Free Watch Over Me by Christa Parrish Page B

Aai , hi.”
    “Benjamin. I am surprised to hear you. Happy, yes. But something is wrong?”
    “No, no. Everything’s fine. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
    “I have much blessings.”
    “And how’s Ba ?”
    “Good. Busy. You can come see us soon? I know he will like that much.”
    “I’ll have to check with Abbi.”
    “If it is too much with that baby, we will come to you.”
    “I said I’d check with Abbi, see if she’s up for taking a trip,” he said, his words craggy.
    Silence.
    “Okay, I’m going now,” he said. “I’ll let you know about the visit in a couple days.”
    “Benjamin . . . give our love to Abbi.”
    “I will.”
    He had to admit, both his parents had accepted Abbi into their family more easily than he had expected. Sangita gave her a mangala sutra , the traditional Indian wedding necklace. Harish invited her to live with them during Benjamin’s deployment. Both did whatever they could—whatever they were capable of, given their personalities—to make her feel welcome.
    They had met Abbi several times when he had first begun dating her. He brought her to church and Sunday lunch, and afterward they would joke together about seeing his parents’ heads explode if they ever married. But as the relationship became more serious, Benjamin stopped bringing her around; he didn’t want his parents to see that Abbi had gotten inside him.
    He proposed to her the night before his graduation, and after the ceremony his parents took both of them to dinner. And then he told them about the impending marriage, how he and Abbi planned a quick double ceremony at the courthouse with Stephen and Lauren. Neither reacted, except to offer congratulations. But the next day his father asked to speak with him and, without emotion or pretense, asked simply if Benjamin had considered “all facets of the equation.”
    “Facets of the equation? Come on, Baba . This is love, not chemistry.”
    “A marriage is more than fleeting feelings, which can come and go. If you do not know this, you will have difficulties.”
    “You just want me to have you find me a proper Indian girl? A nice mail-order bride, like Aai?”
    “Benjamin, you misjudge us. If Abbi is whom you will marry, we will support you. But do not be so naïve to think your mother and I cannot understand what you feel because we not so American as you.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “You did not have to,” Harish said.
    His father had come to the United States for college on a student visa, completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of South Dakota, and stayed on as a member of the faculty. There were no Indian women in Vermillion, though, except for a couple professors’ wives and a handful of students—or, if there were, he had little time to search for them after his lectures and research. Harish didn’t scour advertisements or pay some finder’s fee to an arranged marriage company; he simply sent word to his relatives back in Maharashtra that he wanted a wife. And he found one—or, one found him. Sangita Mehta wrote a letter to him in early 1980, saying she would come cook and clean, and bear him a child, if possible. Well past marrying age at nearly forty, her first two husbands in the grave, she was ready to escape her rural home and the religious tensions in a country where Christians comprised less than one percent of the population.
    Benjamin had been born two years later.
    It was true; he had discounted his father’s words. He thought his parents knew nothing of the foolishness of love. They respected and honored and served one another—but if they felt more than that, Benjamin hadn’t seen it. He’d never even seen them kiss.
    Harish hadn’t been the only person with concerns about the match, though. Stephen came to him two nights before the wedding and said, “Are you sure?”
    In retrospect, Benjamin understood where his friend was coming from. The young loved more easily, without looking ahead or