“We should find a place to check in for the night,” my dad says.
Jacob’s frown deepens, but he doesn’t ask any questions, and my father doesn’t say anything more. He doesn’t give any hint about what he and Maggie spoke about.
“All right,” I say, pulling out my phone and looking up hotels. “I’ll look for a place for us to stay.” When I search the name of the town, there are only two options, so I book the one closest to us, an inn only a few minutes away.
—
The inn is completely unoccupied tonight, so we’re able to book three rooms, all of us finally getting some much-needed space from one another. My father says he’s going to turn in early, and I head up to my room to take a long shower.
After I’m done, I wrap one towel around my head and another around my body and call my mom.
She answers quickly. “Neelu!”
I’m homesick just from the sound of her warm, excited voice.
“Mom! I miss you.”
“I miss you too. How was the wedding?”
I laugh, sitting on the edge of the bed. “So, funny story, I’m still in Scotland.” I fill her in on all the mishaps of the past couple days, though I leave out the details of the one-night stand.
“And none of you know why Maggie did this? She hasn’t said anything?” my mom asks.
“No, but—” I stop and let out a long breath. “It’s possible I had a role in it. I got a little drunk at the rehearsal dinner and started saying some stuff about Dad.”
“Stuff like?”
“Stuff I shouldn’t have told a bride the night before her wedding. Stuff about how Dad basically left me alone, kept to himself. Though I know it wasn’t just me. I know he did that to you too.”
My mom’s quiet for a long moment. “Neelu, you know that I lefthim. I made the choice to come to the U.S.”
“Oh, Mom, not this again. You had to go. It was for school, and he should have understood that. He should have gone with you. There was no reason he had to stay here, he could have—”
“He needed to stay behind for work,” my mom says.
I scoff. “I’ve never understood that. As if we don’t need doctors in the U.S.”
“Foreign graduates have a much harder time finding work,” shesays, as she’s told me many times before. “He was only getting offers in small, rural areas, and they were nothing like the position he had there. Plus, he would have still been far away, nowhere close to us in L.A.”
“He would have been in the same country, at least!”
“Neelu,” my mom says, her voice soft. “You know it wasn’t just me moving that caused all of this. Your dad and I were having problems anyway. Even if he had come with us, we’d likely still have split.”
“I know,” I say. But maybe if he’d been in the U.S., I’d have seen him more often. Maybe he would have tried harder to be a part of my life.
I sigh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring all of this back up again. How are you doing? How’s Bobby?”
My mom tells me all about the latest trip they took to Yellowstone. She and Bobby—her husband—decided to spend their first year of retirement visiting every national park, and they’re starting with the greats. They did Yosemite a few months ago and just came back from Yellowstone last week. They’re not huge hikers, but they love driving around, looking for animals.
We never traveled much when I was growing up. My mother worked a lot of overtime to provide for us, and we didn’t have a lot of extra funds to spend on vacations. I’m happy she’s able to do it now.
“It’s early for elk bugling,” my mom says, “but we still heard them. Saw some of them too. I’ll send you a couple videos!”
“Please do.”
“What’s your travel schedule look like for this season? Any chance you’d want to join us at Zion next month?”
“We’re still undecided about where we’re shooting,” I say. “Natalie’s been emailing me places and we’re reviewing packages. It’s justall so…uninspiring.” Even when we go somewhere new, the locations look the same. Ocean and beach and sky. We never get to explore more than that. “I’m enjoying the Highlands, actually,” I tell my mom. “It’s different from anywhere I get to go.”
