Five Days Left (15 page)

She was already sacrificing her husband to the cause of the children of Detroit, she spat at him, and her bitterness was a living thing. He spent more time at Franklin than he did at home, more time planning practices than he did date nights. She had given enough. She was allowed to keep her dream for herself.

Even after she had let him come back to their bed, it had been another two weeks before she would let him touch her.

Mara

Mara wiped a hand over her eyes, put her phone back in her purse and looked out at the playground. There was a whirring sound as the tinted window beside her head started to lower. “No!” She ducked forward, head on her knees. “I mean, no, thanks. I don’t want her to see—”

She heard Harry turn in his seat and she imagined he must be staring at her, wondering what was the matter with her. All the glaring and hissing and now this, complete insanity. But he said nothing, and she heard his seat creak as he turned to the front, another whir as he slid her window closed.

For fifteen minutes, they sat quietly, watching the kids at play.

The kid at play.

Laks climbed up the stairs to the top of the slide, zoomed to the bottom, climbed up again, over and over. The seat of her pink shorts was brown by the time she and Susan moved on to the tetherball pole. They shrieked as they swung for the ball and missed, swung and missed again. Next, they ran races from the pole to the climbing structure at the other end of the playground.

Mara wanted to call out, “Don’t run in flip-flops!” Remarkably, Laks managed to keep from nose-diving into the ground as she ran full tilt
with the flimsy pieces of rubber barely attached to her feet. Mara shook her head; she had tripped in hers several times today, walking slowly.

Minutes later, the little girls were on the slide again. Next, running to the monkey bars. And over to the swings, where they lay on their bellies and pretended to be Superman. And now the front of the girl’s shirt would match the seat of her pants, Mara thought. She could only imagine how the bottoms of the child’s feet looked. She had let Laks talk her out of a bath the night before, and far too many other nights recently, because it had gotten more difficult for Mara to change position from standing to kneeling and back to standing without losing her balance. And she hadn’t wanted to admit it to Tom. She would find an excuse to have him give Laks a bath tonight; those feet couldn’t go another day without warm water and soap. Really, after the start of April, a nightly bath should be nonnegotiable. Should she write that down, for Tom?

She had already dictated a long letter to him, and one to Laks. They were filed away on a locked drive on her laptop, ready to be printed on Sunday and left on Tom’s pillow for him to find when he returned from his run. She had considered leaving them a number of letters, one to read on each birthday, maybe. But then she heard a program on public radio about a mother who had done that very thing, leaving her daughter a letter to read each year, with various bits of motherly advice, and it had been more of a burden for the daughter than a gift. Each year, the daughter would read about what kind of life her mother had envisioned for her, what college major, what career, what kind of husband. If the mother’s proscription differed from the daughter’s reality, the girl would spend weeks in a guilty depression, worried she was letting her mother down. Or worse, resentful that her mother had burdened her with expectations based on who the girl was years ago, and not on who she had become. There was no room in the letters for her daughter to grow into her own person.

Mara wouldn’t do that to her daughter, or her husband. She would leave them each one letter to tell them how much she loved them, how
lucky she was to have been part of their lives for a brief, glorious time, how happy she would be for them no matter what they did next. And she wouldn’t write out too many instructions for Tom, she decided now, as Laks and Susan performed dramatic dismounts from their swings, faces red, hair matted with sweat, clothes and skin dusted with sand. She’d leave him a few tips, just as she might if she were leaving for a business trip—little logistical things that would make his life easier. But the big things, the Care and Feeding of Lakshmi, she would leave up to him. Let him give in to the bath-avoidance negotiations in early April or even mid-July. He would learn, when the girl’s morning body bowled him over the next day and her gritty feet left tracks in her sheets.

He would be fine, Mara told herself. He would mess up in the same ways she had, and maybe in some new ones. But he would be fine.

A whistle shrieked and the noise made Mara’s hand wave into the hard plastic door beside her. She swore under her breath as the swarm of kindergartners moved its way from the playground equipment over to the door of the school, where a playground attendant stood, arms directing them into a line. An airport worker on a runway. Rubbing her hand, she cursed silently again at her nervous system’s inability to deal with loud noises.

