Page 83 of Isn't It Obvious?
As she climbs off him, he lifts his hand in acknowledgment to Suresh. “I’m going to put the bags down,” Suresh says.
The door to the bathroom clicks shut.What happened?Ravi mouths.
Suresh waves him off.Later, he mouths back, and he disappears up the stairs.
Ravi gets a bowl of baby carrots from the kitchen, returning to find Mia already on the couch. He sits down next to her, and she climbs back onto his lap and plucks the bowl from his hands. “How was the trip?” he asks.
“Good,” she says. “There were lots of rows of grapes, and I raced Mommy through them, and I beat her because she was wearing tall shoes. Can we watch the dinosaur woman again?”
“Sure,” Ravi says, and reaches for the remote to turn on the TV and navigate to YouTube. “How’s your eye?”
“Much better. But Daddy says I still have to do the drops, and they hurt.”
Ravi grimaces. “I’m sorry, but I’m glad it’s feeling better.” He looks down at her, but her eyes are fixed on the TV screen. “You had a good time?”
“Yeah, I told you already,” she says, but she leans back against his chest with full force, the way she does when she’s sad or sick.
“Okay,” he says, and he presses play.
Suresh takes a lot longer to reemerge than he should, and when he does, he issobusy with chores and lunch that he only has time to say four words to Ravi. He and Mia switch from Field Museum videos to Connect Four to Legos to, finally, nap time.
In that time, Ravi’s patience wears thin, so when he finally catches Suresh alone in the kitchen, he leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, and bluntly says, “Waz your scene?”
Suresh retrieves two beers from the fridge, uncaps them, and passes one off to Ravi. This on its own is enough to raiseRavi’s brows—Suresh has a drink maybe once a week, and never during the day. But Ravi accepts and watches his brother swallow two long swigs before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Margot decided to go back to Bordeaux early,” he says.
“Okay,” Ravi says. “She say why?”
Suresh plants his hand on his hip and brings the bottle to his lips again. “She wrapped up whatever she was doing with the vineyard. I guess she got what she wanted from her visit,” he says, looking at the ground.
Ravi looks at him for a beat longer. That furrow in his brow, how the muscle in his jaw keeps clenching and releasing. “You slept with her,” he whispers.
Suresh takes another swig. This time, Ravi joins him.
“Did you… Did you know she was leaving?”
Suresh’s eyes cut back to him. He shakes his head, and Ravi feels his own shoulders drop. “When she said she was going, I said, ‘Don’t you want more time with Mia?’ and she said, ‘Maybe she could visit for a couple weeks next summer.’”
Ravi winces.
“You don’t have to tell me that you were right,” Suresh says.
“I wasn’t going to.” Suresh shakes his head a little, looking away again. “I wasn’t trying to be right, Suresh!” Ravi says. “And Mia seems okay, considering.”
Suresh swallows. “She does. She can’t see me like this.”
“I can take care of her for the rest of the day,” Ravi offers.
“No, no. I just… I’ll be fine by the time she gets up.” He drains his beer, drops it in the recycling, and slips past Ravi toward the stairs.
“Suresh—”
“I will be fine,” he says, not looking back.
Ravi is left staring blankly into space in the kitchen, wishing desperately that he had any goddamn idea what to do.
And Suresh keeps his promise to pretend, so well that Ravi feels likehe’sthe one in danger of tipping Mia off. She smiles and laughs and dances to “Ah Drinka” in the living room, and he’s sure she’s back to doing okay.
At the end of the night, he finds himself lying in his bed, staring at his phone, rereading every message between him and Elle. It’s so strange, how he can hear Yael’s voice in each of them. Now it’s hard to believe that he hadn’t realized sooner.
