The Shaadi Set-Up by Lillie Vale
Chapter 21
After Milan leaves, I make sure to double-check the ferry schedule, timing my departure so there’s no chance we’re on the same ferry home. Rosalie Island suddenly doesn’t feel like my safe haven anymore. After the said-too-much-we-can’t-take-back fight with Milan, we definitely need a break from each other.
You’d think we wouldn’t need another one after six years, but here we are.
So I go home, and even with Harrie and Freddie with me, I’m the one running with the tail between my legs.
The next day Paula calls while I’m in the shower. I heard it while I was squeezing excess water out of my hair, but assuming it was Raj checking in or Mom calling for updates on Operation Get Rita Back Together With Milan, I let it ring.
I don’t want to rehash what happened with him. I’m dreading Friday; waiting for him to show up and knowing in my heart that he won’t.
After all, he didn’t show up before.
After moisturizing and finger-combing the last tangles from my long hair, I dress in my oldest, softest black tee and oxblood hip-hugging shorts. As happy as my pups are to be home, I can’t hide out here forever.
The sooner I finish up at Rosalie, the sooner I can never see Milan again.
Even if it means leaving a piece of my heart behind.
It’s not what I want, but maybe it’s what I need.
What’s broken between us can’t be fixed with a dab of glue or a clever bit of welding.
If only repairing broken hearts was that easy, Mom and Dad would be happy and in love.
Harrie butts his head against my just-lotioned calves. Despite the walk we took an hour ago, he still has energy to burn. Unlike me, who’s ready to jump back into bed and pretend yesterday didn’t happen.
I pick up my phone, surprised to see two new voicemails on the screen. Mom and Aji only call me on WhatsApp; Dad and I volley between iMessage and WhatsApp using emojis, gifs, and selfies with our food; Raj never leaves voicemails when she can just call me back incessantly until I answer. And no one else I know would call me when they could just DM.
Hey, it’s Paula!chirps the voicemail. How are you doing these days? You missed the neighborhood barbecue and my kids’ lemonade stand! It was the cutest thing. Her voice lowers to a hush, like she doesn’t want anyone around her to hear. Anyway, I saw you on a walk this morning and you looked a real mess, honey. Hope it’s not that boyfriend of yours giving you heartache.
She rambles on, spilling gossip that isn’t that scintillating, about people whose faces I can’t even recall, and it takes me a solid minute of half listening before I realize she’s talking about a reality show she watches that for some reason she thinks I watch, too.
If I don’t hear from you by this afternoon I’m going to swing by with some of that lemonade we didn’t sell and a slice of my pineapple upside-down cake to turn your frown upside down!She laughs at her own joke. I saw some of your new posts on Instagram and I love the vibe, especially the painted table that looks like the Rosalie Island coastline? And I know we put a pin in your doing my home renovation, but if you’re back home for good, I think maybe we should take a—
The voicemail cuts off.
There’s a long, pregnant pause before the automated voice begins: Next message, received on—
I end the call without thinking about it.
Something about what just happened is so familiar I could reach out and touch it.
My breath catches.
It’s because of you, and I think maybe we should take a break—
Phone still clenched in my hand, I dash to the closet, throwing open both sides of the accordion doors. I don’t find what I’m looking for at first. I tilt my upper body all the way in, rooting around the clothes still in shopping bags with receipts, ready to be returned if buyer’s remorse or my credit card statement talk me out of keeping them.
I dig past the chest of dog toys, a box from Chewy, random old cables and empty iPhone boxes, the worn children’s books I was too sentimental to give away, and a giant bag of cheap Amazon scrunchies.
Finally, my fingers close around the rough, all-weather fabric of a backpack I haven’t used in years. Success. I pull it toward me. The keychains jangle, parting gifts from hostel friends who gave me a little piece of their home country.
