Cadell’s mouth burned.
His throat burned.
His teeth burned.
His fingers burned where he had touched the food.
His lips felt twice their normal size, as if blisters swelled in them.
Beads of sweat popped out near his hairline like needlesticks.
Irish men were not meant to eat food that was this spicy. Alcohol, yes. Cadell could tolerate alcohol with the best of them, but this was just painful. The last time he had felt this bad, he had been overdosing on Percocet when he hadn’t been able to get ahold of any heroin in Canada.
“How do you like the food?” Andy asked him.
“It’s great,” he said.
Just like fire.
He shoveled yet another bite of the blistering food into his traumatized mouth and chewed.
Seriously, what was Andy’s mother’ using for seasoning? White phosphorus? Napalm?
And yet, the food was a mild spring day compared to the rage swirling in his head.
He hated everything that Andy’s parents had said about her and about girls. Andy was a genius, kind, beautiful, and ethical, and she was going to save his baby’s life. When she had stood up to Xan about the cortisone shots, she was a Valkyrie and a goddess. When he found her cradling Emily in her hospital bed and reading to her, she was the mother of the universe. Andy was the fucking pinnacle of creation.
How dare they not recognize that? How dare they wish Andy to be anything other than the perfection that she was?
But when Andy had tensed beside him, and when he’d seen the horror and fear in her eyes that he would make a scene, he had backed off for her sake.
He was very, very thankful that Emily had been downstairs and not within earshot. He would have had to go full-metal social justice warrior feminist on them if Emily had been there. His baby would not hear that kind of shit without hearing it answered.
Later, though. He would talk to Andy about it later.
Luckily, Cadell was used to hiding the effects of being stoned to high Heaven on heroin while he played concerts, so keeping insane rage under wraps while he was at a dinner party was easy.
Cadell shoveled another spoonful of boiling lava into his mouth.
Pretending that the food wasn’t scalding him was a different challenge altogether. Jesus Christ, this sambar was going to fuse his tongue into glass.
Andy’s mother smiled at him, and her head bobbled around again. “You should try this. It is lemon pickle.”
Oh, Lord.
Pickle.
Uday had specifically warned him about the pickle.
Cadell took a small spoonful from the dish and mixed it into the rice and yogurt like Uday had told him to. That brought the heat down a little, like merely to forest fire around his gums rather than a nuclear inferno.
Andy was eating the food like it was no big deal, daintily eating tidbits of rice mixed with the brown stuff and the other red stuff.
Her mother held out another bowl to him. “Try the gooseberry pickle. It is very nice.”
More pickle.
Cadell ate it.
He ate it all.
He ate until he was sure that he had burned his throat beyond repair and until Andy’s mother was nearly giggling with happiness.
After supper, Andy turned her enormous brown eyes up at him and said, “There is an ice cream stand on the corner. Do you want to walk down there and get some ice cream?”
Freezing ice-cold dairy, a confection that would quench the fire in his throat, mouth, and sinuses? “Sounds great to me.”
On the walk down there, which was maybe half a mile, Cadell listened while Andy talked about her fellowship some more, but mostly he sipped the evening air, trying to cool the abused tissues in his mouth.
He wasn’t sure what to say about her parents’ comments. Maybe he should drop it. Maybe he should wait until they were alone to tell her that he valued everything about her, that he thought she was perfect, and that he didn’t wish her to be anything else. Maybe he should wait for her to bring it up.
Once they got the ice cream—sweet, sweet relief to Cadell’s seared tissues and tongue—and started to walk back, Cadell watched Andy walk through her neighborhood, which was, evidently, populated predominantly by people of Indian extraction. Most of the guys wore dress slacks and button-down shirts, just like Uday had told Cadell to wear and Shoma had picked out of his closet for him.
Every group who passed them—and everybody walked in groups of three or more, often many more—stopped and had something to say to Andy. A lot of times it was an invitation to go with them to the temple or to some social function like a dinner or an Indian dance performance, or that they had seen a mutual friend or heard from a relative in common.
Andy knew everyone they passed.
She was related to many of them, and she introduced Cadell to each group as they encountered them. Others, she had gone to high school with. She knew their relatives, their current jobs, and their friends.
Everyone giggled at Cadell, the oversized guy with studs in his too-big ears and with alien tatts peeking out of his shirt cuffs and collar.
Even when he had lived in upstate New York, growing up with his parents, his neighborhood had never been like this. There were no sidewalks on the country road where his house had been. Walking in the rutted grass beside the crumbling asphalt would have been too dangerous. Huge semi-trucks barreled by, driving at freeway speeds down the winding road to bypass miles of interstate. Cadell hadn’t learned to ride a bike very well because there was nowhere to ride except in his parents’ driveway, and that had gotten boring fast.
Besides, his father had only let him have a half an hour of free time per day. He spent it playing video games online with people he didn’t know.
High stone walls encircled his current house, and the gate was wrought iron. A narrow sidewalk paved the small space between the wall and the road.
He sucked on the ice cream cone, cooling his burnt gums, and the melting ice cream dripped over the calluses on his fingers.
Andy introduced him to another gaggle of girls, all of them wearing tunics and leggings like Shoma had brought over for Emily to wear. Their gemstone-colored clothes sparkled in the setting sunlight, the sequins and small stones sewn onto them were far beyond anything that a guy from a small town in New York had seen. They all sounded alike and moved in the same way, their hands dancing in the air as they spoke with their lilting accents.
Andy sounded like them, and they sounded like her. She fit into the little circle of them like a happy jigsaw puzzle piece.
Cadell stood apart, a separate, shambling, unfinished Jenga tower.
He licked his ice cream again, fresh, tart strawberries smashed into sweet cream. It tasted odd after the scorching food.
Even Uday, when he had decided to take pity on Cadell about the Indian stuff, he had reached out with his sister like she was an extension of himself, like they were both part of an organic whole.
Like he wasn’t alone, ever.
Maybe Cadell should get Emily and leave Andy in peace.