“That was fast,” Harry said. “Recess used ta be thirty minutes when I was a kid.”

“Same here,” she said, craning to find the clock on the dashboard. “Um, the meter stopped when you turned the car off. Could you put the fifteen minutes back on?”

“Yuh, I could.” But he didn’t.

“Harry, don’t you make your living by driving a cab?”

“Yuh, I do.”

“Well, here’s the thing, my friend. Cabdrivers make money by running the meter.”

“Huh.” He pretended to think about that for a bit. “Excellent tip. But this little detour ain’t gonna make or break me.”

“Well,” she said, “what if I wanted you to drive me straight here one day? Not as a detour, but a final destination? You’d let it run then, wouldn’t you? Or do I need to call someone else, if I want to do that? Someone who’ll let me pay.”

“You’d call another cabbie?” He stabbed an imaginary knife into his heart.

“Not unless I have to. I won’t have you driving me here for free.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Done.”

“You’ll run the meter?” She pointed to the machine.

“You’ll only call me?”

“Deal.” She smiled, extending a hand toward him.

“Deal.” They shook. Harry started the car, gave her a thumbs-up sign and a broad smile in the mirror and pulled away.

Harry stabbed a thick finger at his window as he pulled up in front of the house. “Looks like ya got some callers.”

Mara set cash for the fare on the console beside him before looking out her window to see her parents standing at the front door, Neerja holding a casserole dish, Pori a plastic bag with the telltale markings of Agarwal’s Indian Grocery.

“Ya havin’ a cover-dish party? Looks like you’ve got company and they brung dinner.”

“Nope, no cover-dish party. That’s my parents. They often find they’ve inadvertently made too much food. Always, conveniently, in an amount precisely enough for my family. I’m guessing they mistakenly bought entirely too much at the grocery store again, too.”

He shook his head and chuckled. “Shoo, they got the wrong daughter, didn’t they? They sure enough did not get the bring-me-dinner kinda daughter.”

Mara laughed. “You’re right about that. Only for some reason, they
haven’t figured out in forty-two years what you figured out in twenty-four hours.”

“Want me ta keep goin’?” He put his hand on the gearshift, ready to put the car into drive and pull away.

“Oh, no! And I shouldn’t have sounded so rude. They’re wonderful, and they mean well. But I was going to make dinner tonight. I am perfectly.” She brought a hand down hard on the seat. “Capable.” Another slam of her hand. “Of making. Dinner.” She aimed a determined look through the glass, making the silent point to her parents: she was not helpless. They needed to stop treating her like she was.

They needed to stop treating her like she was made of glass, too, Mara thought, remembering what had transpired after their last visit to the house. It was a few days earlier, on the weekend. Pori and Neerja had come for lunch (which they had brought with them), and later they took Laks out for ice cream and a walk. Not an hour after they had dropped their granddaughter back at home, Mara asked the girl to put away her Barbies and the answer was a cheerful, “Sure, Mama.”

Mara rolled her eyes and marched straight to their room to find her husband and complain. He looked at her curiously and she reminded him that if Laks were responding according to her true nature, the answer would have been “Can’t I do it later, Mama?” Or “But I’m going to play with them again in a minute.” Responses that were completely normal and expected from a child her age, and especially that particular child. “Sure, Mama” wasn’t normal.

Little Miss Perfect was in the house, Mara said to Tom, and she knew who was behind it. Coincidentally, her daughter’s Little Miss Perfect routine always seemed to start just after she had spent time with her grandparents. The girl couldn’t sustain it, of course, and Mara was thankful for that. Laks was incapable of lasting more than half a day in “Yes, ma’am” mode before she broke script and acted like herself again, fighting with her mother about the most ridiculous of things.

But those half days with Little Miss Perfect were infuriating, and when they occurred, Mara barely recognized her daughter in the phony, solicitous child standing before her, asking if there was anything she could do to help, offering to carry this or reach for that. Tom had shrugged, unwilling to concede there was cause for concern. Laks was growing up, he said. Kids don’t argue all their lives. But Mara was on to him, she warned, and she was on to her parents. It wasn’t that Laks had miraculously matured fifteen years in a few months, and everyone knew it. It was that she was under strict orders from her grandparents, with the obvious consent of her father, to never talk back to her sick mother. And those were orders that needed to be rescinded immediately.

