“So, Tara, forgive me for sounding like an Indian aunty, but what does your mister do?”
“He doesn’t. I’m divorced.” She took a tiny bite of crunchy, fried calamari, not watching his reaction, quickly changing the topic. “So what brought you to Atlanta?”
“Destiny,” he laughed. He and his partner, Tony Kaputo, owned a video gaming company, Playable Media, in San Jose. They were in the middle of negotiations to buy over a smaller company, Peach Street Games, in Atlanta.
“Does that mean you will be visiting Atlanta often?”
“If all goes well, yes. And now, I have one very good reason to hope it does.”
She smiled, rather stupidly, put her elbow on the table, and rested her chin on a cupped hand. “Where’s your wife?” she asked.
He shrugged. “No wife. Been married twice, though. The first one is up there. The second one is probably in New York.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“You knew her. The first one, I mean.”
“Oh, you married Angela, Annette’s pretty cousin!”
He grinned. “Wrong answer.”
“Michele?”
“Wrong answer again.”
“Oh my God, you married Annette Saldanha? But she was family!”
“Hmm. Yes, but she was in the family way.”
“What?” Her elbow dropped from the table. But why? she wanted to ask him. “You were cousins!”
“When you’re young, you do stupid things.”
A thought then hit her, what he had said earlier about his first wife being “up there.” “What happened to Annette?”
He cupped a hand around his beer bottle, and tilted it along its axis; the smile on his lips waned momentarily when he said, “She died of meningitis. Just two years after we got married.”
“And the baby?”
“He was stillborn.”
“Oh!” She instinctively leaned forward, squeezed his free hand across the table. Her hand was no longer clammy or cold. He held on to her hand, his fingers curling into hers. A tenderness spread across his face, mellowed its features. With the smile gone, she could see that he was older, that time had matured him, that life had thrown curveballs his way, as well.
“I am so sorry,” she said. “So sorry to hear about Annette and your baby.”
He nodded.
Their lunch orders arrived. They ate, and the chatter around the restaurant seemed louder, as if they’d just realized there were people around them.
“The second wife. Who was she?” she asked.
“Patricia. I met her at NYU Stern where we both got our MBAs. Five years down the line, we realized it was a mistake and went our separate ways.”
It had taken him a while to move on, he said, but he had recently started dating again, a woman named Giana.
She tried hard to appear nonchalant. “Sounds like an Italian name.”
“She is.”
“This is good,” she said, pricking a plump shrimp blackened with pepper and a chunk of juicy pineapple on her fork, hastening to change the topic of their conversation. “Would you like to try it?”
“If you’ll let me.”
She leaned forward to drop the shrimp and pineapple goodness on his plate. Without looking, she knew his gaze was on her, not on his plate.
She stayed at the Cheesecake Factory, across the table from him, until people started to arrive for early dinner. Often, it was her own voice reaching her ears, animated and wordy. She told him about Ruth, Dottie, and Alyona, referring to them as her Atlanta mothers and sister. She talked about her newly renewed passion for writing. He filled her in on his interest in yoga and meditation, his charity work. He ran the Annette Saldanha Home for Children in Mangalore with his father, a shelter for abandoned kids.
When he offered to walk her to her car, it seemed likely that he would miss his return flight to San Jose, unless he drove to the airport like a formula one racer.
“Well then,” she said, leaning awkwardly against her Toyota Camry. “Drive safe.”
He touched her shoulder lightly. “Don’t old friends deserve a good-bye hug?”
She took a step forward and leaned in toward him. His outstretched arms enveloped her as if they had been waiting for this moment for decades. He felt warm, familiar; as if they had embraced a million times before. She was awash with long forgotten feelings. When he finally drew back and touched her cheek lightly, much like the scene from twenty-three years ago that she had replayed a million times in her head, her instructions to herself had flown out of her head. She gazed unabashedly into his eyes.
“Thank you for not running away this time,” he said playfully.
It wasn’t a long drive home. Or perhaps it was. There wasn’t much traffic inside the Perimeter. Or perhaps there was. She had no idea. When she turned the key in the lock to open her apartment door, she wondered for a second how she had gotten there. Which route had she taken?
She glided into the bedroom, dropped on the bed in a ninety-degree-angle fall, face up, arms stretched out. Her cheeks were still flushed. She closed her eyes and imagined again, the warmth of his embrace, their long conversation. She had been wrong in her assumption that her adolescent feelings for Cyrus were dead. Those feelings were back with the same intensity.
She smiled at a memory. After she had slid behind the wheel and rolled down her window, he had leaned in, his face and shoulders filling her view. She had noticed his thick eyelashes, how they accentuated his unusual eyes, and a little cut high up on his jaw, below his right ear, where he had probably nicked himself shaving that morning. She had noticed her own immense desire to put her hand out to touch it, to touch him.
“I have a confession to make,” he had said, looking into her eyes. “I was not in Atlanta when your email arrived yesterday. You made me take a red-eye from San Jose.”
She had simply stared at him in disbelief. “It was worth it,” he had said.
“Yes, it was nice reconnecting,” she had mumbled.
There was something else he had told her that made her heart smile now. “I stood at the spot until the sun went down,” he had said of that last day so many years ago. “I kept coming back to the spot, even walked past your grandmother’s house for weeks in the hope of seeing you. Annette said you changed schools and she never saw you after that last day.”
“Oh, really!”
“Oh, really? Is that all you’re going to say?” He had laughed.
“I’m sorry. I was so timid.”
He had leaned forward and given her a peck on her cheek, a gentle brush of his lips against her skin. “Please don’t make me wait a quarter of a century to see you again.”
Her eyes closed at the memory, her face arching up involuntarily. Maybe she shouldn’t have met him. Already, the calm she had spent months building inside of her, around her, had been invaded with ocean waves of emotions.
Chapter 22
His email arrived on the sixth day. The Atlanta deal had come through and he’d be back in town next week, he said. She deleted the email, but let it rest in the trash folder. For two restless days, she resisted the urge to resurrect the email, filling her free time with grocery shopping and elaborate Indian cooking, reminding herself of the pitfalls of rushing into something she wasn’t ready for.