Lucky Boy Read online

  When they arrived, he waved his way past the valets and parked more than a block away, along the neighborhood sidewalk. He turned to Kavya. “Ready?” She frowned and touched her hair. The wind from the open windows had plucked ringlets from her updo, and they sprang off her head like confetti. He opened his door and paused. “Hey, beautiful.” He tucked a ringlet behind her ear. “We’ll have fun. I promise.” He kissed her cheek, then her hand.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath and opened the door with a thrust of her toe.

  A mandap was set up at the far end of the Patels’ backyard, three acres on the outskirts of Sacramento, land that used to be gold territory but now lay fallow. It belonged to Hitesh and Suma Patel, her parents’ oldest friends. Hitesh Patel moved among his guests, his belly shaking with every back he slapped. Above the land floated gold, pounds and pounds of it, on earlobes and chests and wrists of ladies wrapped in silk, their brows arched and perfectly threaded, scanning the land like aging lionesses.

  In the beginning, Kavya’s parents had befriended the Patels because they had little choice. The scarcity of Indians in the 1970s had propelled this North-South friendship. Preeti grew up three blocks from Kavya in a modest, tree-lined neighborhood. Three blocks in India might have kept them from ever meeting, but among the Caucasian tundra of suburban Sacramento, it had felt essential that the girls be friends. Soon enough, their parents realized that they got along, as well, that they shared more than nationality, and that the neutralizing effects of American soil would allow their friendship to flourish.

  Kavya hitched up the folds of her sari to walk over the wet grass. After the girls grew up and left home, the Patels moved here, to a gated community on the outskirts of town, at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. Houses here had bathrooms the size of Berkeley bungalows and lawns that stretched without purpose, unfettered by other plant life, disrupted only by swimming pools and the occasional gazebo. Calling it a community was a stretch. Houses—mansions, really—were spread so thinly across the grassy hills that neighbors went mostly undetected.

  She wouldn’t have gone, except that not to go would have made a stronger statement than she was willing to make. Preeti Patel was getting married and sealing forever her victory over Kavya. Over the years, the girls had grown from playmates to rivals and begrudging friends. To be fair, it was Kavya who begrudged; Preeti was endlessly gracious, completely unimpeachable in her maintenance of friendship. Preeti was infallibly interested and interesting, and if she felt superior to Kavya, she never spoke of it, never mentioned her own achievements. That was left to the mothers.

  And also to be fair, there wasn’t much rivalry to speak of. Rivalry suggested equality, and Preeti beat Kavya at every step, in a flurry of accomplishment, beautifully and without comment: The day Kavya smoked her first spliff, Preeti won the state spelling bee. The night Kavya first let a boy’s hand crawl up her blouse, Preeti won the national spelling bee. The day Kavya gave away the drum set she had failed to master, Preeti became first-chair violinist of the Central Valley Youth Symphony. The week Kavya got into Berkeley, Preeti got into Berkeley. A week later, Preeti received fat envelopes from Stanford, Brown, Yale, UPenn, and Princeton. Harvard had said no, most likely a typographical error that the Patels didn’t bother to pursue. When Kavya spent her weekday afternoons trying to free Tibet and bring back affirmative action, Preeti ensconced herself in the Stanford library, resting only to call her mother. When Kavya spent her weekends cocooned in Rishi’s unwashed sheets, Preeti returned home to eat her mother’s food. When Kavya graduated from Berkeley and became a barista, Preeti won a Fulbright and spent a year studying diabetic blindness in rural Gujarat. The year Kavya started culinary school, Preeti moved back to California with a degree in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins. The week Kavya got audited for misfiling her taxes, Preeti bought her first house, a three-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. They were the Goofus and Gallant of the Central Valley Indians, and most people knew it.

  For seven years, as the girls slipped from their twenties to their thirties, Kavya had this over Preeti: She was married. Matrimonial completion had always been her trump card. Today, it would be swept from her grasp.

  If there had been a belly to stroke, a smooth hill of skin rising bare and brown from the front folds of her sari, she would have had something that Preeti didn’t have, and even when Preeti did have sweet-faced and well-behaved children, it wouldn’t have mattered, because Kavya would have had her own. Even if she’d been mid-cycle, still trying that month, she might at least have declined to drink and felt the murmur of a harbored secret when asked, one hundred times or more, when she and Rishi were having children. But she’d lost again that month. She had tried and failed. She would try and fail and try again.

