Free Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

waitressing job at Pappasitos, where he has connections. With tips I’d be earning twice as much. We could move to a bigger place. This is important because lately our one-bedroom seems to be shrinking.
    I feel guilty thinking this. Just last week, after I told Robert I’d had a rough day, he sat me down on the couch, put my feet in his lap, and rubbed them with peppermint oil until they tingled. I could see why he’s the most popular massage therapist at Bodywork. But what touched me the most, pun fully intended, is that he was willing to do this for me at the end of a long day spent wrestling with flesh.
    In the mental conversations I can’t seem to stop having with my mother (which are the only conversations we have anymore), I ask, Can you imagine Dad ever doing this for you, even before he decided to leave?
    My mother responds with one of her sayings: He who laughs last laughs longest.
    No. She turns her face so I won’t see her tears, and I feel rotten.
    I don’t think I’ll quit Nearly anytime soon. I love navigating its cavernous interior, replacing on hangers pants that have fallen to the floor, folding curtains into a compact squareness, rummaging with missionary zeal to reunite a lost sandal with its mate. I sweep the ancient feather duster over escritoires, andirons, a Jesus statue with an index finger chopped off. Sometimes I stay on even after my shift is over, running my hand over stains and rust-tattoos, imagining the adventures these objects had before they ended up here, their tribulations when they leave. Once in a while I take something small, a saltshaker that’s lost its pepper partner, a talking doll that makes a strangled sound when you pull on the cord attached to the back of its neck. I carry it around in my car for a few days, and then I leave it in a freeway underpass so a homeless person can have it.
    So far I’ve only taken things that no one else wants, but I can feel something growing in me, restless and cresting like a storm wave. I find myself watching the Jesus statue. One of these days, I’m going to snag it.
    When people bathe in the Ganges, I once read somewhere, or maybe my mother told me, their sins are forced to leave them and wait on the banks because the river is so holy that nothing impure can enter it. The sins will repossess the bathers when they climb out, but as long as they’re immersed, they’re free of sorrow.
    Nearly is as close to a holy river as my life can get.

    After our first fight, I made a list to remind myself why Robert is special:
    4. He’s a great cook. (I’m not.)
    3. I love his hands. I’ve loved them ever since he ran them over my naked back at our very first meeting. (This is not as risqué as it sounds. I was at Bodywork for the Weekday Half-Hour Special, which Blanca had bought me as a birthday gift.) He gave me a full hour and then invited me to dinner. Over souvlaki and ouzo, we discovered that we shared a passion for sci-fi movies. A month later, he asked if I’d move in with him.
    I knew it was too soon. Plus I’d never lived with a man. Yes, I said. Oh, yes.
    2. He’s an intriguing mix of contradictions. He loves literature. (On our first date, we discussed Paul Auster.) Yet every Friday night he gets together with his high school buddies to play pool. Sometimes it bothers me, how he has these different compartments in his life. (He hasn’t introduced me to the Friday buddies. Not that I want to meet them. But still.) I wonder which compartment he’s placed me in.
    Are these frivolous reasons? How about this one, then:
    1. Robert is nothing like my father.

    At three p.m. Mr. Lawry perches his hat, a startling spinach-green, atop gray corkscrews of hair and informs us—as he does every afternoon—that he has errands to run. He leaves Keysha, his favorite, in charge and exhorts Blanca and me to use our time gainfully by price-tagging a box of kitchen