By this time, Shanaya was biting her hand to hold in the muffled snorts of laughter. Allison looked back and forth between them, finally getting the joke. “You big liar! I’m…I’m going to tell Mr. Singh on you!”
“Tell me what?” her father asked, appearing in the doorway as if by magic.
“She…her…” Allison spluttered, while Shanaya and her mother collapsed into hysterical giggles. “They’re telling me the most awful lies about how her mother’s jewelry has a curse on it!”
“Well,” her father said, loosening his collar with a sigh of relief, “knowing my mother-in-law, that’s not completely out of the question.” He kissed Allison’s cheek, then Shanaya’s, pausing for a more thorough kiss from his wife.
She slapped his arm. “Stop it! She was always very nice to you! It was my father who thought that you were a useless dilletante. ‘What sort of man,'” she intoned in a deep, forbidding voice, “‘only has one college degree? Maryam, I forbid you to wed that wastrel!'”
“Just as well you didn’t listen to him then, right?” Dhananjay Singh sat at his place and spooned a healthy portion of food onto his plate. “Allison, when are you going to come and live with us and save me from this henpecking gaggle of women?” His warm brown eyes smiled at her. “I promise to provide you with ten bolts of the finest cotton cloth and a new pair of shoes every year.”
Allison smiled, nodding in every evidence of deep thought. “It is a generous offer, Lord Singh. But I know,” she said, eyes lowered in apparent modestly, “that your first wife will always be foremost in your heart. How can I compete with Maryam? And I swore to my own God that I will be no man’s concubine.”
“You are a menace and I feel pity for your fiancé.”
“That’s all right,” Allison said cheerfully. “I make up for it in other ways.” She stretched and got up. “Supper was wonderful,” she said. “But I have to get home. I have to figure out how to make one hundred seats at the reception hall fit the one hundred and thirty-seven people on the guest list. Call me tomorrow, Shannie, okay?”
She got up, walking her best friend to the door and giving her a hug. “I’ll have the necklace to you in a day or two, all right?”
“That’s fine.” The hug was returned fiercely. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
——————
Also in this series:
- In Genie Us by Glaze72 - Chapter 2: She Dreams of Gene Eh?
- In Genie Us by Glaze72 - Chapter 3: A Change Will Do Her Good
- In Genie Us by Glaze72 - Chapter 4: Morning Would?
- In Genie Us by Glaze72 - Chapter 5: Eaten Out