  Kavya’s mother was the first to see them. She broke from a group of ladies to stalk across the lawn. Still yards away, she cried out, “Where is your mangala sutra?” Kavya only wore her wedding necklace, a thick gold rope with a cluster of pendants, when she knew her mother would be checking. She’d forgotten.

  “Why you’re wearing black?” her mother asked.

  “Hi, Amma.”

  (“Hi, Mom,” Rishi eeked from behind.)

  “Why you didn’t wear the green sari?”

  “I like this one.”

  “Come, maybe Suma Aunty has something you can change. I’ll ask.”

  “No, thank you. I’m wearing this.” Kavya kissed her mother’s cold cheek and caught there the scent of white wine.

  “Are you drinking? Is that alcoholic punch?”

  “Why you couldn’t dress like Preeti? See how lovely she looks!”

  “She’s the bride.”

  Preeti Patel stood at the head of a receiving line, revealing herself, unconventionally, before the ceremony began. She wore a red sari, her hands laced with henna, her neck, face, and hair meshed in gold.

  “Preeti has her head on the right way,” Uma said, her gaze flickering like a moth wing over her own daughter. “Did you eat? Go eat. They have pakoras and some samosas. The samosas are too oily. All this fried food. And go get something to drink.” In the distance was what looked like a fully stocked bar. Rishi spotted an appetizer table and was gone.

  Uma Mahendra clicked her tongue. “See who all is wearing black?” She swung her nose to the group at the far corner of the lawn: Maya Gulati, divorced. Sapna Kumari, lesbian. Aparna Dutta, some sort of filmmaker. Neha Murthy, single. Rakhi Viswant, single. Geetha Nallasivan, Sheela Chatterjee, Veena Jain, all belligerently single. They glided to the bar in black saris and stilettos, a coven of the shameless. They seemed to be having an excellent time. Kavya patted her mother’s shoulder, stuck her purse under her arm, and stalked off to join them.

  “Drink juice,” her mother called. “No boozing!”

  Kavya hadn’t done any boozing for approximately nine months, the length of a pregnancy, but in her case, a steady parade of losses. That evening, her ovulation yet to start, faced with hours of this place, these people, boozing was precisely what Kavya planned to do. A great deal of booze would be required to outlast the mingling, the questions, the ceremony, the post-ceremony mingling, the reception, the speeches, the tearful send-off of bride and groom. Her mission was to reach the bar without interruption, but the odds of making it across the grass without being grabbed for embraces and interrogations were slim. The grass sucked at her heels and halted her step. She was a slow-moving target, easily detected.

  “Kav-YAH!”

  A fierce clamp on her forearm spun her around to face a woman with buttery arms and an enormous and complex, somewhat frightening, bindi. “Hi, Aunty,” Kavya said and fell into the warm cushion of an embrace. The woman pulled Kavya into the waiting gully of aunties, where arms circled her waist, fingered her hair, pinched the skin of her abdomen.

  “Is this Kavya?” came the cry. “Looking just the same, darling! Still working at th
e pizza parlor, Kavya? Hello, beta, looking sooo lovely, why so skinny, Kavya, where is the belly fat, hah?”

  Like gulls thrown a crust of bread, they frenzied around her, their voices rising to shrieks.

  “Remember, ladies, we got married and fat and that was the way it was, isn’t it, and now these girls are staying so slim, it is good, it is good I think, no, to stay healthy, my knees! My knees are paining me day and night and I think if only I had stayed slim like this, it is good, Kavya, good to stay healthy, but what is this flat belly, hah, when will we see some you-know-what in there Kavya, if no fat then how about a baby, no? How handsome that Rishi is, nothing stopping you, isn’t it? Your poor mother is probably wanting a little one, isn’t it, something to keep her young, nobody’s getting younger, Kavya, we need some grandchildren, isn’t it, that’s what I told my Raju, Raju, go do hanky-panky and bring me the baby, Raju! Go eat, Kavya, you’re looking so tired, these girls work too hard now, isn’t it, remember, ladies, we got married and sat down and that was it, we had to watch the servants, to make sure they didn’t steal, isn’t it, but then we could relax, these young girls stress themselves too much, and then they cannot conceive, isn’t it, no, no, Kavya beta, not saying anything, you will have no trouble noooo trouble having a baby, you will have a hundred babies!”

