All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva

Author:Anjali Sachdeva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

When my parents are finished crying, my mother cooks supper for me, all the recipes I haven’t tasted since I was sixteen. I stand in the kitchen with her and chop vegetables while my father and George watch football in the next room. I know she doesn’t need my help, but I don’t know what to say to her and it feels good to have something to occupy my hands. As we work, she talks about George, raising her voice now and then when she wants to make sure he hears her.

“He’s too busy for school,” she says. “Busy drinking and chasing girls. You remember, he was such a good boy, and what happened? He’s wasting his life.”

“It’s mine to waste,” he says from the living room, and from the grim tone of his voice I can tell this is a fight they’ve already had many times, one where the heat of the argument has given way to simmering resentment. My father tells him to be quiet and my mother hands me an onion for the chopping board.

She makes enough food for a dozen people, and when she has it all on the table, my father claps his hands and breathes deeply before he says grace. He always did this, but I’d forgotten about it until just now. George and I would roll our eyes at each other just before we folded our hands to pray. I look at my brother and he meets my eye and, for a moment, he smiles, the same mischievous smile he had at eleven, and I can see him just as he was, as though no time has passed. My father thanks God for bringing me back to their house, and my mother squeezes my hand in hers as though she could knit our flesh together.

After we eat, my mother says, “I’ll get some sheets. You can sleep on the sofa.”

“I have a hotel room.”

“No,” she says. “You have to sleep here. What kind of mother lets her daughter sleep alone at a hotel?”

The cushions of the sofa are too soft, the night too full of city sounds. I lie awake, still dressed, listening to my parents’ breathing in the next room for perhaps an hour before a wedge of yellow light spills into the hall from George’s bedroom. He steps softly into the living room and stands looking down at me.

“You awake?”

“Yes.”

“Want to get out of here? Have some fun?”

“Sure.”

“All right, come on.” He holds out his hand to help me up from the couch and I’m surprised all over again by the strength and size of him. When I’m standing, he looks me up and down and says, “Do you have something else to wear? Something less…you know?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he says. “I don’t want people to think I brought my aunt to a party.”

“Shut up,” I tell him, but I’m smiling in the darkness.

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