I press my hand over my eyes. Oliver whines softly and licks my elbow.
“So when do I need to buy a sari?” she asks brightly.
I choke out a laugh that's half relief and half something that aches in a good way. “You don't need a sari, Ma.”
“I looked them up online after your text about India. They're gorgeous. There's a shop in Toronto, Devi's Silk House. I already bookmarked it for the next time I visit you.” She takes a sip from her mug with an expression of absolute serenity. “So, tell me about the family. What am I working with here?”
“You're not working with anything. You're not coming to India.”
“Not this time. But eventually. Once you’ve enticed the boy with your boyish charms, and it's real.” She says it with the unshakeable confidence of a woman who has decided how the story ends and is simply waiting for the characters to catch up. “Now tell me about his mother.”
I tell her. I tell her about Meera Kapoor, about the estate, about the astrologer, about Dev the cardiac surgeon with the spectacular cheekbones. I tell her about the aunties and the extended family and the eighty-person engagement dinner. My mom listens with her chin on her hand, her eyes getting progressively wider.
“So, she hired a professional astrologer,” my mom says slowly, “to check if this other man's stars are compatible with your boy's stars.”
“Yeah.”
“And she booked a caterer for eighty people.”
“Yep.”
“Before asking Arjun what he wants.”
“That's the gist.”
My mother's expression goes through a very interesting sequence of emotions. Surprise. Bewilderment. Something that might be reluctant respect for the operational logistics. And then, settling into her features like a weather system moving in across a lake, a steely determination that I recognize from every parent-teacher conference, every hockey tournament, every single moment in my life when Brenda Welling decided that her kid was going to be okay and heaven help anyone who got in the way.
“You call me,” she says, pointing at the camera. “Every day you're there. If things get rough, you call me. And you tell Arjun…” She pauses. “You tell him that Brenda from Huntsville says he's welcome at the lake anytime. No astrologer required.”
I have to put the phone down for a second and press my face into Oliver's fur, because my mom is the best human being alive and I refuse to cry on FaceTime before 7 a.m.
“Okay,” I say, when I've pulled myself together. “I gotta go. I need to buy a suit. Arjun said they have a guy who will make me one, but I still want to have one ready just in case.”
“A suit! Casey, you look so handsome in a suit. Send me pictures. Send me all the pictures! I love you. Oh, and feed Oliver; he looks like he’s getting too skinny again. Call me tonight.”
“Love you, Ma.”
I hang up. Oliver licks my face. I sit on my couch in my Kensington Market apartment, with my seventeen browser tabs about Indian engagement customs and Rajasthani weather and sari-draping tutorials, and I let myself feel it for a minute. The terror. The hope. The aching, ridiculous tenderness for Arjun, who clasps his hands behind his back to hide his tremors and has green eyes that look like they belong in an art museum.
I spend the rest of the morning showering, getting dressed in something that isn't covered in dog hair (a losing battle, but I still make the effort), and scrolling through the dossier preview Arjunsent as a teaser. By the time the shops on Queen West are open, I've kissed Oliver on his enormous head, told him to guard the apartment, and headed out into the frozen Toronto morning to buy a suit.
The suit shopping is a disaster.
I know this going in, because suit shopping has been a disaster for me since I was fourteen years old, when I hit six feet and my shoulders decided to pursue their own independent growth trajectory. Off-the-rack suits do not fit me. They’ve never fit me. The shoulders are too tight, or the chest pulls, or the jacket fits but the sleeves make me look like I'm bracing for a flood. I once tried on a suit at The Bay and the salesperson looked at me with an expression of genuine professional grief.
I go to three stores.
Store one: A mid-range American chain-store menswear place on Queen West. The salesperson takes one look at me, looks at his rack of size forty-four regulars, looks back at me, and says, “We could try the big and tall section.” The big and tall section has one suit in my size range. It is olive-green. It has shoulder pads that make me look like a CFL linebacker. I leave.
Store two: A higher-end shop in Yorkville. The salesperson here is more optimistic. He pulls a navy fifty-two long, helps me into the jacket, steps back, tilts his head, and says, “The chest is... working. The shoulders are... ambitious.” The pants make it halfway up my thighs and stop with the definitiveness of a load-bearing wall. I leave.
Store three: A tiny, cluttered family-owned tailor shop on Spadina that a nurse at the hospital recommended once upon a time. The man behind the counter looks to be at least seventy years old, four-foot-eleven, and looks at me over his glasses with the calm assessment of someone who has personally wrestled with every body type the human species has to offer.
“Wedding?” he asks.
“Engagement. Sort of. It's complicated.”
“It always is.” He walks around me in a slow circle, pulling ameasuring tape from around his neck with simple confidence. He measures my chest, my shoulders, my arms. He makes a small, knowing “hmm” sound. “Big boy. Hockey?”