  Kavya broke from the group and ran, her heels sinking into the lawn, threatening to topple her. As she neared the group in black, they turned to receive her. Maya Gulati plucked a fresh glass of prosecco from the bar. Turning back to Kavya, she lobbed her a small smile, nodded, and raised her glass.

  2.

  Arno, the boy next door, was the first Soli had ever kissed. She was fourteen at the time, and he was an altar boy, noble and broad-shouldered in his white robes. They would meet in the dark and humid side chapel, beneath the saint’s gaze. Soli had thought for twenty-six days that she loved Arno, that they would marry and live together in the village, but then Arno left. Set your heart free, Solimar, Doña Alberta would say. My boy’s doing so well up there, he’s never coming back. Never! Arno went North to work, and Soli, heart-weary, had moved on to the altar boy who replaced him, falling again with gusto, only to lose this second love to the temptations of the North. She wound her heart around the next altar boy, and the two, three, four that followed, resigning herself to the knowledge that she would have to unwind it again, lest it break. When Arno did return, no longer a boy, married now to a woman from Veracruz, he came back with creases around his eyes and dollars tumbling from his pockets and built his mother a home. Soli didn’t want Arno anymore. She wanted a life that moved.

  “She’s the proudest woman in town, that Alberta,” Mama said. “She’s friendly enough, yes, to your face. But I can tell there’s something devilish in there, some devilish kind of pride.” Arno was building a solid American brick house, a dollar house, and from her crumbling adobe cube, Soli watched it every day, rising from the ground, one proud wall and then another. Four brick walls and a tidy flat roof, and then, when they thought it was finished, metal spindles sprang from the roof, the anchors of a second floor. Arno’s mother would have the tallest house in the village. Arno, who had left school at fifteen, who worked like a donkey up North, who had borne humiliation and solitude, had made it all worthwhile.

  “It’s time for me to leave,” Soli had said that spring, for maybe the hundredth time. It had been weeks since Silvia’s letter. This time, her mother turned to her. Her father put down his mug.

  “And what would you do?”

  The conversation, at last, had begun. Soli felt her future, like a winter-shriveled bloom, begin to soften to the sun.

  She watched the dollar house grow, and so did Mama and Papi. They didn’t gawk like Soli did—Mama couldn’t look at it when they walked by. She would lift her eyes to the sky. Soli knew her mother wanted a dollar house. She knew she needed to give her one. She wanted to buy her parents a new roof, so they wouldn’t have to patch the tin that warped and leaked every spring. She wanted to buy them their own telephone line, so they could call her and she them, like the laughing families in the commercials. Papi had raised her to be as focused as a man; Mama had raised her not to depend on one. If she was as independent as they’d raised her to be, then she had no choice but to leave. She could have gone to the city, but who knew what waited there? If she was going to leave, she would leave like a man.

  There were certain risks, of course, to leaving as a woman.

  “¡Violación!” Mama hissed the word, a spark of spittle flying from her lips. It was a word never to be said aloud, lest it caught and flared. “If they rape the ugly ones, think what they’ll do to you.”

  Soli hadn’t known what to say to this. She didn’t know where to begin.

  “Manuel seems to be a good man,” Mama comforted herself.

  “How do you know?” Soli asked, and regretted it immediately.

  “Señora Ruiz. Juanita’s mother? You know the old one with the mole? You know she was born with that thing? The doctors said it would grow into her eye socket and blind her, but her parents said no, no—”

  “Mama.”

  “Okay, so. Señora Ruiz has another daughter. This is her daughter’s nephew, this Manuel.”

  “And?”

  “And so we know him, don’t we?”

  Soli knew there was only one answer.

  “I will be fine.”

  “Yes. You will.”

  No one’s nephew, she wanted to say, could be anything but a saint. Surely the mere fact of having an aunt would fill a man with virtue. But she kept her mouth shut. It seemed like a good time to start.

