The Shaadi Set-Up by Lillie Vale
Chapter 17
Listen,” says Raj as we mill through Lucky Dog Luke’s flea market the next weekend. She stops in front of a painted dresser and vanity set. “This fight had to happen for you both to realize what you want. Out of your relationship, out of the scam.”
I fidget with the vintage white-and-gold mirror tray I’m holding, hooking my thumbs into the tiny handles. “I still don’t know what I’m going to say to him. I feel so guilty. I’ve never broken anyone’s heart before.”
“I’ve had plenty of practice.” Her dramatic purple metallic eyeliner catching on the dim fluorescent lighting, looking not just Extra, but extra sparkly. “And it’s never easy.” She stops me to tighten the bow scrunchie in my high ponytail. “Just be honest.”
I groan and dive into one of the many little shops branching off the main walk. Booth #293 has stacks of lace and thick, folded quilts on rickety tables and tall bookshelves. The space is fragranced by cut glass bowls of potpourri and giant vanilla candles. QUILTS $20/EA reads an index card taped to the shelf below some homespun cross-stitched proverbs. While Raj frolics in the aisle or does whatever she does, I sift through the stacks.
There’s a beautiful patchwork quilt with black, rust, and khaki stripes, something that would be far more at home in a rustic log cabin than in a beach house. But below it is a quilt in soft shades of blue, with solid cornflower squares and floral calico.
It’s practically made for Bluebill Cottage.
Raj pops her head in to finger an ugly moose cross-stitched on a pillow. “Classy.”
I set my mirrored tray down on a doily-layered end table. “Hey, help me hold this one up, would you? I need to examine it for stains.”
She releases a long-suffering sigh, but takes the quilt by the opposite corner, pinching it between two fingers. “It smells a little funky. Plus, it’s kinda . . .” She side-eyes me as she searches for a polite word. “Grungy. And I thought you said bedrooms look fresher in white.”
“Sheets, definitely. But fold this up on the bottom third of the bed and it makes a room look super cozy, super fast,” I explain.
“I regret letting you drag me out here to pick up stuff for a house you’re not even going to live in,” she grouses. “You used to be so sentimental about giving away your pieces to people like Paula because ‘I want them to go to a good home,’ ” she says with finger quotes and a falsetto voice that sounds nothing like me. “And now you’re all, like, ‘Let’s buy this sexy mirror box thing that can look up someone’s nose and these cottage-core not-your-grandma’s-quilts I love that people I don’t know are going to have lots of sex on!’ ”
I cringe, but luckily we’re the only people nearby. “The point of the tray is not to look up anyone’s nose.”
“Then why do you need a mirror on it?” She flashes me an I’ve-got-you-now grin.
Fond exasperation and Raj go hand in hand. “It’s for the aesthetic,” I remind.
“Oh, the aesthetic,” she says gravely.
That does it. It takes every single muscle to keep the delicious smirk off my face as I widen my eyes and do an exaggerated peer around her shoulder, hugging the quilts against my chest. “Hi, Luke.”
She pales. Wide-eyed, she slowly turns around.
I hold my snicker at bay until she rounds on me.
“I deserved that,” Raj admits, a rueful grin pulling at her mouth. “I can’t even be mad. Actually, wait, yes, I can. Because you totally bamboozled me into making a pre-lunch stop here when you know I only look deli-cute right now and not seeing-hot-guy-in-bad-lighting cute.”
“There’s no such thing as deli-cute,” I inform her. “Also, you have a full face of makeup on so quit your mental gymnastics.”
She hmphs. “Fine, but I’m telling you now, if I see him, I’m gonna duck and cover.”
I bump my hip against hers. “When did I get braver than you?”
After picking out a few more blue-toned quilts, we head to the front to pay. It’s a win that we get sidetracked only once when Raj stops to model in front of a wall of rusted license plates and stolen road signs, insisting that I get her “good angle” (which, let’s face it, is all of them).
