Free Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Ruma. I have enjoyed each day.”
    “Me too.”
    “These days with Akash have been the greatest gift,” he added, his voice softening. “If you like, I can come for a while after you have the baby. I won’t be as useful as your mother would have been.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “But please understand, I prefer to stay on my own. I am too old now to make such a shift.”
    His gentle words fell on her thickly, too quickly. She understood that he had not had to think it over, that he had never intended to stay.
    “Make time to look into law firms here,” he continued. “Don’t let all that hard work go to waste.”
    He stood up, and before she could stop him, rinsed out his cup and saucer and put those into the drainer as well. It was time to go.
    “Let me go downstairs and give Akash a kiss,” he said. He turned to leave the room, then stopped. “Do you have a spare stamp? I need to put a bill into the mail.”
    “In the drawer of the little table in the hall,” she said. “There’s a roll there.”
    She heard the drawer opening, then closing, then the sound of his flip-flops hitting the stairs. When he returned, he went to the entryway to put on his shoes, tied his laces, fit the flip-flops into the front pocket of his suitcase. He kissed Ruma on the cheek. “Take care of yourself. Let me know how the garden comes along.” He glanced at her stomach and added, “I am waiting for the good news.” He turned and walked outside to his car, putting the suitcase into the trunk. She stood watching as he turned on the engine and backed out, wondering when she would see him again. At the mailbox he paused, and for a moment she thought he was about to open the window and put his bill inside. But he only waved through the closed window, leaning toward her, looking lost, and a few seconds later he was gone.
     
     
     
    “Where’s Dadu?” Akash asked as she was finishing her tea.
    “He went home today.”
    “Why?”
    “Because that’s where he lives.”
    “Why?” In her son’s small face she saw the disappointment she also felt.
    “Daddy’s coming back tonight,” she said, trying to change the subject. “Should we make a cake?”
    Akash went to the kitchen door and tried the knob, looking through the glass at the yard. “I want Dadu.”
    She opened the door for him and followed him out, both of them padding barefoot, Ruma treading gingerly, Akash not fearful of stones or twigs. It was chillier than she expected, still too early for the warmth of the day to have gathered. She considered going back in for sweaters. “Sweetpea? You cold?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest, but Akash did not reply. He picked up the empty watering can her father had left underneath the porch and pretended to water things in his little plot. She looked at the items poking out of the ground: pens and pencils, a straw, a Popsicle stick. There were papers, too: old envelopes from junk mail, the cards that fell out of magazines, seeking subscribers, folded up like little tents on the soil. Her eye fell to another piece of paper, stiffer than the rest. She bent down to look at it, recognizing her father’s handwriting. She assumed it was a postcard her father had sent to her, one Akash had removed from the front of the refrigerator door, or the basket on the hall table. But this postcard bore no post-mark, had not been sent. It was composed in Bengali and addressed in English to someone on Long Island. A Mrs. Meenakshi Bagchi.
    She picked it up. “Akash, what’s this?”
    He reached out, attempting to snatch it back from her. “It’s mine.”
    “What is it?” she asked, more harshly this time.
    “It’s for my garden.”
    “Did Dadu give this to you?”
    He shook his head angrily, and then he started to cry.
    She stared at the card and instantly she knew, just as she’d known from the expression on the surgeon’s face what had happened to her mother on the operating table. The woman in the video, the