  • • •

  MANUEL CAME TO THE HOUSE the day after the festival. When he pulled up in front of their home, the neighbors seeped out of their doorways and gathered on the drive. They stood with their arms crossed, examining the man—still handsome in the daylight—who’d come for their Soli. A few gazed solemnly at the Cadillac.

  He wore a tie and shiny black shoes. He had a neat black mustache and a small patch of hair on his chin. He spoke respectfully to her parents and showed them what he’d be driving. It was a lion of a car, long and black, with a red-and-gold crest on its hood. Papi ran his hand over its roof and nodded. Manuel’s eyes rested on the fingerprints left behind.

  She remembers this: The prospect of riding in such a car with such a man made her feel like she could lift off the ground, soaring.

  “Look here,” Manuel said. He had a radio in there and a cell phone. He had cases of bottled water in the trunk. And he whipped from his pocket a navy blue passport with a crisp picture of him on one page, stamped with symbols that winked in the light. Soli would ride with him to the border, and then she would hide. Manuel, with his blue-and-gold passport, would be welcomed home to America. He showed them how the backseat lifted up to reveal a small compartment, big enough for a girl like Soli to fold herself into. She’d stay hidden until they crossed safely, cleared the guards and vigilantes, and then she’d emerge, an American butterfly.

  The compartment looked as small as Popocalco felt.

  Papi took one look at it and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, no, no. Thank you, señor, for your time, but no way will my daughter be climbing into a trap like that.”

  “Papi! I can do it. I’ll be okay.” And with Papi, Manuel, and all of Popocalco watching, Soli climbed in to prove it. “See,” she called, her lips smashed against her knees. “No problem!”

  Manuel said, “Señor, you have my word. She will be safe in there. She will spend thirty minutes. Forty. And see? Breathing vents. Cut into the fabric.” He grinned at Papi. “Pretty smart, right?”

  Soli climbed out. “Please, Papi.”

  “She’s lucky she’s small, señor. A man could never do this.” Papi walked away. He would help her go, she knew, but he would never say yes.

  • • •

  PAPI W
AS A CORN FARMER. His father and his grandfather were corn farmers. It was what the family did, until the corn became too expensive to farm, and then impossible to sell. The strain of corn from Soli’s valley was eleven thousand years old, an age beyond her understanding. But now the stalks bent to the ground, or lay heaped like dead grasshoppers.

  The day before Soli left Popocalco, her father took her on a walk through town. They walked to the church and lit a candle at Clara’s altar. The saint gazed down. She knew things of Soli that no one else did. Soli believed in saints, mostly because she’d been told to, but as she grew from a child to a woman, she’d started to question the parameters of the arrangement. Could this supposed patron be two places at once? Was she confined to the village? Would she follow Soli down the highway and across the border, or hang hovering above the cantina television, keeping the picture from fizzling to static in the crucial seconds before Granados broke from the defensive line to strike?

  They walked past the cantina and ignored the buzzing television and the voices that called out to them. They walked past the village’s only billboard, hand-painted: Señora Garza makes the freshest tortillas! 57 La Calle! Señora Garza’s for the best and the freshest! Her father held her hand. “Listen, m’ija,” he said. “The place you’re going? Not everyone makes it there. It isn’t easy. People die from the heat, they die from hunger. They get shot. You take care of yourself. Make sure you get fed. Call the cantina from every phone you can find or borrow. They’ll come get me. Stick with Manuel. He is a good man, a trustworthy man, and we’re giving him all the money we could find. You hear that? We’re paying him. You don’t need to pay him. You don’t pay him in any way.”

  • • •

  MANUEL CAME FOR HER on a Wednesday morning before dawn. It was strange, thinking back, that the day was nothing but a Wednesday, that it had no more momentous name than that. There were people who woke that day and did nothing to change their lives. And then there was Soli. Manuel waited with the engine running. She had a coat and one rucksack. Inside the house, Papi said goodbye. He pressed a folded American bill—five dollars—into his daughter’s palm. Then he hugged her. Papi held her for a very long time, until her ear ached from the press of his sternum. Instead of wrapping her arms around him, Soli lifted the bill and studied it. She’d never held American money before and couldn’t pull her gaze from the ashen green.