Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [15]
“There’s the exit Adam takes to go to work,” she said.
“How far it is?”
When she was younger she would have corrected him; “How far is it?” she would immediately have said, irritated, as if his error were a reflection of her own shortcomings. “I don’t know. I think it takes him about forty minutes each way.”
“That’s a lot of driving. Why didn’t you choose a house closer by?”
“We don’t mind. And we fell in love with the house.” She wondered whether her father would consider this last remark frivolous.
“And you? Have you found work in this new place?”
“Part-time litigation work is hard to find,” she said. “Preschool is only until noon, and Adam and I don’t want Akash in a daycare.”
“In order to practice here you will have to take another bar exam?” her father asked.
“No. There’s reciprocity with New York.”
“Then why not look for a new job?”
“I’m not ready yet, Baba.” She had not bothered to contact any firms in Seattle, not called up the trusts and estates attorney one of the partners at her old firm had given her the name of, suggesting maybe Ruma could write briefs on a case-by-case basis. She realized she’d never explicitly told her father that she intended, for the next few years, to be at home. “We’re still getting settled.”
“That I understand. I am only asking if you have a time frame in mind.”
“Maybe when the new baby starts kindergarten.”
“But that is over five years from now. Now is the time for you to be working, building your career.”
“I am working, Baba. Soon I’ll be taking care of two children, just like Ma did.”
“Will this make you happy?”
She didn’t answer him. Her mother would have understood her decision, would have been supportive and proud. Ruma had worked fifty-hour weeks for years, had earned six figures while Romi was still living hand to mouth. She’d always felt unfairly cast, by both her parents, into roles that weren’t accurate: as her father’s oldest son, her mother’s secondary spouse.
“They won’t be young forever, Ruma,” her father continued. “Then what will you do?”
“Then I’ll go back.”
“You’ll be over forty. It may not be so simple.”
She kept her eyes on the road, pushing a button that turned on the radio, filling the car with the determined drone of a reporter’s voice. She had never been able to confront her father freely, the way she used to fight with her mother. Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them. She knew that she had disappointed him, getting rejected by all the Ivy Leagues she’d applied to. In spite of Romi’s itinerant, uncertain life, she knew her father respected him more for having graduated from Princeton and getting a Fulbright to go abroad. Ruma could count the arguments she’d had with her father on one hand. In high school, after she’d gotten her license, he’d refused to insure her on the family car so that she could drive it on her own. In college, when it was time to declare her major, he’d tried to convince her to choose biology instead of history. He had balked at the cost of law school, but when she’d gotten into Northeastern he had paid for it all the same. And he had argued, when she and Adam were planning their wedding, that an outdoor ceremony was unwise, recommending an institutional banquet hall instead of the bluff on Martha’s Vineyard she and Adam desired as a location. As it turned out the weather was perfect, the sun beating brilliantly on the ocean as they exchanged their vows. And yet, even to this day, Ruma suffered from nightmares of the white tent and folding chairs and hundreds of guests soaked