“How do you know?” I whispered as Mr. Finkler handed back the previous week’s tests.

“Ninety-four, good job,” Shruti said. Mr. Finkler had written the number in red and circled it twice on my blue book. She waved hers.

“Ninety-eight,” I conceded.

“Her mother told my mother at Kroger,” Shruti said. “I didn’t even know she was applying to private schools.”

I shrugged.

“You didn’t know either?” Shruti pressed. “Aren’t you two, like…” And she pulled an appalling face, aping something she had seen on television, a knowing-teenage-gossip face.

Desperate to put a stop to the way she was pouting her lips and raising her eyebrows, I said, “No, definitely not,” and it was true—we weren’t, like, anything. Not anymore.

ANJALI DAYAL DID NOT WORK in the way my parents worked. My mother was a financial analyst. My father spent eight hours a day on his feet, in a white coat behind the counter of a Publix pharmacy. He had suffered years of study for that job, in India and in America, but in my eyes as a kid, I had a father who “worked at the grocery store.” When I said that once in front of my mother, I was swatted on the butt and duly corrected. My father was a pharmacist. The word clunked in my mouth—but never again would I say he worked at the grocery store.

Anita’s mother, on the other hand, would tell you she ran a “catering business.” She filled in for working Indian mothers who wanted to serve their families proper home-cooked fare but who lacked either the time or the skill in the kitchen to do so. Occasionally she would do a graduation or birthday party, but for the most part, Anjali Auntie answered calls placed in response to flyers she hung up at the temple and in Little India strip malls—those two-story off-the-highway structures housing Kumon math tutoring centers and restaurants called Haveli or Bombay Palace or Taste of India and threading salons where women pruned themselves of excess ethnic hair. She drove all over the suburbs and did much of her cooking in other people’s homes, as though the women hiring her wished to think of her the way they thought of the help back in India. To admit that the prettier, younger mother was the “proprietor of a small business” would have been strange and modern and white.

Surely Anjali Auntie did not need this job—based on everything my mother said about Pranesh Uncle, money was flowing from the West Coast. But she did it nonetheless, perhaps because she was afraid, herself, of being left to do godknowswhat.

It was this job that threw me into close contact with the Dayal women for the first time in a month. At the end of May, my whole family donned our Indian clothes and headed to a big party celebrating the Bhatt twins’ graduation. I scratched at the blue kurta my mother had made me wear. Talk on the way there focused on the honorees: Jay was Ivy League-bound in the fall, while Meena would attend a state school, and not one of the “better” ones, in my parents’ eyes. Meena’s fate offended my mother.