“Yes, Daadi.”
“You could have left. Gone to the airport. Flown home to your mother and your dog and your safe, small life.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn't you?”
Casey glances at me. Then back at Daadi. “Because your grandson drove to my hotel at six in the morning with no speech, with my stegosaurus sticker in his pocket, and he told me he was choosing me, and I believed him.”
Daadi's eyes move to me. The corner of her mouth twitches.
“You brought the sticker,” she says.
“I brought the sticker.”
“Sentimental fool.” She taps her cane once. Approval. Then she looks at Casey again, and the warmth in her eyes is real and present and entirely earned. “You. Come here.”
Casey crosses the room. He kneels beside her chair, instinctively, the way he kneels beside children in the ER, bringing his face level with hers. Daadi reaches out and cups his face with one papery, strong hand.
“Take care of him,” she says. “He is difficult and repressed and he will try to process your entire relationship through medical terminology at least twice more before the year is out. When he does this, do not leave. Hit him with a newspaper. It worked on his grandfather.”
Casey laughs. Daadi smiles. It is a real smile, the kind that crinkles the corners of her green eyes and makes her look, for a moment, like the twenty-year-old girl who loved a poet in a house with blue walls.
“Yes, Daadi,” Casey says. “I'll find a newspaper.”
“Good boy.” She pats his cheek. “Now go. Pack your things. I assume you are going back to that freezing country.”
“We are going back to Toronto,” I confirm.
“Toronto.” She says the word the way one might say ‘dentist’ or ‘root canal.’ “Your grandfather visited Canada once. He said the weather was an insult and the coffee was an abomination,but the people were unreasonably kind. I suppose the boy proves the theory.”
Casey makes a sound of theatrical outrage. “The coffee is not an abomination. Tim Hortons is a national institution, Daadi. I will not stand for this slander.”
“You are currently kneeling,” Daadi observes. “And the coffee is an abomination. My husband was many things, but he was never wrong about beverages.” Casey opens his mouth to argue, catches my eye, and closes it. Some battles cannot be won. The coffee battle, against an eighty-year-old woman with a cane and sixty years of beverage opinions, is one of them. Daadi waves her cane toward the door. “Go. And Arjun?”
“Yes, Daadi?”
“Call me when you land. Not a text. A call. With your voice. I want to hear that you are safe, and I want to hear him in the background being loud, because a house without noise is a house without life, and you have been too quiet for too long.”
My throat is tight. I bend and press my forehead to her hand, the traditional gesture of respect, and she places her palm on my head with a tenderness that contains sixty years of love and sixty years of regret and the fierce, unshakeable determination of a woman who refused to let her grandson make the same mistake she did.
We leave Daadi's rooms. In the corridor, Casey takes my hand again.
“Your grandmother is the most incredible person I've ever met,” he says.
“She made a napkin flower the centrepiece of her emotional assessment of you.”
“Your grandmother just gave me permission to hit you with a newspaper,” Casey says, grinning.
“She gave you a directive, not permission. There is a difference. Permission implies you have a choice. With Daadi, you do not.”
“Right. Same thing.”
We pack the guest suite. The room where everything started and everything changed and the pillow wall rose and fell and the sheets were tangled and the marks were made and the words were said. Casey's bag quickly goes back together with the cheerful disorganization of someone who has never folded a garment in his life, having already packed for his stay in Jaipur. My bag goes back together with the precise, compartmentalized efficiency of someone who is trying very hard not to think about what happens when we walk out the front door.
Priya arrives back from Jaipur in time for the departure. She hugs Casey with a fierceness that compresses his ribcage, then holds him at arm's length and delivers her conditions.
“You will call me. Every week. You will send me photos of Oliver. You will send me photos of the snow because I have never seen real snow and I refuse to die without photographic evidence. And you will take care of my brother, who is impossible, and who I love, and who I am trusting you with despite every instinct telling me that trusting anyone with a Kapoor is a high-risk investment.”