Chapter 21
chapter 21
Naomi’s fingers were flying over her laptop keyboard when her phone vibrated against her kitchen table. Normally she ignored incoming calls and messages when working after hours, but when she saw her parents’ landline flash across the screen, she picked up.
“Hey, Dad.”
“It’s Mom, Peanut.”
Naomi sat up straight. “What’s wrong? Is Dad okay?”
“I’m fine, he’s fine, everyone’s fine,” Sue Kelly assured her, and Naomi’s fingers twitched to return to the keyboard. “I thought I’d check in.”
Why? Check-ins were her stepfather’s domain. Sue might swoop in for a word or two if she could pull herself away long enough from whatever project or hobby she was currently obsessed with. But when Sue didn’t launch into a long-winded, detailed overview of her newest venture into self-discovery, a faint alarm bell rang in Naomi’s brain.
“What’s up?”
“You tell me. Eric has mentioned a few times that you’ve been very busy.”
Naomi had been keeping her stepfather updated on every little detail that she was sure, thanks to Dev, would win Gia over. From the peacock-pattern mugs, a subtle tribute to Gia’s favorite animal, to the splashes of plum accents throughout, Gia’s color of choice, Naomi’s confidence was growing as they approached the bazaar’s deadline.
“He says you’ve been working too hard,” Sue said, parroting exactly what her stepfather had mentioned during their last few phone calls.
“I only have two weeks left.” Naomi’s finger tapped against the edge of her laptop keyboard. She had twelve days, to be exact.
“And how much is there left to do?”
Ignoring the touch of urgency in Sue’s voice, Naomi opened the master spreadsheet that haunted her dreams. Many of the larger tasks were checked off; however, she was in the final period, when subtle details and snowballing hiccups liked to play offense. And Naomi would roll over and die at Gia’s feet before she let things go into overtime.
“We’ll get there.” These were the same words she repeated silently to herself when, in the middle of the night, she awoke in a cold sweat at the thought that the Fisher Chrome X-9 faucet she had chosen for the bazaar might go on backorder.
Sue paused, and Naomi heard Eric’s low baritone in the background. When he fell silent, Sue was back. “Which park had you wandering around like a Disney princess and tree hugging this morning?”
Hearing what was unmistakably her stepfather’s words fall from her mother’s lips ignited something bitter and fiery in the center of Naomi’s chest. Why did Sue even care? Up to this point, she’d shown little interest in her daughter’s career, much less how she spent her free time on her days off.
“I’m not sure,” Naomi replied, vaguely remembering that she hadn’t stepped foot outside today. When her peripheral noted that six minutes had passed since beginning this phone call, Naomi cleared her throat. “Anyway, I should get goi—”
“We’re worried about you,” Sue said. “You’re not acting like yourself.”
“Why? Because I didn’t hug a few trees today?” Uh-oh . That had come out snappier than intended. And from Sue’s sharp intake of breath, her mother agreed.
“Working with this family hasn’t been good for you,” Sue said, speaking over Eric’s muffled voice in the background. “I don’t know what you were thinking, messing with these kinds of people. Nothing you do will ever be good enough for them.”
Messing around. As if she were doing this on a whim and not building her career. Not busting her ass to make ends meet. But as Sue continued her tirade, Naomi sank into her seat instead. She’d heard it all before; had been on the receiving end of this rant her entire life. Although it had been a long time since Sue went off like this, the fact that her daughter had intentionally left the privacy and anonymity of a small, homogenous town to live among the community she had chosen to run away from twenty-six years ago had to chafe.
“My work will be good enough,” Naomi said.
“You aren’t cut from the same cloth, Naomi.”
The same cloth, indeed. The Mukherjees were a rich tapestry, centuries of finely woven threads pulled tight, infallible. Naomi was threadbare, patchy at best.
Both Sue and Dev had warned her about not getting swept away by the South Asian community, and that was exactly what had happened. Somewhere along the way, though, things had shifted in a way that popped a kernel of uncertainty in Naomi’s chest.
Something else was driving Naomi forward now, something that sandwiched her lungs whenever she thought of Gia’s face upon seeing her renovated business. Would Dev’s hand find hers as Gia took in the newly painted walls, gleaming surfaces, and heart-wrenching accents that breathed life and love into the café? What would Gia say then? What would Dev say about her work?
About her ? Naomi shivered. Imagine if she let that little bomb drop to Sue.