In one of the inside pockets is my old iPhone 4s, the one I’d begged my parents for in high school. I’d taken it with me to Europe sophomore year of college, but had made the mistake of trying to pop it out of the case while on the plane to make sure I could do it. In the hustle of disembarking, I couldn’t get the case back on in time.
Which meant that when I heard Milan’s voicemail, the purple butterfly case had been stashed in my purse instead of protecting my phone. And when I’d dropped it in shock, the screen had shattered on impact. The long, jagged crack looks like a wicked grin.
It’s because of you, and I think maybe we should take a break—
I’d assumed Milan’s voicemail ended there.
But now I remember what he said yesterday: I never broke up with you, Rita.
It’s a long shot. But maybe, just maybe, like Paula’s voicemail had cut off, his had, too.
Maybe he had never broken up with me at all.
I think the five minutes it takes to charge the phone long enough to be able to check my voicemail are the longest five minutes of my life—until I’m on the phone with the customer service rep another fifteen to figure out why the mailbox is empty.
I’m transferred to someone else, a bored-sounding woman who couldn’t care less that I’m trying to recover the proof to exonerate the man who broke my heart.
“You’re trying to recover a voicemail from how long ago now?” Her tone is incredulous.
When I tell her, she whistles. I’m pretty sure that’s not in her customer service handbook.
“If you haven’t saved it somewhere, it’s not on our server anymore,” she says. “We purge old voicemails pretty frequently. iPhones nowadays would be able to save voicemails indefinitely, but back then? Thinking you probably just had a month before it deleted.”
My hope strangles in my throat, every last bit of anticipation ebbing away. So that’s it? There’s no way to get it back? To see if it came with a part two?
Try again, I want to insist. Double-check with a supervisor.
At my silence, the woman asks, more gently now, “Was it important?”
I don’t want to think about how many other desperate strangers she’s had to let down.
“Not anymore,” I say, voice tight. “Thank you.”
—
After hanging up, I’m strangely bereft without a wild goose to chase, so I decide to follow through on my plan to return to Rosalie Island with Harrie and Freddie. The boys would be content to stay, but suddenly my cozy little space seems squeezed and small, with an anticlimactic heaviness draping the air. I yearn for Bluebill Cottage with its high ceilings and rooms full of possibility, the way home settles in every nook and cranny.
I left the island only yesterday, but just like every time before it feels like I’ve left something important behind.
While my clothes spin in the dryer, the rest of the morning goes by in a flurry of cooking: crunchy Vietnamese-style chicken salad, lemony lentils with rainbow veggies, and heaping helpings of comforting spicy masala mac. The days of Milan coming over with lunch are, I’m afraid, in the past.
I lug my duffel and a cooler—heavy with portioned meals to last me through the final stint of home improvement—from my house to my car and then all the way to the New Bern ferry parking lot. That’s when I realize that in my rush to get back, I got here too early. My head’s fogged up with the past instead of the present.
With a short wait until the next ferry, I take the boys on a walk through New Bern. It turns out to be Harrie sniffing at every new flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk and making frequent stops to “talk” to the cats dozing in front windows. And somehow, without even realizing it, we wind up close to the historic district where my parents’ fixer-upper used to be, a few streets away from the rows of Hatteras yachts near the ferry terminal.
How do I know? The fuchsia azalea shrubs shading windows and spilling through wrought-iron gates are the color of my very first lipstick from the Clinique counter. To Aji’s consternation, I was drawn to the bright colors even then, eager to graduate from the tinted lip balms and Lip Smackers lip gloss that made it hard to kiss (not that I’d been kissed, but I trusted in Raj’s pronouncement that gloss left a sticky mess everywhere, and as someone who had kissed a grand total of two boys and three girls, she should know).
Mom bought it for me, anyway. When she asked why I didn’t choose the natural, soft pinks she’d selected, I told her it reminded me of the azaleas growing outside the windows of the New Bern house. We drove home the rest of the way in silence.