Mara was not helpless, and she was not made of glass. She didn’t need to be propped up on soft pillows while her parents ran her household for her, and she wouldn’t shatter if someone argued with her. And Pori and Neerja, whether they wanted to or not, needed to get that through their heads.

Mara was stirred from the noiseless lecture she was making to her parents by the sound of Harry unclipping his seat belt.

When he put his hand on the door, she said, “Don’t help me out, Harry. Please.”

“Oh, yer dad’ll wanna come, I s’pose. Walk ya to the door.”

“He will, but he knows better about that, at least.”

She unfastened her seat belt, but didn’t move to get out. “I suppose you think I’m insane, letting you help me when no one’s around but not when someone is. Maybe even selfish, letting a perfect stranger walk me into the house on Monday, the way I let you, but not my own father.”

Harry cleared his throat and she looked up to find him in the rearview mirror.

“I wasn’t always a cabbie,” he said. “I used ta be . . .” He paused. “Somethin’ more. Years ago, in Tulsa.” He turned away from the mirror then and looked out the windshield for a moment. Mara thought she saw
wistfulness in his profile, and she wondered if he was imagining how things were then, when he was “somethin’ more.” He found her eyes again in the mirror and continued. “When I had ta slide down a peg or two and take this job, I didn’t wanna do it there, where people’d known me as . . . someone else. Someone better. So I came here, where people never knew me any different than I am now.

“People here, they don’t look at me the way they used ta know me then, when I was . . . so much more. They don’t get this . . . thing in their eyes, this look that shows it’s so sad for ’em ta see how far I’ve fallen.” He frowned as though picturing the looks of pity he was seeking to avoid. “’Cause they don’t know that about me. If I had ta do this in Tulsa, see those looks in people’s faces all the time?”

He shook his head. “So, no. I don’t think you’re insane. Or selfish. I think you’d rather deal with someone from Tulsa, who never knew ya when, and doesn’t always look at ya like he did.”

“Jesus,” Mara said, incredulous. “Were you a shrink in Tulsa? Bartender? Priest? Mind reader?”

“Ha,” he laughed. “Nah.”

“Harry?”

“Yuh?”

“I’m sorry about whatever brought you from Tulsa to here.”

“Huh,” he said, looking away from the mirror again for a second before looking back. “’S no big thing.”

“Oh, don’t you dare try to fake a faker.” She winked at him, then shoved her door open and fought her way out of the car.

She knocked on his window from outside the car and he put it down.

“You know,” she said, “I’m throwing a little caution to the wind this week. You saw how I was on Monday, the first time you tried to help me. I don’t usually stop hissing, the way I did with you. So it’s not as if I let strangers help me all the time, and not my own parents.”

He smiled. “I’m the lucky one, I guess.”

“Ha,” she laughed. “That’s one way to look at it.”

“Well, it’s the way I’m lookin’ at it.” He lifted a driving log and pen from the console and poised to write something down. “Same time tomorrow?”

“Actually, does ten forty-five work? Morning recess is at eleven.”

He nodded, making a note. “I’ll ring the doorbell. Take advantage of the chance ta help while you’re still throwin’ yer caution around.”

“I know you will.”

“It’s possible I’m about as stubborn as ya are.”

“Oh, more probable, I’d say, than possible.” She smiled. “But it might explain why we’re so . . .” She shrugged and looked over the top of his cab, uncertain whether to send her thoughts about him into the air where he could hear them. It was preposterous for her to feel so close to someone she barely knew. More preposterous still to say it out loud.

“Yuh,” he said. “I s’pose it might.”

“Marabeti!” Neerja called from the front door.

Mara turned to wave at them while Neerja reached to hold Pori back as he made an instinctive move toward his daughter.

“Hello, daughter,” he called. “Your mother and I were hoping you could take some food off our hands before it spoils.”

Mara turned to Harry, who gave her a knowing smile, then thrust his arm out the window and up to the sky in a high salute before pulling away.