In the background, Eric’s calming monotone grew in volume, and after a faint rustling, Sue relinquished the phone. Naomi listened to her stepfather clear his throat into the speaker, the gruff scratch of his throat from over seven hundred kilometers away a soothing balm after Sue’s litany.
“Are you all right?” His voice was so gentle that Naomi’s heart quivered, reminding her of his clumsy hands fumbling for the pink box of Barbie Band-Aids whenever the tiniest of scrapes brought tears to her eyes. “I know your mother kind of lost her cool, but she’s worried about you. We both are.”
It was tempting to reassure Eric that he needn’t worry, how her spare time was in the hands of someone she was interested in, someone who was making the unbearably long days bearable…even while sometimes being adorably unbearable himself.
But with Sue hovering in the background, Naomi wasn’t interested in signing her death sentence tonight.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Are you sure, Peanut? Because you don’t quite sound like yourself these days. This project sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”
“I said, I’m fine .” Eric fell silent and guilt flooded through Naomi. He did not deserve to be snapped at. She needed to do a better job at pretending everything was all right, that despite overdue bills, sleeping with her client, and a looming deadline for a very critical business owner, she was fine . Naomi was the master of holding it all together on the outside even in front of the people she cared for the most.
She loved her stepfather, but he would never understand what the bazaar’s success meant for her. He’d grown up in the kind of community where the librarian who set aside his favorite books was also in a crochet circle with his mother and had been taught Sunday school by his grandmother. There had never been any doubt where Eric Kelly belonged in life, no uncertainty of where he fit and how. He was steady, dependable, and thoughtful, but he was also oblivious to what it was like to be on the outside looking in.
He was a lot like Dev, in a way.
“I’m fine,” Naomi repeated with a determination that didn’t invite further discussion.
Her stepfather’s injured tone acknowledged that he heard her loud and clear. “Okay, sweetheart. I’ll leave you to it. Just…Take care of yourself, all right? Your mother and I are worried.”
Naomi’s lower lip trembled. She wanted to apologize, but what if she said too much, revealed the darkest corners inside her, parts of her that she could barely bring herself to flicker a light on? No, she couldn’t unload that on her stepfather right now. Not when the rebrand was almost done and she was so close. Instead, Naomi said her goodbyes and forced her attention back to the laptop.
When her phone vibrated again, Naomi spared her cell only the briefest of glances, so determined was she not to give into distractions again.
However, when she caught sight of Dev’s name, she opened his text message.
Dev: I think I’m in your neighborhood. Can I stop by?
Naomi’s eyes widened as paper-thin vulnerability fluttered along the edges of something thick and sweet low in her belly. Pleasure.
A few minutes later, a knock sounded at her door, interrupting Naomi’s desperate attempt to tidy up. Naomi abandoned a half-folded throw blanket and flew to the door.
“I thought we were meeting at the bazaar?” she said as she let him in.
Dev’s sharp brown eyes moved around her small one-bedroom apartment. She had forgotten how observant he could be and felt herself shrinking a little as she wondered what her apartment—nestled on the second floor of a tired building in a less affluent Kelowna neighborhood—would look like to someone like him.
Don’t let him see your uncertainty , she reminded herself as she notched her chin upward, as if the thrift store throw rugs and chipped laminate kitchen countertops didn’t bother her in the least. She moved to sit behind her laptop with a dismissive wave at the apartment. “I just need to finish some emails. Feel free to snoop.” As if she wouldn’t be watching his every move from behind the laptop she had yet to pay off.
Dev nodded and moved into her small living room, which was a mismatch of secondhand furniture and show pieces gifted to her from loyal service providers she had met during her corporate days. Her apartment was colorful and cluttered, and it lacked the understated qualities that belied a lifetime of taste and deep pockets; it was the complete opposite of how Dev had grown up.
“Are these yours?” Dev asked, holding up a few books from her bookshelf.
Naomi squinted in his direction and ducked her head when she saw the titles in his hand. They were Indian cookbooks, ones she had purchased recently on a whim but had not yet tried.
“Yes.”
Dev grinned. “I thought you didn’t grow up eating this stuff?”
He had been envious when she had revealed that her mother’s knowledge of cooking anything, least of all Indian food, had been comical at best. Dev had seemed enamored with the idea of a lifetime of canned soup, grilled sandwiches, and burgers, unaware that such foods had barely satiated her craving for a home she didn’t know.