Luke’s working the counter wearing his “Ask me my name” name tag and a yellow Henley that brings out the color of his hair and the warmth of his summer tan. He’s wrapping a customer’s glass swan paperweight in brown paper when he catches sight of us.
Raj stiffens and turns aside to another booth, like that’s where she was heading all along.
“Rajvee!” I hiss.
She all but presses her face to a glass showcase filled with costume jewelry and brooches. And one hideous life-size rooster with a chipped beak, glass eyes that follow you around the room, and a successful Mardi Gras’ worth of shiny beads looped around his neck.
“I’m just looking,” she mumbles. “I’m an interested customer. I would love to grace my home with this”—visible twitch—“fetching fellow.”
I give up, figuring she’s gotta be nervous if she’s lying about the most hideous creation known to man. I awkwardly return Luke’s grin as I wait in line, shifting the quilt-laden tray in my arms.
After snapping pictures for Milan and getting two thumbs-up, I couldn’t resist the charm of these handmade quilts. They’re just coastal chic enough to be draped over a rocker in the master bedroom or thrown cozily on the armrest of the sofa. Soon, we’d be moving into the kind of weather that made people snuggle up with blankets, and these are so, so perfect.
“Find everything okay?” Luke asks when it’s my turn to be served.
I suspect he enjoys playing up the helpful employee bit when it’s me. It’s sort of become our inside joke after all these years.
I give him a gratified thank-you-so-much-for-asking smile. “Oh, yes. No problems at all.”
Except, of course, maybe for my little problem still feigning interest in the jewelry case to avoid coming face-to-face with Luke.
He nods toward her. “Is this because we matched on Tinder?”
I pull out my wallet. “Partly.”
“ ‘Partly’?” With a bemused smile, he pulls my purchases across the counter to peer at the seller’s tiny white price tags.
“She’s also a Sagittarius.”
He laughs as he punches numbers into his printing calculator. “That explains everything.”
I glance at Raj, who’s shuffling toward the door and freezes guiltily when I catch her. “Trust me, I know how weird it gets when you run into someone you know online.”
He rings me up with a small, secret smile. “Hey, I don’t know about that. Could also look at it like the universe is giving you a little nudge in the right direction. And it’s eighty, even.”
“You believe in signs?” I ask, surprised. I’d calculated the total already, and have my bills ready to hand over. I try not to dwell on the fact that unless I hit up an ATM soon, I’m down to a couple of ones and a ten.
“I mean, I don’t read my horoscope every day or anything.” Luke shrugs and hands me my receipt. “But I don’t ignore the obvious, either.” He cushions the tray with a wad of brown wrapping paper and piles the quilts on top. “All this for that new place of yours?”
My eyes fly to his. “I mean, it’s not mine. But the place I’m helping the owner flip, yes.”
“That’s what I meant. Kinda surprised me, if I’m being honest. Never known you to take on such a big job like that. You’ve turned down so many others for— Was it artistic reasons?”
I can sense the question inside the question. “Something like that,” I hedge. “You know how I feel about giving too much of myself to a place. It’s weird when everything I do is handmade, to leave so much of my work behind in someone else’s house.”
“No, right, I get that. But how is this any different?” He runs his hand over the quilts before sliding them into an oversize plastic bag. Gently, he says, “I’ve been to your place before, Rita. I’ve seen all your thrift hauls on your Instagram Stories. This stuff is exactly the style you’d buy for yourself.”
He’s reading too much into a few pieces of decor. So what if I’m revamping Bluebill as if I’m the one about to move in? It doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that I have really excellent taste, which any prospective buyer will love.
I can let go of the house. I can. I will.
“Thanks, Luke,” I say, snatching the bag from the counter. “I’ll tell Raj you said hi.”
“By the way!” he calls after me. I turn. “The gang’s missed seeing you at the dog park on Saturday mornings. Alanna and George miss their buddies.”
“Harrie sends kisses,” I say with a grin, slipping through the door Raj holds open for me.
Luke clutches at his heart. “And Freddie doesn’t?”
