Mom shook her head. “Nah. Divorce is common these days. This isn’t like back home.”
Jana gave her mother a raised-eyebrow stare. “Mom, I’mnotdivorced. I’ve never been married.” Which is a fact she’d reminded her mother of countless times. She sighed. “The director also said he was looking for a dynamic, vibrant addition to a close-knit team.” Jana wasn’t sure anyone had ever described her asvibrant. Capable, brilliant, accomplished, yes, but not vibrant.
Mom shrugged. “So be vibrant.”
“It’s not like I can just flip a switch and be someone else.” She peeked into the disaster of a living room. “What’s the cyclone all about?” She’d finished her own packing the day before, but Imani insisted she wanted to pick her own clothes for the trip.
Mom snorted. “Your daughter is apparently having a fashion emergency.”
Jana frowned. “Does it have to be such amessyemergency?”
“She’s four, Jana,” Mom said pointedly. “Things are allowed to be messy for four-year-olds.”
Sometimes Imani seemed four going on fourteen. Jana went into the living room to her daughter, who was sitting on the floor in the middle of all the clothes and toys. Imani beamed at Jana and immediately started talking as if her mother had been with her all afternoon. That’s just how Imani was. Jana had sometimes been gone weeks, and once even months, without seeing her daughter in person, and Imani would always carry on as if they’d never been apart. It killed Jana, though. She really hoped Imani wasn’t masking distress about her mother being away so much.
“I don’t understand why I can’t bringallthe dresses,” Imani said, looking at the piles of folded clothes surrounding her. “Kamila Aunty said I need lots of pretty things for the wedding.”
Jana squeezed into the few inches of clean floor next to her daughter and kissed the top of her head. Imani was wearing a zebra-print sundress, and her curly hair was escaping the French braids Mom had done in the morning.
“Why aren’t you doing this in your room?” Jana asked.
“Nanima said to pack here because she’s cooking.”
“How many dresses do you have here?”
“Thirty-seven,” Imani said with wide, solemn eyes. Imani was usually a cheerful, playful child. Her personality resembled her father’s in many ways but especially in her extroversion and easygoing nature. But Imani took fashion and her dresses very seriously. Jana often wondered how exactly this outgoing and completely fabulous little person came from her uterus.
Jana reached for her planner and showed Imani the month spread with the days they would be gone colored in yellow. “Well…we’ll be gone for sixteen days, but I don’t think you need a fresh dress each day. And sometimes you might want to wear pants or shorts.”
Imani looked scandalized at that suggestion. Jana laughed. “Okay, but you have new lehengas for the wedding events. How about eight dresses?”
Imani thought about it. “Ten?” she offered.
“Okay, ten.”
“Can I bring more dresses when we go to Disneyland?”
Jana smiled. “We’re going to DisneyWorld, sweetie. It’s in Florida…where Kassim Uncle lives in the winter, remember?” Well, they were going to Disney if Jana got a new job. Jana was waiting to buy the tickets, but as far as Imani knew, the trip was happening. “Did you pack pajamas?”
Imani’s little face scrunched up in thought. “I need sixteen pajamas?”
Jana laughed again and scooped up her daughter and put her on her lap. After giving her a tight hug, she smoothed Imani’s hair. “How about we finish packing together? Then after we clean up, we can eat pizza.”
Imani jumped off Jana’s lap and ran toward the kitchen. “There’s pizza?” Jana winced as the clothes fell into even more disarray.
Jana resisted the urge to chase after her. First, she needed to tidy this mess.
***
The first leg of the trip, an overnight flight from Toronto to Amsterdam, was, well, long. And about as easy as one would expect an economy flight to be with a cranky four-year-old who refused to sleep on the plane. Or eat. Thank goodness for Mom’s samosas, because Imani wouldn’t eat anything the airline provided, including the cute kid’s meal Jana had preordered. Jana finally managed to get her daughter to understand how to make the in-flight entertainment work, but then Imani was so delighted that there was so muchPeppa Pigavailable that Jana doubted that the girl would close her eyes on the flight at all.
Traveling was usually effortless for Jana, since she went abroad for work so often, but she hadn’t been on a trip with Imani before. At least not a trip as long, or as far, as this one. Hopefully things would be better once they got to Tanzania.
Jana was not looking forward to the actual wedding. At least she’d been able to skip the four-day bachelorette party extravaganza in Amsterdam first, thanks to that job interview at Think. Jana felt out of place duringnormalparties—a wedding where she would be on display as a member of the bridal party may as well be a den of snakes to an introvert like her. But after the wedding, they were all going on a safari trip through several national parks, and Jana was excited to show Imani the African animals that she’d recently become obsessed with.
And truth be told, Jana could use the vacation. She’d been job hunting for a month now, since her last contract position ended. It was the cycle of Jana’s life—get a new contract to launch a development project somewhere in the world, work from home planning the project, go on site for a few weeks or longer to oversee the launch, then come home and look for the next contract. Jana loved that she could make lasting impacts in regions that needed it most, but the cycle was exhausting. The job at Think waspermanent. And in Toronto, with little travel. If she got it, both Jana and Imani would have more stability. They could do trips like this more often, just like Jana had traveled with her parents when she was young.
But she wasn’t sure that being in the wedding party would feel like a vacation. Jana had been quite surprised when Kamila had asked her to be a bridesmaid. Jana was actually closer to Kamila’s fiancé, Rohan, and despite the fact that she and Kamila were friends now, they hadn’t always been.
