Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [20]
“I’m sorry we haven’t seen your new apartment,” she said to her father. “Adam doesn’t have any vacation for a while. But we’ll come after the baby’s born.”
“There is nothing to see there. Just a TV and a sofa and my things. There is no space for all of you to stay. Not like here.”
“I’d like to see it anyway,” she said. “We can stay in a hotel.”
“There is no need, Ruma. No need to travel all that way, just to see an apartment,” her father said. “You are a mother now,” he added. “No need to drag your children.”
“But that’s what you and Ma did, taking us to India all those times.”
“We had no alternative. Our parents weren’t willing to travel. But I will come here again to see you,” he said, looking approvingly into the distance and taking a sip of his tea. “I like this place.”
“My dad’s planting flowers in the backyard,” she told Adam that night on the phone.
“Does he plan to be around to take care of them?”
His flippancy irritated her, and she felt defensive on her father’s behalf. “I don’t know.”
“It’s Thursday, Ruma. How long are you going to torture yourself?”
She didn’t feel tortured any longer. She had planned to tell Adam this, but now she changed her mind. Instead she said, “I want to wait a few more days. Make sure everyone gets along.”
“For God’s sake, Ruma,” Adam said. “He’s your father. You’ve known him all your life.”
And yet, until now, she had not known certain things about him. She had not known how self-sufficient he could be, how helpful, to the point where she had not had to wash a dish since he’d arrived. At dinner he was flexible, appreciating the grilled fish and chicken breasts she began preparing after the Indian food ran out, making do with a can of soup for lunch. But it was Akash who brought out a side of her father that surprised Ruma most. In the evenings her father stood beside her in the bathroom as she gave Akash his bath, scrubbing the caked-on dirt from his elbows and knees. He helped put on his pajamas, brush his teeth, and comb back his soft damp hair. When Akash had fallen asleep one afternoon on the living-room carpet, her father made sure to put a pillow under his head, drape a cotton blanket over his body. By now Akash insisted on being read to at night by her father, sleeping downstairs in her father’s bed.
The first night Akash slept with her father she went downstairs to make sure he’d fallen asleep. She saw a sliver of light under her father’s door and heard the sound of his voice, reading Green Eggs and Ham. She imagined them both under the covers, their heads reclining against the pillows, the book between them, Akash turning the pages as her father read. It was obvious that her father did not know the book by heart, as she did, that he was encountering it for the first time in his life. He read awkwardly, pausing between the sentences, his voice oddly animated as it was not in ordinary speech. Still, his effort touched her, and as she stood by the door she realized that for the first time in his life her father had fallen in love. She was about to knock and tell her father that it was past Akash’s bedtime, that he should turn out the light. But she stopped herself, returning upstairs, briefly envious of her own son.
The garden was coming along nicely. It was a futile exercise, he knew. He could not picture his daughter or his son-in-law caring for it properly, noticing what needed to be done. In weeks, he guessed, it would be overgrown with weeds, the leaves chewed up by slugs. Then again, perhaps they would hire someone to do the job. He would have preferred to put in vegetables, but they required more work than flowers. It was a modest planting, some slow-growing myrtle and phlox under the trees, two azalea bushes, a row of hostas, a clematis to climb one of the posts of the porch, and in honor of his wife, a small hydrangea. In a plot behind the kitchen, unable to resist, he also put in a few tomatoes, along with some marigolds and impatiens; there was just time for a small harvest to come in by the fall.