—
“Maybe I should get a dog,” muses Raj as she turns onto my street. “Then I’d have a reason to go to the dog park.”
“Maybe you should get a rooster, instead, since you like them so much.” It’s hard to keep a straight face when she gives me a dagger-filled stare. “It was painful to watch, babe,” I say. “That thing was absolutely cursed and you eye-sexed it for five minutes.”
“Hey, I gave you fair warning I was gonna be chicken if I saw him.”
“This is an ideal time to make another rooster joke, but I’ll refrain. Please clap.”
Raj lightly thumps the dash. “There you go. So, do you know what you’re going to say to Neil yet?”
I squirm in the front passenger seat, throwing up a prayer. “I wish I did. Then at least I could rehearse it. You know I’ve never had to do this before. Most of my relationships just kind of fizzled out before the three-month mark. It was never a big deal since neither of us thought it was serious. Like serious serious.”
“But Neil’s out here wanting to introduce you to his ma almost from the start.” Raj clucks her tongue. “Jesus, Rita. How did you miss the warning signs that he was ready to settle down?”
We’re slowing down. I can see my house up ahead, small and rented, but mine.
“I like him, Raj,” I confess, “but when we met on Tinder, I wasn’t expecting forever. I liked the right now. I didn’t see—didn’t want to see—that he was already looking to the future.”
“I wish I had some advice,” she says. “But between you and me, I would never have bet on the Shaadi scam when there’s a Desi mom in the ring. What can go wrong, will go wrong.”
Speaking of, Neil’s car is in my driveway. Right on cue, he gets out of the car, hand up.
“Someone’s early,” she comments, gliding to a stop. “It’s too late to keep going like we didn’t see him, right?” She reluctantly waves at him without letting go of the steering wheel.
I step out to gather my stuff from the back seat, sliding my bag of thrifted treasure from Lucky Dog Luke’s up my arm so I can grip my takeout box of falafel pita leftovers in one hand and my keys in the other.
“Tell me how it goes,” Raj says from the corner of her mouth.
“You don’t have to talk like that. He can’t hear you.”
“He’s looking right at me,” she says anyway, barely moving her lips.
“Good job not looking suspicious,” I say, shutting the back door. “Thanks for the ride.”
When Raj leaves, there’s nothing left to do but face Neil. He’s hovering by his car like he wanted to come over and say hi, but talked himself out of it.
“Hi,” I say, not sure how to greet him, so I lean in for a kiss on the cheek. Somehow the wires get crossed and his lips smoosh against mine for a millisecond before he pulls back.
“Oh, wow,” he says.
He’s not talking about the unintended kiss.
“Sorry. I, um, had a lot of pickled onions on my falafel.” (And garlicky zhoug, a spicy green-chili-and-cilantro herb sauce. And harissa. And tangy mint yogurt.)
I unlock the door for us. Before, Neil would have gone in and held the door open for me, but now he waits for me to go in first. Waiting to be allowed in, as if he’s a guest and not someone with a key who’s slept over here at least twice a week for months.
Harrie’s underfoot, barking at Neil with a vigor he’s lately reserved for Mrs. Jarvis’s fence-scaling cat and door-to-door salesmen. Another reminder of the Before that seems so foreign and far away.
“Harrie, no,” I say firmly. “No.” When Harrie downgrades to suspicious looks and mild yips, I say to Neil, “Sorry, he never did this to—”
He never did this to Milan.
“To?” Neil closes the door and waits by the couch.
I recover fast. “To . . . anyone on Rosalie Island.”
“Oh. Did you have a lot of neighbors? The pictures you sent didn’t look like it.”
I busy myself with putting the leftovers in the fridge. “Thanks for coming over. You didn’t have to leave work early, though.”
“No, I didn’t. I . . . I took today off. There were things I needed to think about.”
Things? Me and him things? “Oh,” I say, turning around. “Sit, please. You don’t have to be so formal.” It puts me on edge, the way he’s poised like he’s ready to drop onto the couch, but isn’t yet because he’s waiting for my invitation.
