Page 16 of The Dirty Version

He smiled. “Right, because it would trash your reputation. It’s the same for me. The ethics of intimacy work have to be completely aboveboard. My job depends entirely on my reputation. Even if Astrid wasn’t literally like family, Stacy and I don’t date people in the industry.”

Tash suddenly felt very stupid. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No, ask whatever you like.” Caleb shrugged, seemingly not irritated. “Being a man in the business is complicated—it’s a selling point with bros like Braverman, but it comes with its own set of fine print. That’s why I would never want to do it without Stacy.”

He pushed his plate away, as if entitled to his own interrogation now. “So. No students. But that doesn’t explain why you’re single.”

“Who said I’m single?”

“Janelle.”

Tash laughed out loud then. “You go first. Why is Hollywood’s foremost designer of nudity and copulation single? And forget the work excuse. There’s a whole world outside ‘the industry.’”

Caleb disputed this. “It doesn’t always feel that way when you live in LA.

But my real reason is cliché: My mother left when I was two.

I have mommy issues, even though my stepmom was amazing.

Or maybe I have commitment issues. Viv and my dad flamed out, and he never recovered.

I don’t want any part of what that looked like. ”

He’d made the first move—in a game of vulnerability, or damage, or bravery, or truth.

Now it was Tash’s turn.

She stared at him across the table. “My reason is that men suck.” She lit up a little when Caleb laughed.

“I have the track record to prove it: My grad school boyfriend cheated on me, and the guy I got engaged to afterward called our wedding off— in the middle of my press tour for The Colony .” She nodded when Caleb winced.

If nothing else, Zachary demanding his diamond ring back outside a public radio sound booth made an entertaining anecdote.

“He couldn’t be the pediatrician who was married to the baby-killer. Not a good look for him, apparently.”

Caleb’s mouth opened. Before it closed again. “I don’t know what to ask first. You were engaged to a pediatrician?”

“A pediatric resident.”

“And just to be clear, again”—not masking his incredulity—“he knew the baby wasn’t real?”

Tash’s arguments with Zach remained vivid.

“In retrospect, I don’t really know if it was the baby-killing or the book’s success.

There’s a chance he never expected me to sell it, or he never really understood what the book was about, but the minute it gained traction, he took the plot personally.

” Tash waved a palm widely around her aura.

“This all became too much. He was embarrassed.” Just like her parents.

Which Tash mourned sometimes—in the forlorn corners unreached by her feminist bonfire light.

For a while there, Zach had seemed the ideal medicine for Tash’s other wounds—he was not artistic, he was sweet and stable, their spheres didn’t overlap.

He appeased Vik and Mary Grover. His aesthetic could border on doctor kink when he wore rubber-duckie scrubs.

“For the record, he sounds like a wuss.” As he looked at her, Caleb’s eyes were just shades lighter than the sleeping sky. He finished off his beer. “Please excuse my toxic masculinity.”

But Tash thought there was more to it; she’d learned even supposedly evolved men couldn’t rise to the occasion. Zachary couldn’t get past his outsized sense of self. She’d wanted to believe he was an exception, but instead he fit the rule.

Quietly, almost to herself as Caleb signaled to the waitress for their check, Tash shook her head. “He was actually one of the good ones. That’s the disappointing thing.”

* * *

Tash drifted into her duplex alone, warm from the beachside dinner. She glanced to a wall clock. She had the urge to call her mom.

She dialed, starfished on her bed, woozy with cantina conversation and blocking-bootcamp afterglow, hoping this was the perfect frame of mind for dealing pleasantly with Mary Grover—as Caleb’s talk of mothers had fortified Tash’s gratitude.

Her mom was healthy and still living; she was present in Tash’s life.

She was well-meaning, despite her often antiquated opinions.

Plus, alcohol and the drowsy hour; Tash did not feel combative at all.

In recent years, Mary Grover had even made an effort to shy from topics that caused the two of them to clash. She’d stopped asking if Tash planned to apply for a more prestigious teaching position, for example. It’d been months since she last mentioned the sure decline in quality of Tash’s eggs.

Now Mary’s matter-of-fact inflection postmortemed an evening of bridge game drama into Tash’s ear, the code indecipherable, as Tash and her brothers had never learned how to play, even though Vik and Mary’s cards night had commanded a spot on the family calendar for as long as anyone could remember.

