“Hello!” he said now to the muscled, blond, female security guard at the front desk, who responded with an apathetic “Mm.” Undeterred, Samir continued cheerfully. “My name is Samir Jha. I’m here to see Leon Stepping of Iyer & Whitman.”
The security guard looked at a clipboard at her elbow, her eyes running down the list of names. Samir saw hesitation cross her face, and then she looked back up at Samir. “I need to make a call,” she said, picking up the phone. “Have a seat.” With her free hand, she gestured over to a small collection of aesthetically pleasing potted plants and leather armchairs clustered around a tabletop fountain.
“Oh, um, is there a problem?” Samir asked, feeling his mouth go just the tiniest bit dry. He wanted, needed, to be up on the fourteenth floor, being shown where the copier was.
But the security guard only held one authoritative finger up and then gestured to the seating area again. Opening his mouth and then thinking better and closing it again, Samir turned away like some door-to-door salesman who’d been told the dogs would be set on him if he didn’t take his leave. Except I was invited to be here, Samir thought, straightening his shoulders. This was clearly a mistake. Leon Stepping probably just forgot to put his name on the list.
Pinky
Aboard the Boeing Something-or-Other aircraft, Pinky sat in her first-class seat behind her parents. Her dad turned around and winked at her, his face soft and rounded and pale, completely the opposite of her mother’s.
Technically he was her stepdad—he and her mom had met when Pinky was a baby and had gotten married when she was four—but she couldn’t remember life before him. One of her first memories was of throwing a lump of sweet potato at him and him laughing uproariously. So, naturally, toddler Pinky had done it again.
“You comfy there, kiddo?” her dad asked now.
“Yep.” She’d promised her mom she wouldn’t wear her ripped shorts and midriff-exposing crop top, so instead she was dressed in an off-the-shoulder top and distressed capris, which was practically formal wear in Pinky’s eyes. She glanced at her reflection in the plane window. At least her hair, with its unruly pieces of teal and magenta and green, and her nose and eyebrow piercings still helped her feel like herself.
Her mom turned around. “Pinky, can you please turn down your music? I can hear it up here.”
“I have AirPods in!” Pinky said, gesturing to said Pods.
Her mom sighed and turned around, and Pinky saw her dad murmuring to her. Probably talking her off the ledge of abandoning Pinky in one of those safe-shelter places.
“Excuse me.” An older man in a suit stood in the aisle, frowning. He looked down at his boarding pass and then back up at the seat numbers. “I think I’m… in that seat.” He gestured to the empty window seat next to her.
Pinky hopped up and let him slide in. When she sat back down as he adjusted himself, he turned to her and motioned for her (kind of rudely) to take out her AirPods. Pinky did slowly, her eyebrow raised. This better be a medical emergency.
The skin on his face was papery white, nearly as white as his thinning hair. “Are you supposed to be in this seat?” he asked, looking at her clothes kind of pointedly.
“Um… yeah?” Pinky said, frowning. “It’s 2D, right?”
“Right…” The man opened his mouth as if to say something else. Finally, he added, “And you’re sure this is your seat?”
Pinky opened her mouth to respond, to ask the guy precisely what he meant by that comment, but then her mother turned around, looking very much a first-class traveler in her Armani cardigan and silk pants. Glaring at the old dude, she said, “That is her seat as much as the seat you’re sitting in is yours. Is there a particular reason you think her seat might not be hers? A reason that isn’t blatantly based in discrimination, that is?”
Pinky chuckled at the guy’s thunderstruck expression. “That’s Veena Kumar, my mom. She’s a partner at Kumar & Strong. You might’ve heard of them—the biggest corporate law firm on the West Coast? Oh, and that’s my dad, Howard Yeung, next to her. They’re both lawyers, incidentally.” Her dad was also giving the dude the evil eye, which Pinky knew was hard for him to do. He was as much a teddy bear as her mom was a werewolf/Komodo dragon hybrid. (How the heck they’d ended up together was completely beyond Pinky.) She smiled sweetly at the man in the seat next to her. “Just FYI.”
The man turned an alarming shade of fuchsia, shook out his copy of the Wall Street Journal, and began to read. It was as if he suddenly couldn’t understand what they were saying and was definitely not a part of this conversation anyway.
Pinky beamed conspiratorially at her mom, thrilled at this rare moment of solidarity. Her dad winked at her, and her mom said, “Turn down your music. You’ll damage your hearing.” And then she turned around and went back to the Times.
After that, the old man pretty much left her alone. He didn’t even ask her to get up so he could go to the bathroom, and Pinky knew for a fact that his bladder had to be hurting after all those Bloody Marys.
* * *
They landed what felt like forever later. Grabbing their luggage, they made their way outside, Pinky blinking in the afternoon sunlight.
Ellingsworth Point. It was the same as Pinky remembered it. She looked around at all the women in pastel-colored clothes, like walking Pez candy (her mom was one of them). Luxury cars glinted in the sunlit parking lot as far as the eye could see, most of them driven by chauffeurs.
The summer people had arrived. Pinky had mixed feelings about being a “summer person,” but then again, she had mixed feelings about being here at all.
One of the lesser frequented Elizabeth Islands in Massachusetts, Ellingsworth still thought of itself as relatively unspoiled and unmarred by tourists (unlike its cousins, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket), though that was rapidly changing. Although there were beautiful beaches on Ellingsworth, Pinky’s family had a lake house in the more interior part of the island and they spent all their time swimming there. Her dad had a weird aversion to sand for having been born and brought up in coastal California.
“Ready?” her dad said, leading them to the rental car area.
Pinky glanced at her mother, who was dictating a work email into her phone. Two whole months in the lake house with her, with not even school or Pinky’s Atherton friends to interrupt.
“As I’ll ever be,” she muttered.
* * *
The drive to the lake house took about an hour, and Pinky and her dad played Antakshari, which was an Indian game where people had to sing a song based on the last letter sound of the song the player before them had sung. It was supposed to be played with Hindi songs, but since neither Pinky nor her Chinese-American stepdad spoke Hindi, they played it with English-language songs.
Her dad gave a sonorous rendition of “My Heart Will Go On,” and when he was finished, Pinky tapped her finger on her chin. “ ‘On’ was the last word, so that leaves me with the letter N… Hmm…” She glanced at her mom’s profile, always so serious. “Mom? What’s an N song I can sing?”
Her mom smiled. Pinky was constantly taken aback how much her face transformed with the simple act of baring her teeth. “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down—” her mom began, grinning at her father.