He exhales, then sits, slow enough to give the impression he thinks there’s a minefield under the sofa cushion. My heart clenches to see him act like a stranger. Feel like a stranger.
I fill two glasses with tap water and bring them over, sitting cross-legged on the other end of the sofa. He’s not quite looking at me, even though I’m facing him, so I talk to his profile instead. “I owe you an apology, Neil. I should have come home earlier to talk about this. You were right. I-I-I was using work as an excuse. I was hiding out on Rosalie because I didn’t know how to have this conversation with you. How to tell you . . . god, so many things?”
I blow out a breath, bracing myself for the next sentence I have to say. “Part of me fell for you before we even met. I fell for the version of you I saw on a screen. Handsome, funny. You were the only Indian guy—guy in general—on Tinder who wasn’t a creep. Do you have any idea how many dudes saw ‘furniture restorer’ in my bio and messaged me with some ridiculously unoriginal jokes about wood?”
I pull a face, thinking back to all the “Wanna get your hands on my grade-A wood, baby?” and “I bet I can get you hot and hammered” jokes.
Neil gives me a sidelong glance before angling his body toward me, more open now. “And the bar was so low that I seemed like a good choice.”
“No!” I shake my head, fingers squeezing around my glass. I take a hurried sip. “You are a good choice. You’re a great guy, Neil.”
He leans in a little closer at the same time I hesitate. We both know the “but” is coming.
“But you’re ready for marriage, or your mom’s ready, and I literally want to puke at the thought of telling my mom that I’m dating the son of her first love. I can’t break her heart, Neil. It would be different if . . .”
If I was in love with you.
I don’t say it. I hate that I even think it.
“. . . If I was ready to take the next step, but I’m not. You’re my longest relationship in years. I told you that after my high school boyfriend, I never . . . I mean, they were nice guys and everything, but they weren’t my epic love.” What I mean is, they weren’t Milan.
Neil brings his fist to his chin. “Then what was I?”
“Fun,” I respond. “Sex-on-the-first-date fun. Keeping-it-a-secret fun. It was easy to be with you. It was dating without the incessant questions and badgering and everything that comes with dating in our culture.”
I take a sip of water. “But your ma is the number one woman in your life. You can’t say no to her. You agreed to date other girls while you had a girlfriend, and you didn’t see a problem with it. You go along with everything she wants. After what happened with your dad and my mom, you know why that’s a problem for me.”
I can see from his face that, just like the first time I told him, he still doesn’t quite get it.
He can’t see it as a bad thing when his parents got their happy ending.
“You had it right, Neil. MyShaadi. It’s in the name. I thought it was so clever, so foolproof. Stalling our parents from the marriage melodrama long enough to keep dating to see where things went, but . . . your ma really grabbed the bull by the horns.” I give him a wry smile. “I didn’t count on her being a wild card.”
His forehead scrunches into a half dozen creases. “What if we dropped MyShaadi and kept seeing each other? I could tell Ma I’ll find someone without her help?”
The trouble is that what he calls help, I see as intrusion. He’s telling me what he thinks I want to hear. He’s okay with his ma pushing him—us—toward the predetermined next stage in life.
I’m not.
Neil reads it on my face. His shoulders slump and his sigh fills the room.
My nose itches and I rub it fiercely. “The girls you went out with,” I say, swallowing. “I should have been jealous. It should have been driving me bananas that you were making jokes, rolling out all the charm to impress a cute girl. And it’s not that I don’t trust you, because I do. It’s that I should have wanted to be in their place . . . and the thing is? I was okay that I wasn’t.”
His fingers flex around the glass and he leans forward to carefully set it on the wooden coffee table without using one of the crotcheted cat coasters. “You know, when you called me . . . I had the feeling you were going to break up with me. I couldn’t think straight at home, so I came here early. I thought, even if I was just in your driveway, I’d find the words, the magic words.”
