I tried not to move, not to lose her touch. I nodded. A question formed in my throat, but I didn’t say it aloud. Could I have some, too? “I’m not sure I’d know the difference, either,” I said.

8.

It had come time for the suitable families to meet. Prachi and Avi were beginning to look for houses, and the Kapoor clan, self-identified Los Altos natives, had taken the opportunity to invite my parents out for a visit. Houses. Homes! These things were my mother’s purpose. She was only too happy to lend her expertise to the hunt. We were to troop around, my whole family and Avi (his parents pled fatigue re: Bay Area real estate), working through as many open houses as could be crammed into one August Sunday.

I’d been conscripted into joining. “You’ll have to do this one day, too,” my father insisted, just as when we’d toured colleges for Prachi. There, the ever-dangling threat of the future.

I picked my parents up from my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya’s house in Fremont, then gathered Prachi and Avi from the city.

“How mad that my brother lives so near your parents, Avi,” my mother said merrily, as everyone squished into the backseat of my knee-knocking Honda. (Avi was lingering on the waitlist for a Tesla, and Prachi had never liked driving, not since her traumatic year of lessons from my father.) And yet it was not mad at all, because the Bay Area is the upper-middle-class Indian American promised land. These sunny small towns, with their citrus trees, their tidy main streets—all these qualities make the place peaceful in a way that promises an end to competition, suggesting (incorrectly, of course) that the game has been won.

“We should have rented a car,” my father said when my Honda took too long to start.

Avi attempted to soothe nerves. “We can take my mom’s other car tomorrow, Uncle.”

My mother fluttered. “Oh, no. No. We would not put your parents out. We can rent.”

I was exhausted from a week of pushing further into the Tale of Isaac Snider. He’d be back from Indonesia the following week, and we were scheduled for a check-in to ensure I was on track for the proposal defense in November. I was aware that I’d produced more on Snider than on the Gilded Age. I was aware, too, that the sentences pulsed in the former pages, and lay limp in the latter. I still had time, though, to try to breathe some life into my sample chapter on religious messaging surrounding money during the period.