because of me?”
“It’s not like that,” Ravi protests. “It’s just too much right now.”
“It cyah be like this, Ravi,” Suresh says. “You cyah be giving up your life for mine.”
“It’s not yours. It’s mine, too.”
Suresh’s eyes soften then, like he realizes this is part of what had upset Ravi earlier, and Ravi is grateful for it. “It is yours, but you can’t give this up. If you like her, you should be with her.”
“Would you date someone right now?”
“No,” Suresh admits. “But it’s different.”
“How?” Ravi asks, his voice cracking. “How is it different?”
Suresh stares at him for a moment, ready to argue. But he must not have anything to say, because eventually he takes a deep breath and turns his sights back on the screen, controller in hand.
Ravi is grateful for that, too.