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of me. He brings your dad and me something every time he visits.” Here she paused meaningfully— to help me realize, no doubt, that I could show some improvement in that area. “He does a lot of things for me, in fact. Last week he took me to the doctor for my checkup.”
    “But you always go on your own—”
    “I don’t like to drive so much nowadays,” she said.
    “What do you mean? Are you sick? Why didn’t you ask me if you needed—?”
    She changed the subject deftly. “And he brings over the latest Hindi movies and watches them with us, the ones with all the hit songs. Your father really enjoys that. You know how he loves music—”
    “Since when did you start watching Hindi movies? You never let me watch them when I was growing up. You called them brainless, sexist fluff.”
    “Since when did you start wanting to eat my Indian food?” countered my mother, who believes in offensive play. “It was always pasta and pizza and Oh mom, not alu parathas again! when you were growing up.” Then she added, “I love you both, you should know that. You’re not in competition, even though you did decide to get a divorce.”
    My mother has never made a secret of her utter and irrational fondness for Sonny. I can’t figure out this aberration in a woman who is otherwise one of the most intelligent people I know.
    Maybe there’s another Sonny, Belle told me once. A kinder, gentler Sonny that only your mom can see, the way she sees her dream people.
    Yeah, I said. A kinder, gentler Sonny. That would have to be a dream for sure.
    To give my mother credit, she never tried to pressure me into staying with Sonny once I’d decided to leave. Even though I could never bring myself to tell her why.
    But here I am, obsessing on ancient history when I should be tackling the problem on hand. This has always been my shortcoming, one more way in which I’m different from my mother, who is the original Do It Now poster girl. Perhaps this is why she dreams and I paint. Because dreams look to the future, and paintings try to preserve the past.
    We watch from the window of the Chai House as movers unload another truckload of expensive-looking equipment and wheel them into Java.
    Belle gives me a you’d-better-get-back-to-the-phone-and-make-that-call look.
    I give her a why-do-we-have-to-drag-my-mother-into-this look.
    “Rikki, this is not the time to indulge in false pride. We need your mom’s help.”
    “We can handle it ourselves,” I say in my most confident tones.
    But inside, I’m afraid. I’ve never been a planner. Mostly, I’ve fallen into things that life has swept up against me. Going through with the divorce is the only difficult decision I’ve made. My mother, now: she’s the fighter in the family. Once she decides on a goal, she never lets go. “Like the tortoise,” my father would say, “in the tale of the hare and the tortoise.” With a wry smile and a wink, he’d add, “And guess who’s the hare?”
    I was never sure if he meant himself or me.
    But there were races my mother didn’t win. She never could get my father to stop drinking, though periodically she’d get mad and throw out his bottles.
    “Why should I quit?” he told us once. “It gives me happiness—or keeps me from sorrow, the same thing. And I’m not harming anyone, am I?”
    His drinking was erratic. I could never understand what brought it on. Sometimes he’d go for a month without touching alcohol. Other times he’d start drinking on a Friday night and continue through the weekend. He only drank red wine—he claimed it was good for his heart—and was never abusive when he drank. He sat in the corner of the living room and played songs by dead people on his antiquated stereo, mostly love songs by Sehgal or Rafi or Kishore Kumar, though sometimes he’d surprise me by playing Lady Day. From time to time he would sing along—he had a powerful baritone—a rapt and distant smile on his face. When he got too drunk to sing,