telephone connection was so good today that Janya felt as if she were sitting in her mother’s bedroom, as she had sat as a child, watching her mother fasten gold bracelets around her wrist and brush her jet-black hair.
“We are fine,” Janya said. “Rishi works many hours, but he is an attentive husband.”
“That is good, then.”
“And how is my family?”
“Your family is there, in America, with your husband.”
If her mother still felt the urge to instruct her in how to be a proper wife, Janya thought all was not lost. “How is my family in India?”
“Well enough. The heat is terrible and causes your father to cough, but soon the rains will come.”
“And you?”
“I am always well.”
Janya waited, hoping her mother would take the conversational lead, but when she didn’t, Janya asked about Yash.
“He is a good boy who tries hard and never shames us.”
Janya felt the slap as surely as if her mother’s palm had extended across the miles between them. Her throat constricted again. She wasn’t sure that words could make their way through the narrowed passage.
“He is not here to speak to you,” her mother said, before Janya could force out the next question. “He is with his father during the day, now that school is not in session. Your father wants him to learn what his life will entail once he passes his exams. He has little time for conversation.”
Janya asked about other relatives, her uncle and his sons and their families who lived on the top floor of the house the families shared. Her uncle’s wife, who had undergone hip surgery, an elderly cousin of her father’s who was nearing death.
Her mother gave perfunctory answers and finally reminded Janya that the call was expensive, and she must not waste Rishi’s money on news that could be handled as well in a letter. Janya didn’t have the opportunity to point out that her mother rarely wrote to convey news, because her mother continued.
“I will be writing you soon anyway. There is something I have to tell you that is best said on paper.”
“It will take at least a week to arrive. What could possibly be best said in a letter?”
“The very news I will tell you. I don’t want you to overreact. You must take this as if it were meant to be, as you must take every day of your life.”
Janya had gotten to her feet to stretch, but now she sat down again. “But now I will worry.”
“There is no need. This is something you cannot change with worry. It is simply something that is. No one is newly ill or dying. You are old enough to understand that not everything you want is good for you.”
Janya knew there was no persuading her mother. A decision made was a decision chiseled into granite. As a child, Janya had pictured her mother’s edicts as Sanskrit text on temple walls.
“I miss you,” Janya said, although she knew the words were uttered for herself. She needed, somehow, to say them out loud, but she knew her mother would never acknowledge the emotion behind them. “I miss everything about India, even the things I didn’t like.”
“It will do you no good, this missing. Surely you are old enough to see that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you must learn to.”
“I hope you and Baba will come for a visit. I hope you are saving for it.”
“We are saving to help your brother reach his destiny. For our part of his wedding once he marries. For his education and his children. That is our duty.”
“I’m important, too,” Janya said. Anger was beginning to simmer beneath a long-nurtured sadness. “I am your daughter, and I’m worth saving for, as well. You will like Florida.”
“Look to the future, Janya, not to the past. Your past is best forgotten.”
Janya hung up a moment later. Outside, she heard someone passing. Through the window she saw Tracy Deloche, hands on hips, stomping by as if she had somewhere important to go.
Janya was afraid that she would never have a place like that herself, a place she truly needed to go and could. Never again.
Tracy was still furious. Of course she had known Wild Florida was determined to keep Happiness Key safe from development. She had been told Marsh Egan was a pit-bull attorney with hound-dog charm, and that he was capable of doing anything to get his way.
The man was legendary. Once he and other rabid environmentalists had chained themselves in a line one hundred yards