“Sometimes I crave a big, fat gulab jamun. Don’t you?”
“Believe it or not, I do,” Dev said with a chuckle.
Dev moved to Naomi’s living room end table and examined the collection of framed photographs there. “Who is this?”
Naomi craned her neck, but the arm of the sofa blocked her view. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“This guy standing beside you at graduation.”
“That’s my dad.”
Dev’s eyes rose in surprise and, belatedly, Naomi realized she had never mentioned that her stepfather was white. “My stepdad,” she admitted. “He’s my stepdad.”
“You never mentioned…” Dev trailed off. “What about your dad?”
“I never got a chance to know him.”
She could tell from the downward turn of Dev’s lips and his eyes clouding over that he was assuming the worst. “I’m sorry, Naomi.”
There was no way to casually explain that her biological father wasn’t part of her life because he had shown zero interest in doing so after abandoning her when she was a toddler as if it still didn’t bother her twenty-three years later, so Naomi settled for a shrug and trained her eyes back to her laptop, trying not to type too aggressively and failing miserably. She could feel Dev’s eyes on the side of her head for several long moments before he shuffled to a second bookcase stuffed beside her TV.
“Someone likes Keanu Reeves,” he murmured. “You have…Wait. Hang on.” Dev slid a DVD case off the shelf and waved it at her. “ Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham ? Really?”
Naomi’s cheeks heated. It was the same Bollywood movie he had mentioned at Aashi’s house, a title she had committed to memory after the elderly lady’s suggestive song and shimmy. “I was curious.”
“Did you watch it?”
“I…I haven’t had the time,” she replied. Or, at least, she hadn’t had the time to watch more than the first half hour of a three-and-a-half-hour movie. Still, it filled her with a strange sense of purpose knowing she would finish the movie one day—and maybe try her hand at churning out an Indian dish from scratch. She could learn. And check things off the invisible cultural bucket list she kept adding to in her head.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Dev said.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that, culturally, you get to pick and choose what you want to be a part of. No one is demanding anything from you or telling you what you want.”
If he only knew. Naomi pretended to examine her screen as she chewed her lip. Without realizing it, he was offering her the perfect segue to confess her desire to connect with any semblance of culture. To discover the Bengali side of herself, if such a thing even existed. But how did one express a need to feel grounded to a person who felt suffocated six feet under?
Besides, at this point, the truth was embarrassing. Admitting she was jealous of his large, meddling family and the adherence to a culture that was, yes, overbearing, but also rich, and meaningful, and beautiful. Her envy was as silly as a tall, proud fir tree longing to be cut down and dragged into someone’s home to be trimmed, decorated, and live out its days on display for one month, maybe two max.
But at least that tree would be surrounded by family and know its purpose.
“The best part is you’re in complete control of your fate,” Dev added, sitting down on her couch and leaning back with his hands folded behind his head. “For example, you might decide to master Garba and go on to become the best dancer out there. But whether you attend every Garba or never attend again, no one will care. No one expects anything from you. That must feel so good.”
Naomi’s heart plummeted. She knew that Dev was trying to compliment her situation and that he had no idea how he sounded, but she heard exactly what he wasn’t saying. She could hone her skills, try her best, and attend events, but, in the end, no one would care. There were no expectations for someone who would never truly belong, who would always be on the outside, face pressed against some grimy window.
She would never be enough.
“Are you spending the night here?” As soon as the words fell from her lips, Naomi winced. She sounded impatient and accusatory.
Dev sat up straight, his forehead wrinkling. “Is that okay? I don’t mean to presume. I don’t have to if you don’t want me to. Like, I want to but not if you don’t want me to. I…”
As Dev babbled—his eyes wide and hands flat against his thighs, fingers splayed—Naomi softened at the sight of him clearly panicking with no clue how to recover. It was endearing and, even though he had said all the right words to pluck at the wrong strings, she wanted to rescue him. To ease his discomfort. She rose from the table and sat beside him.
“I’d like for you to stay,” she said, placing her hand on his leg, which had begun to bounce.
He relaxed back on the couch immediately and offered her a relieved smile complete with the shy wink of his dimples. At least, Naomi decided as she brushed a chaste kiss on his right dimple while trying not to give in to the bitterness that had soured the moment earlier, if she couldn’t win with the South Asian community, at least she could win at this.