Her mother recounted a particularly fearsome duo she and Tash’s father had just beat, and Tash rolled over on her bedspread, stretching to her nightstand for the letters she’d discovered in her utility closet beside The Colony ’s legalese.

“Yes.” Mary affirmed their provenance once Tash seized the chance to ask.

“I wrote each of you. Every day. But I think you’re the only one who read those letters.

” Tash’s mother reported this without a trace of bitterness.

“Rohan and Neel usually came home with theirs, still sealed, at the bottom of their bags.”

Unsurprising, as Rohan and Neel hadn’t been desperately homesick during those Seema Auntie stays. Rohan and Neel hadn’t been cooped up in the kitchen, chopping onions for chaat. Rohan and Neel had been playing soccer outside with their male cousins, joyous and free.

Tash shuffled through the heap of aging envelopes, scanning her mother’s tidy penmanship.

“Everything you wrote in here is true, Mom?” She unfolded sheets of crosshatched math-teacher paper, Mary’s trademark.

Tash chuckled confusedly as she read a particularly strange line aloud.

“This one says you spent ‘a long day plucking chickens.’”

She noticed the flatness of her mother’s unelaborated phrasing—Caleb would love it. Mary Grover also sounded in person just like she did on the page.

“Yes. One hundred percent true. I got a bargain at the butcher shop, fifty raw birds. I was so proud of myself until a van showed up and all the chickens still had their feathers.” Her mother laughed softly, beads sliding on an abacus, smooth and measured. “You should have seen your father’s face.”

“Wait—” Tash could not imagine her father helping. Vik Grover usually just got home from a day at his busy dental practice and sat at the head of the table. He never cleared a single plate. “Dad also spent ‘a long day plucking chickens’?”

“Goodness, no! Grandma Sally flew down—and trust me, we spent more than one long day.” Without a whiff of resentment: “It was awful, actually. We wore nose clips and rubber gloves.”

For the entirety of Tash’s childhood, a square meal awaited every night—in addition to teaching high school math full-time and doing all the housework, Tash’s mother also cooked.

She spent her vacations restocking the deep freeze in the garage with casserole dishes, labeled and tightly sealed.

Mary ran a military, oven-ready operation: orange chicken, lemon chicken, cherry chicken, coq au vin.

Over the summers, her mother would have only had a quiet house for a short time, while Tash and her brothers were away at Seema Auntie’s.

Mary Grover got three weeks without the early-morning tutoring of failing algebra students, or Neel’s hairy teenage body odor, or Rohan’s endless pile of grass-stained tube socks.

Or Tash’s emo poetry. Or Tash’s misanthropic huffing off.

Through Tash’s adult eyes, it seemed tragic, a waste of precious peace.

“Mom, how come you never traveled while we went to Seema Auntie’s?

” Tash asked it with a relaxed openness that, without the booze and exhaustion, might otherwise have been tempted to judge.

“You had time to yourself.” The contents of the envelopes fanned across her bed.

“These letters make it seem like all you did was chores.”

“Your father was working.” As if this were self-explanatory.

Tash frowned, glad her mother couldn’t see her expression. “Okay. But wasn’t there anywhere you would have wanted to go alone?”

“Without your father?” As if the very notion was ridiculous. “Who would have taken care of him while I was gone?”

Tash tried to make her tone teasing, rather than deliver a treatise on her mother’s generational, internalized patriarchy.

“Mom. That might be the most old-fashioned thing you’ve ever said.

” She tried to make it gentle: “You were working really hard. Dad could have taken care of himself, and you know it.”

Mary’s voice sharpened, marking the overstep.

“Don’t lecture me, Natasha. I do what I like.

I’m not old-fashioned—I’m the proud parent of a gay son.

” Her clip became imperious, a mathematician’s absolute: “I’m one-half of an interracial couple in the South, I’ll remind you, before anyone thought that was ‘cool.’ You have no right to impose your values on my decisions. ” And then she hung up.

Tash’s beer warmth receded under her mother’s cold verbal slap. Her stomach sank as she let go of the letters. She closed her eyes into her pillow, pulling the phone away from her ear.

She chided herself for the souring—after all, her mother’s hierarchy of social progressiveness had always been clear:

Gay son, fine; mixed race, okay. But feminism—or rather, a made-up tale of feminism on a pretend island—caused Mary to struggle, either with the storyline or with its author. Probably just with Tash.

* * *

The botched call with her mom became feathers in Tash’s dream.