Page 97 of Isn't It Obvious?
“Not your entire family.”
Ravi stares at him, and he stares back. “The part that matters most.”
Suresh sucks his teeth. “Doh talk that way.”
Ravi props his elbows on his knees and drops his forehead into his hands. “You so schupid sometimes. If you thought about how I felt for one second, last weekend would have been a lot better for you.”
“What does that mean?” Suresh demands.
“You and Mia are the only ones who love me for who I am, unconditionally. And you know that. But you preach about family to me like I don’t understand its importance without you explaining it. I know how important family is, Suresh! I go home every year, even though the head of our family denies myexistence. The only way I can stomach doing it is if I remind myself that my family can be complete in a different way. That Dad’s word isn’t the beginning and end of it for me.”
He lifts his head, and Suresh is looking at him, his jaw slack.
“I am exactly who you should have asked about how to help Mia through this,” Ravi says, “and you refused to listen to me at all.”
Suresh clenches his jaw. “She did better than I did,” he says.
“She did. But she also slept in my bed half the night this whole week.”
Suresh snaps his attention back toward Ravi, his eyes wide in disbelief. Whatever’s on Ravi’s face makes his expression shift to abject sadness. “I was trying to do the right thing for her,” he says, starting to tear up.
“I know you were.”
“I try to do the right thing for you, too.”
“I know you do. But I’m an adult, and right now I’m co-parenting with you, and you have to accept my help if you want it to work.”
“I’m sorry, Ravi. It’s been—It’s been a difficult year.” Suresh releases a breath, almost like a laugh, and wipes at his cheeks. “Oh Lord, now I’m sorry for crying, too.”
Ravi reaches out and squeezes Suresh’s shoulder. “You don’t need to be sorry for that.”
They’re quiet for a minute, then Suresh walks over to the TV stand and digs out a second controller. “Think I could still cut your tail?”
Ravi grins. “No. You out of practice, old man.”
They get through the first game without talking. Ravi wins, but it’s closer than it should be given that Suresh hasn’t played in years. During the second, Suresh starts to trash-talkhim like he used to. After the third, he gets up to get them beers from the fridge, and Ravi is struck by how long it’s been since they’ve done anything like this together.
When Ravi first moved here, Suresh was still too depressed to do much more than the bare minimum. But he got a little bit better after a couple of weeks, and they could’ve been doing this… maybe not nightly, but often.
They should’ve been.
Suresh settles back onto the couch. “You didn’t go to your reading club this week,” he says—a statement, not a question.
Ravi sighs. “I’m not going to be doing that anymore.”
“Oh?”
He takes a swig of his beer. “The librarian who runs the club and I…” He shakes his head, not sure what to say.
“You slept with her,” Suresh says, and it’s not lost on Ravi that this is exactly what he’d said to Suresh when he got back last week.
Ravi swallows, looking away. “I became friends with the woman from the podcast. Then more than friends, and we broke it off because neither of us thought we should be dating right now. I thought she lived on the East Coast, and I only knew her by her stage name. But it turns out that she was the librarian who runs the club, and I didn’t know until last weekend. Until after.”
“You were upset it was her?” Ravi shakes his head, and Suresh winces. “She was upset it was you,” he says.
“No.” Ravi closes his eyes, his heart aching in his chest. He’s not upset it was Yael. In a different world, she’d be everything he could ever want. “I can’t be somebody’s boyfriend right now.”
Suresh’s eyebrows lift. “Because of Mia? Because of me?”
