Kumar’s first wife, Sapna, had died on Pearl Harbor Day in the full tilt of the holiday season, four days after Amit was born. It was easy enough to remember how long ago that was as Amit was twelve. Sapna had been ten years younger than Kumar.
“Ten years kinder,” he would say to her on her birthday. “Ten years more forgiving.” It was true, Sapna’s joy in life could make her seem uncomplicated, when in fact she was probably as complicated as anyone else. “No stupidity in happiness,” she liked to say. She loved her husband, she loved her sons. She loved that she had managed to escape northern Michigan for Chicago. Their lives, however busy and freezing cold, were good lives. She had come through childbirth for a second time without a hitch. They were all home together. Ravi, who was two and a half, was taking a nap. Sapna was sitting on the couch, the baby in her arms. She looked right at Kumar and said, “It’s the strangest thing.” Then she closed her eyes.
The autopsy showed a genetic abnormality of the heart—long QT. Considering the severity of her condition, the real surprise was that she hadn’t died after Ravi was born. But sometimes people didn’t. Sometimes they lived their entire lives never knowing the fate they missed. When tested, they found out Sapna’s mother had the gene as well. Her sister had it.
“For the vast majority of the people on this planet,” Fix had said, “the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside.”
It was less than a year after the death of his wife that Franny came to Kumar’s table at the Palmer House and asked him what he wanted to drink.
“Jesus,” he said, staring up at her in disbelief. “Tell me that you’re not still working here.”
Kumar, she thought. How had she forgotten Kumar? “Every now and then, only on the weekends,” Franny said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “I have a real job in the law library back at the University of Chicago but the pay is appalling. Plus I like it here.”
Kumar was waiting to pick up a client and take him to dinner. “I’m offering you a job,” he said. “You can start Monday. A single job that will pay you more than your two jobs combined.”
Franny laughed. Kumar hadn’t changed. “Doing what?”
“Due diligence.” He was making it up. “I need you to compile financial records for a merger.”
“I never finished law school.”
“I know how far you got in law school. We need someone we can count on. This is your interview. There, I’ve hired you.”
A tall black man in a charcoal suit came to the table and Kumar stood to greet him. “Our new associate,” Kumar said to the man, holding out his hand towards Franny. “Franny Keating. Is it still Keating?”
“Franny Keating,” she said, and shook the man’s hand.
Later, Kumar would say he worked it out on the spot: he would marry Franny, and in doing so solve everything except the unsolvable. He had loved her when they were young—if not in the year she had shared his apartment then at least after she had left with Leo Posen. If she were free he saw no reason he wouldn’t be able to love her again. The problem was time. Sapna’s parents had come from Michigan to take care of Ravi when Amit was born and almost a year later they were still living in his house. Between work and his children, between his life and the enormous burden of grief, there wasn’t a minute in any day that wasn’t devoured. His genius would be to hire Franny rather than date her. He didn’t want to date her anyway. He wanted to marry her. If she came to work in his law firm they would see each other every day. They would come upon each other’s stories naturally, in the elevator or exchanging files. He could make sure that his idea was as good as he thought it was before entrusting her with his children and his life.
Settled, he thought when he handed her his business card and said goodnight, everything’s settled.
The bar was still playing the same tape all these years later, or a tape that was remarkably similar to that other tape. Franny would have laughed to think how much it used to bother her. She never heard it anymore. But when Kumar and his client left the bar and she put his business card into her apron pocket, she could half-hear Ella Fitzgerald singing as if in the back of her mind,
There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget
Don’t you want to forget someone too?
Lying in the darkness of her mother’s house, Franny tried to imagine a world in which Sapna had lived. Maybe Franny and Kumar would have met again, bumped into each other in a bookstore one day, laughed and said hello and gone on, but she never would have married him, and his sons would never have been her sons. If Sapna could have lived then certainly Beverly could have stayed married to Fix, which would mean no Jack Dine, no Dine stepbrothers, no Christmas party in Virginia. It would also mean no Marjorie though, and that would be a terrible loss when Marjorie had given Fix the benefit of great love. But maybe Bert would have stayed with Teresa then, and fifty years later he might have saved her life by insisting she go to the doctor in time. Cal would have missed the bee that was waiting for him in the tall grass near the barn at Bert’s parents’ house. He could have lived for years, though who’s to say another bee wouldn’t have found him somewhere else? With Cal alive, Albie would never have set the fire that brought him to Virginia, though he wouldn’t have come to Virginia anyway because Bert would have stayed in California. Franny, half asleep on top of the bedspread beside her husband, was unable to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the moorings of the past. Without Bert, Franny would never have gone to law school. She would have gotten a masters in English and so she never would have met Kumar at all. She never would have been in Chicago working at the Palmer House and so she never would have met Leo Posen, who sat at the bar so many lifetimes ago and talked about her shoes. That was the place where Franny’s life began, leaning over to light his cigarette. Somehow, out of all that could have been gained or lost, the thought of having never met Leo was the one thing she couldn’t bear.
The sound of Kumar’s breathing had deepened and slowed, and she got up carefully, felt for her dress and shoes in her suitcase, and changed clothes in the dark.
When she came down the back stairs to the kitchen, Franny found her mother at the breakfast table by herself, arranging petits fours on a tray.
“You know there are people here who will do that for you,” Franny said.
Her mother looked up and gave her an exhausted smile. “I’m hiding for just a minute.”
Franny nodded and sat down beside her.
“This party always seems like such a good idea in the abstract,” Beverly said. “But every time I have it I can’t imagine why.”
They could hear the guests in the other room, the hilarity in their voices raised by the eggnog and champagne. The piano player was playing something faster now, maybe a jazzed-up version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but Franny wasn’t sure. Twelve days, she thought, she would have killed herself before she ever got to the five golden rings.
Beverly put out the last of the tiny square cakes from the box, pink and yellow and white, each one crowned with a sugared rosette. “Rick came after all,” she said, turning the squares to diamonds. “Now he’s drinking.”
“Matthew said he’d come.”
“I can’t take them all together,” Beverly said. “One on one the boys are fine, or mostly fine, but when they’re together they always have an agenda. They have so many ideas about the future: what I’m supposed to do with Jack, what I’m supposed to do with the house. They don’t seem to have any sense of what conversation is appropriate for a Christmas party. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know why they keep asking me. Do you have any ideas about the future?”