“Don’t tell me you’re going to make more calls tonight. The way you feel? You’ll give the old guys heart attacks.”
“No, I’m going to call Kenny’s cell phone and tell him to get his worthless butt back here in case I need somebody with me tonight.”
“You know, I was married to a man I could never have asked for that kind of help. I wouldn’t even have considered it in the best of times. Maybe you’ve still got something left with your husband after all.”
Tracy took everything back into the kitchen while Wanda thought about that. She returned with a glass of ice water and a bag of peas, and held them out. “You feel better.”
Wanda already thought she might. And that was the strangest part of a strange, strange evening.
chapter eleven
On Monday morning Janya discovered American garage sales and fell in love. She was entranced with the lopsided displays of colorful books, battered baby furniture, and surplus cups and saucers laid out over ordinary lawns. Castoffs transformed an unassuming Palmetto Grove street into a more familiar one of vendors hawking merchandise. Best of all, bartering was encouraged. The sale she visited was a gigantic neighborhood effort, where yards would bloom for a week with old television sets and dresses adorned with funny padded shoulders. An entire block of junk was the best possible initiation.
With Rishi’s encouragement, she had taken the bus with a map in hand to find her way to the unfamiliar neighborhood. Rishi had promised if she found something at a good price, she could pay, and he would come at lunchtime to take her treasures home. He had been enthusiastic, and so proud that she was willing to wander streets she didn’t know.
Now, on Tuesday, humming the energetic “Dus Bahane”—one of her favorite Bollywood songs—and moving her hands and feet to the music, she rearranged yesterday’s purchases. A folding table to hold a simple bronze lamp beside their sofa. A soft green basket to put beside the lamp for mail. A woven rug in shades of rose and beige to place in front of the sofa. A plant stand that was exactly the right size for one of Mr. Krause’s ferns.
Of course, when the Krause family was found, she would give back the fern. In the meantime, she had brought several smaller plants into her cottage for safekeeping. One sat on a brass tray filled with different sizes of candles—which she’d also found at the sale. One shared the bedroom she shared with Rishi.
When she gazed at the plants both indoors and out, their greenery reminded her of the courtyard in the house where she had grown up, lush and fragrant with bougainvillea and frangipani, and shaded by a gulmohar tree with flame-colored blossoms that blazed in the months before the monsoon.
Her favorite purchase completed the illusion. She had bought a small fountain to set on a table on their tiny patio, and it reminded her just a little of the one she had often sat beside as a child. She knew this fountain had never been expensive, even when new, and that it was impractical, because she had to run an extension cord from the house when she wanted to hear it. But with more of Mr. Krause’s plants on the concrete and under the trees surrounding it, the patio was now a welcoming place. And when the fountain gurgled, and she could bring a chair outside and sit beside it, she knew she would be as happy as she had been for a very long time.
She wondered what all this meant. Was she growing resigned to her new life? Was she, as other people did, relinquishing the dreams she had held for herself and settling for something so much smaller? There seemed to be no point in holding on to old dreams of family, love and happiness. She had called home yesterday, when she hoped her mother would be gone, to speak to her brother. Among other things, she had hoped Yash would tell her the news coming in her mother’s letter. But Yash had been gone, as well, and the new maid had told her there was no time when Janya could count on reaching him.
After she had replaced the phone in its cradle, it seemed that losing Yash, to whom she had always been close, was the final sign that life as she had known it was over. Yash had not telephoned since she moved into this