She forgot to take the turn to our favorite frozen yogurt place and when we got home, she disappeared into her bedroom with all her purchases instead of trying everything on for Dad like she usually did. That was when fourteen-year-old Rita realized that even though four years had passed since the house had been sold, Mom still carried something about it with her.
I never wore that fuchsia lipstick where Mom could see. And because she never saw me with it at home, Aji assumed she was right all along, that I was too young for lipstick. The truth was that I applied it before first period at school, craning over the sink in the girl’s bathroom, and carefully wiped it off at the end of the day before Mom came to pick me up.
My heartbeat quickens. There’s no logical reason I should have remembered how to get here, not when the last time I’d barely been tall enough to see over the window.
Nostalgia brings an image of the house to my mind.
I jangle the leash. “What do you think, boys?”
Harrie, always up for an adventure, wags his tail. Freddie raises one paw. Okay.
I walk along Middle Street in a daze, unable to shake how surreal it feels being back. Disloyal, too, maybe. Hand-in-the-Marie-biscuit-jar naughty, like I’m not supposed to be here.
The historic downtown is vibrant with upscale restaurants and teahouses, an art gallery selling local art only, florist and gift shops, cozy cafés oozing small-town charm, and, surprisingly, even an Indian takeout. The shade trees don’t provide much protection and dappled sunlight warms my shoulders, but as we get closer to the first house that stole my heart, pink crepe myrtles canopy above us. They weren’t this big when we left, nor did they droop low enough to touch.
My parents had been in a constant battle with the guidelines for the interior and exterior of the house, as per the National Register of Historic Places. With tempers flaring, they were constantly battling with each other, too. My mother, trying to keep her voice low so I wouldn’t hear, gritting out that Dad should never have bought a fixer-upper that required so much research into what was appropriate for the historic district, and Dad, wounded, whisper-yelling back that he was doing this for her, for us, didn’t she see that?
By some strange muscle memory, I see the house in my mind before it even comes into view, shrouded behind mature flowering dogwoods and crepe myrtles. The gable-front Victorian is spiffier than I remember it. The white window trim of the high-peaked two-story and the front porch balustrade look recently refreshed, popping against the sky-blue of the painted clapboard.
Mom favored cream with lapis-blue shutters the same shade as the nearby Neuse and Trent rivers, but now that I’m here I can’t remember in what state they actually sold the house. I don’t remember much from the month Mom lived here by herself, either, and even less about how—why—she came back from this house that she and Dad never finished.
Whatever unhappiness lay within her, had she exorcised those demons? Had she exorcised her complicated feelings about Amar to let herself fall in love with Dad? My heart sinks. Or did she decide to come back only for me, using the month alone to brace herself for a lifetime living with a man she didn’t love?
And Dad had taken her back. So had Aji.
And nobody ever spoke a word about it during or afterward. Even now, all these years later, it’s like it never even happened at all.
Freddie rubs against my calves and Harrie whines, both of them picking up on my mood.
I stare long and hard at the fuchsia azaleas in front of the first-floor bedroom window that would have been mine. My heart twists. Someone else lives here now. The shrub has flowered even wider now, grown so much. Behind the Disney princess peel-off window stickers and the gauzy pink curtain comes a childish shout.
I snap out of my cotton-eared haze, blinking furiously.
Whatever Mom’s reason for returning to us, she and Dad had found a way to grow their life together. After she came back, the two of them had gone away for a week, taking a couple’s trip to Niagara Falls that I’d later learn was their belated honeymoon. And though there had been several trips to Europe and Asia since then, the photo of them together on the Maid of the Mist is the only one Mom’s ever used as her WhatsApp icon. And Aji, who gets pretty vocal whenever she isn’t taken somewhere, for once didn’t complain at all.
Somehow, my parents had fixed their relationship. And if they could do it, then maybe I could find a way to unpick the splinters of Milan from my heart, too. Maybe all those splinters put together could build a home.
“Bluebill,” I say with a gasp. “Shit. We have to get back to the ferry.”