more important to him, after all, than all the money in the world. And to prove it he went to the bank the very same day and brought home a sheaf of forms to fill so that he could take out a second mortgage on the house. He kept calling the police station, too, but the police weren’t much help. They were working on it, they said. They’d checked the local hospitals and morgues, the shelters. They’d even sent her description to other states. But there were no leads. It didn’t look very hopeful.

So finally he called India and over a faulty long-distance connection that made his voice echo eerily in his ear told his mother what had happened. My poor boy, she cried, left all alone (the word flickered unpleasantly across his brain, left, left) how can you possibly cope with the household and a child as well. And when he admitted that yes, it was difficult, could she perhaps come and help out for a while if it wasn’t too much trouble, she had replied that of course she would come right away and stay as long as he needed her, and what was all this American nonsense about too much trouble, he was her only son, wasn’t he. She would contact the wife’s family too, she ended, so he wouldn’t have to deal with that awkwardness.

Within a week she had closed up the little flat she had lived in since her husband’s death, got hold of a special family emergency visa, and was on her way. Almost as though she had been waiting for something like this to happen, said some of the women spitefully. (These were his wife’s friends, though maybe acquaintances would be a more accurate word. His wife had like to keep to herself, which had been just fine with him. He was glad, he’d told her several times, that she didn’t spend hours chattering on the phone like the other Indian wives.)

He was angry when this gossip reached him (perhaps because he’d had the same insidious thought for a moment when, at the airport, he noticed how happy his mother looked, her flushed excited face appearing suddenly young.) Really, he said to his friends, some people see only what they want to see. Didn’t they think it was a good thing she’d come over? Oh yes, said his friends. Look how well the household was running now, the furniture dusted daily, laundry folded and put into drawers (his mother, a smart woman had figured out the washing machine in no time at all). She cooked all his favorite dishes, which his wife had never managed to learn quite right, and she took such good care of the little boy, walking him to the park each afternoon, bringing him into her bed when he woke up crying at night. (He’d told her once or twice that his wife had never done that, she had this idea of the boy needing to be independent. What nonsense, said his mother.) Lucky man, a couple of his friends added and he silently agreed, although later he thought it was ironic that they would say that about a man whose wife had disappeared.

As the year went on, the husband stopped thinking as much about the wife. It wasn’t that he loved her any less, or that the shock of her disappearance was less acute. It was just that it wasn’t on his mind all the time. There would be stretches of time--when he was on the phone with an important client, or when he was watching after-dinner TV, or driving his son to kiddie gym class--when he would forget that his wife was gone, that he had had a wife at all. And even when he remembered that he had forgotten, he would experience only a slight twinge, similar to what he felt in his teeth when he drank something too cold too fast. The boy, too, didn’t ask as often about his mother. He was sleeping through the nights again, he had put on a few