I open my mouth, about to tell him I’d searched for the right words, too, but there aren’t any. There’s only the truth. He holds up a hand, Let me finish, please.
“The only thing on my mind was how to talk you out of it, but I didn’t know what to say until now.” He takes the half-drunk glass from me and sets it next to his. He clasps my hands in his and utters, in the gentlest, softest voice I’ve ever heard him use: “I understand.”
I go absolutely still. “You understand?”
He lets out a short laugh. “Yeah, I mean, weirdly, I think I do. I won’t lie, Rita, I’m not against marrying you. You know, growing up, it’s like Desis just have two options: have a love marriage with someone family approved that you probably met in college, or some kind of arranged marriage. Even if it’s not done via MyShaadi or the old-fashioned way with our parents arranging everything, it always involves somebody conspiring. It’s like this uncle has a niece who’s here on a work visa and hint-hint, nudge-nudge, or that auntie I randomly met in line at Patel Brothers used to live on the same street in Mumbai and”—his voice lifts dramatically—“guess what, she has five single daughters!”
I try not to laugh. I get the feeling both of his examples are from lived experience.
“When I met you,” he says, lower now, “on Tinder of all places, I thought I could still have a love marriage. Someone I met by chance who I could see a future with. It didn’t have to be one or the other. And for so long, I thought it did. The one girl I brought home for winter break sophomore year of college, it’s not like Ma ever came out and said it, but she wanted me to be with an Indian girl. I could tell from everyone’s frozen smiles when we walked through the door. She could tell, too; there’s a reason we didn’t make it to next Christmas.”
“Neil,” I say, a little taken aback. He’s never revealed any of this to me before. “You’re twenty-seven. You can absolutely still meet somebody a thousand different ways. There are always hot girls at the gym, getting ice cream at the marina, getting groceries at the store.”
“Who would dump me in ten seconds flat once they figure out I can never stick to a cardio routine, don’t own a yacht, and basically live off ready-made deli sandwiches, frozen pizza, and Cheerios because Ma cooks double and brings half over to my apartment.”
“Okay, I did not know that,” I say. “Jesus, Neil, is that why you never help me cook?”
He has the grace to look sheepish. “I never had to learn.”
It makes sense now why our couple cooking always turned into me cooking.
“Anyway,” he adds, “people only meet like that on TV. In real life everyone keeps to themselves and stares at their phone to avoid making eye contact.” He eyes me, weighing something. “To tell the truth, I thought you were my meet-cute.”
I can give him this. “If it wasn’t for our parents, maybe you’d have been mine, too.”
His smile is rueful. “Maybe. But maybe not. Either way, thanks for saying it.”
“Some of those things you think people would break up with you for? You can change them. You can do your own grocery shopping, learn how to cook. I can help.”
Even as I offer, I know he’s not going to take me up on it. He’d rather go from his mom to his wife, not lifting a finger. Not because he’s lazy or sexist, because he’s neither of those things. He’s just used to seeing himself as a little helpless when it comes to doing things for himself. When it comes to thinking for himself.
And even if we continued dating, what if tomorrow his mother tells him I’m not the right girl for him? Will he listen? Will he fight for me? Or will he be his father’s son?
Either way, I want more.
“You’re sweet, Rita,” says Neil. He presses his lips together and tries to smile. “I wish I was as brave as you. But I like things simple and easy. If it’s not for you, I’m not looking to go up against Ma. She and Dad were arranged, and they made it. And they made it look really, really good. I don’t think I ever thought they weren’t in love with each other a silly amount.”
He bites his lip. “Maybe MyShaadi had us pegged from the start.”
There’s no use trying to talk him out of re-creating what his parents have. And who knows, maybe one of his MyShaadi dates might actually be the One. I hope so.
Neil comes to the same realization as I do.
He pulls his key from his pocket, rests it in his palm for a moment like it weighs the world, and then places it gently on the coffee table.
I lean forward and graze his cheek with my lips. “I wish you all the best.”