“Wait, wait, this here’s my woman.” Kendrik pulled his phone back out of his pocket. It took him a second to find a succession of pictures of his girlfriend in the gallery.

Aria swiped through them. In almost every picture, her face was turned at a flirtatious three-quarter angle. Her hair was straightened and dyed purple-red. Her eyebrows had been drawn on to match the color of her hair, and big fake eyelashes framed a sassy look in her brown eyes.

Kendrik watched Aria scan through the pictures proudly, waiting to hear a comment on her beauty, which he knew he could expect. Aria giggled when one of the pictures she clicked to was a topless one. Kendrik jumped to take the phone out of her hand. “You don’t needa see those. They be triple-X.” He paused for a minute, trying to figure out how to cut through the embarrassment. “She Brianna. She work at Foot Locker down in Crenshaw,” he announced.

“She’s pretty. How did you guys meet?” Aria asked.

“Her cousin be a friend o’ mine. Yeah, I met her at a kid’s birthday party. She was tryin’ to hit this piñata and was swingin’ the stick all around. It was pretty cute.” Nostalgia was heavy in his smile when he remembered it.

“Are you from LA?” Aria asked him.

“Yeah, I been here all my life.” Kendrik’s response trailed off when Imani caught his attention. “Hey, I gotta go say hi to Imani over there,” he said, standing up. Aria nodded. “Nice talkin’ to ya,” he said, again holding one side of his pants while he bounded across the lawn to Imani.

Aria watched them hug and Kendrik proceed to help Imani set things up on one of the foldable picnic tables. For the most part he was talking and she was listening. Aria missed his company when he left. The conversation had served as a welcome distraction from her worry about what was happening between Omkar and his parents just a few streets away. She also liked him. The macho impression that he gave was like a gloss he didn’t want people to see past. Underneath it, he was friendly, and she could feel the gravity of his caring.

Jarminder heard Omkar’s car pull up to the curb first. Neeraj had opened the store, but was not tending it. Instead, he had spent the morning failing to console his wife. Neither of them had slept the previous night. They had called everyone they knew, looking for Omkar. In her mind, Jarminder had run through every different version of them crying and running to hug each other if he came home, as she’d seen in all her favorite Bollywood movies. But in reality, when he showed up, the suffering she felt in his absence again turned into anger.