The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,69

the world—Bobby and I had failed in many ways, but not in this. That made it impossible to hate him.

I also recognized I hadn’t seen these things when I was with Bobby. I’d been too busy tending to his happiness, checking in on his moods, walking on eggshells around his gloominess.

I’d totally lost sight of what I wanted. I’d become the woman I’d never wanted to be; I’d become the woman I’d disdained my mother for being, but that she hadn’t been at all.

I ached when I thought of Gabriella’s statement: I miss us. All of us together, the way we used to be. I missed the idea of having a partner, someone in my corner, a soul mate. But Bobby had never really been those things. I’d spent lots of time and energy, oh so much energy, creating the myth that he was.

Which meant I now had a lot of free time and energy on my hands.

What was I going to do with it?

Chapter Twenty-Two

SHIVANI

SHIVANI APERJEET STOOD IN A HOT KITCHEN GRATING CARROTS to make gajar ka halva for her oldest son’s birthday. Vijay, who would be forty-three—forty-three!—had not asked her to make halva, but she remembered how he always put his fingers in it, plucking out the cashews and all the golden raisins.

Shivani wiped her forehead with the loose end of her fuchsia sari. The young ones, the grandchildren—although none of them were Vijay’s kids, which was not right, he was forty-three!—would turn up their noses and complain that this was not “real” pudding. Whoever told them halva was pudding? Shivani kept on grating, the juicy, orange mound growing before her. She remembered who. Rita. Vijay’s wife.

Shivani snagged her knuckles on the grater. Not his wife. Not now. She couldn’t get used to saying “ex-wife.” Forty-three! He was forty-three and left a marriage just like that, the way a person might toss out rattan furniture that wasps had burrowed into.

She sucked the coin taste of her bloody knuckles and pictured Vijay scolding her for using the metal grater. “Mom,” he would say, “why don’t you use the food processor we bought you?”

Shivani picked up the last carrot and grated it down to a quarter-thin nub. She didn’t want to use a machine. She didn’t want it to be easy.

She scooped up the slick, orange gratings and plopped them into the gallon of whole milk waiting in the stockpot. She turned on the flame, lowered it to a hint of blue, then put her hands on top of the empty gallon jug. A marriage did not come with an expiration date like this gallon of milk. The idea was as foreign to her as the gas flame she could turn on twenty-four hours a day when she first came here.

The milk had already turned pale orange as Shivani wiped her forehead and under her eyes again. Now she must stir the halva for an hour or more, until the carrots drank up nearly all the milk. She remembered Rita’s wide eyes. “An hour? No wonder this is never on the menu at Indian restaurants,” she said. “It’s too labor intensive.” As if that were a bad thing. A reason not to make it. “If we turned up the heat, we could speed it up, right?”

Wrong. If you turned up the heat, you would scorch the milk on the bottom. Even if you peeled off the black strips, that ashy charred taste would remain. No. You must be patient. You must tend to the stockpot while the milk simmered and the carrots swelled over the low flame.

Shivani sighed. She’d been married by the time she was twenty. She knew her children were embarrassed to talk about their parents’ arranged marriage. Shivani had known that would not be the path for her sons or even her daughter. She’d been happy for them, with their choices.

But their freedom had not done them any good. For all their choices, for all their “practice”—Vijay and Rita had shared a home before the wedding—it had not protected or prepared them. Only Asheev was married now. Kinnari was thirty-five! She claimed there were no good men but was outraged when Shivani had offered to arrange some meetings with sons of their friends.

Shivani dropped eight cardamom pods into the orange milk. “I will marry for love,” all of her children had declared. Did they think she hadn’t? She and Lalit had love. But they loved the marriage as something far greater than just either one of them.