Page 88 of The Rut in the Road

Raj’s spot.

I liked that I knew where he sat, when left to his own devices, although I now felt a bit guilty that I’d been making him sit in a beanbag chair when he had a really comfy couch he could have been sitting on.

But he’d come to my apartment because I’m a touch psychic and he’d wanted to spare me having to touch his things.

I ran a hand over the blanket he’d left over my legs.

She hummedto herself despite the soreness of her fingers. Stitching by hand took so much longer—and resulted in so many more stabbed fingertips—than using a machine, but her mother had sewn these for all of her children, as had her grandmother for her mother, aunts, and uncles. And she onlyhad three children to sew for—her mother had five, and her grandmother had eight!

Rajesh would be her last, and while some part of her had been saddened by that, because it meant Meena would never have a sister, as she had, the part of her that was exhausted by three children was a little pleased that there was no chance of having yet another set of small feet to chase around the house.

He was almost three now, Gibran six, and Meena eight, and all growing so fast that she felt like she had to keep sewing to make sure their toes remained covered in their beds.

She knew that she could much more easily buy them quilts or thick down comforters—the kind with cartoon animals or trucks or flowers and rainbows. But her children had enough of those things—toys and t-shirts and plastic tiaras. They would at least have quilts that were made the traditional way, from scraps of fabric that had been tunics and dresses for their family, repurposed to place the same fabrics that had rubbed the skin of their aunts and uncles and great-aunts and -uncles over them as they slept. To remind them that they were part of a bigger family who loved and protected them.

I smiledas I pulled myself out of the thoughts of a woman who could only be Raj’s mother. She clearly loved her children and wanted them to be part of a long family tradition. The memory I’d brushed over was an older one—one cemented into the threads and fabric of the quilt by the long hours she’d spent sewing it by hand. I was certain that, if I’d wanted to, I could have found hundreds of others—hers, undoubtedly from mending or washing it, and Raj’s, from decades of owning it.

I liked the idea that it was made up of pieces of the family—of scraps of fabric that had outworn their original use, but weren’t simply to be discarded and thrown away. Instead, those pieces—things people had loved, presumably—were woven together into something at once both old and new, something that held the thoughts and care of many people all brought together.

You might think that something like this would be an absolute nightmare for a contact psychic, given how many thoughts and feelings might have gone into not only its use over the years, but into its creation and into the creation of the clothing it was made from. But something old like this, something so full of thoughts and feelings, was actually much more pleasant than something that had only been touched once, and then only by someone who had to package it or wash it, rather than someone who had made it.

“Here,” came Raj’s voice, and I looked up to find him holding out a plate with several slices of pizza that looked far fancier than any sort of frozen pizza I’d ever seen.

I blinked. “Did you order this?” I asked him. I wondered if he’d done so before he came to get us, or after.

But he shook his head. “I had the dough in the freezer,” he said with a shrug.

“Youmadeit?” I knew he could cook—he’d done so for me often enough, but always at my apartment, which, now that I thought about it, never really had much in the way of ingredients. I certainly didn’t have the ingredients to make pizza dough, since I hadn’t the faintest idea how to even start. Flour, I was pretty sure, but that was as far as I could get.

“Is that okay?” Raj asked me, a frown starting to settle on his features.

“It’s amazing,” I replied, now feeling more than a little inadequate about my rather pathetic culinary efforts over the past several months.

He shrugged again. “I grew up in a house where we made pretty much everything from scratch, since it’s hard to get a lot of things from the grocery store,” he replied. “And Indiangroceries are few and far between.” He offered me a smile. “I cook a lot less Indian than my father does, but I guess the habit of doing things from scratch stuck with me.”

I almost asked him why he didn’t cook Indian food, but I stopped myself, unsure if such a question would be rude or offensive.

“Not that I don’t also have regular frozen pizzas in there,” he continued, his cheeks darkening a little. “But I had the time to do this since you were late, so I thought I’d make something a little more interesting.”

I looked down at the pizza on my plate, discovering that the toppings were also different than what you could get on the premade frozen kind. One had potatoes, red onions, and blobs of white cheese. Another had what looked like sausage, mushrooms, and spinach. And the third had some sort of thin ham, caramelized onions, and blobs of something dark. It smelled amazing.

“Potato and goat cheese,” Raj said, pointing to the first. “Sausage, mushroom, and spinach, with a tomato sauce,” he confirmed for the second, “and then fig and capicola.”

My mouth watered. “It looks great,” I told him.

“Water to drink?” he asked me. “Or—well, I guess you shouldn’t have wine with the pain meds. I have blood orange soda or regular lemonade, too.”

I blinked. I never had anything except water. “I… don’t know what blood orange tastes like,” I admitted.

“I’ll bring you one,” he said. “If you don’t like it, I’ll drink it.”

I did like it. And the pizza. Enough that I ate a lot more than I usually did, which seemed to please Raj enormously, although it also made me very sleepy very quickly.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized after slumping into his shoulder.

“Don’t be,” he replied, kissing my forehead. “It’s almost midnight. You can stay down here if you want, but there is a bed upstairs.”

I thought about this. His couch was very comfy, and I wouldn’t have to move if I stayed on it.