“I can’t,” she said.

“Why?”

“I can’t leave the kids,” she said.

“They have a mother, you know.”

“Lately, not a very good one.” She looked down at the thin yellow wedges of dried paint under her nails. Yesterday, they had painted Tyler’s toy chest, then decorated it with Maddy’s blue handprints. The baby had laughed and banged her little palms into the tray of blue paint, and Tyler hadn’t even cared about the paint that flew onto his clothes and arms. But when Mary came home, tired and grumpy, she only noticed that Tyler had stained his new sneakers and that Josie had left them unwashed. “She’s gone all the time now,” Josie said. “She’s attending, and on call twice a week.”

“Well, she’s their mother. She’ll have to find a way to deal with it.” He took a container of yogurt from the shelf. “Dahi,” he said, and handed it to her.

She looked down at the container in her hands, tried to focus on the red cartoon cow on the lid.

He took it from her, put it in the cart, and held her hands. “I can help you with the tickets.”

She shook her head and slid her hands from his. “No … I mean, thank you … I know you would, but I can’t.”

There was a long awkward silence, and she wished there were no India, that everything he needed was contained in the sixty-five inch space of her body. She put her arms around him and squeezed tightly. “The next time,” she said. “I’ll go with you then.”

Still, that night, she waited for him to fall asleep and then sat in front of the computer for an hour, searching airline sites and nearly buying her own ticket. A few thousand dollars would barely put a dent in her father’s account, and perhaps if she bought her own ticket, she could keep hold of herself. She could go for two weeks and come back virtually unchanged.

But it was more than that. It was also something else. Something she had felt sitting in the movie theater with him, surrounded by people who believed that what she had done in this life would be played out for eternity.

So, instead, she listened to Devesh detail what the wedding would look like—the flowered mandap under which the ceremony would take place, the bride’s arms draped in thin gold bangles, the trays of samagri—fruits and grains and sweets—the world an explosion of color.

She imagined it all and said that she wished she could go.

“Then come,” he said.

They were sitting on the couch eating ice cream and watching Company, a Hindi gangster movie.

“Why do the gangsters sing songs?” she asked.

“Everyone sings songs,” he said quickly. “Why won’t you come?”

“And everyone dances?”

“Yes; now, why?”