“When are you going to find a nice boy and settle yourself down?” she asked. It was late in the morning after the drag show at The Crossing, and Danny and Monica had sauntered up the shady lane to the Bombay Buffet, their favorite lunchtime hangout across the street from the New Mexico state capitol.

“Oh Monica,” Danny said with a scolding chuckle. “You’re worse than my own mother.”

“Well, you’re not getting any younger,” she teased.

“I’m thirty-two.”

She pulled a concerned face. “As old as that? It’s worse than I realized.”

“Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with your own son?” Danny asked, swiping half a chickpea samosa through a puddle of vindaloo sauce before popping it into his mouth.

“Funny you should mention him,” Monica said.

“Yeah, I’m a regular Shecky Greene.”

“You haven’t met Ashok, have you?” she asked.

Danny shook his head. “I’ve not,” he said. “You have three kids, right?” Monica nodded. “I haven’t met any of them. Wait ... has your daughter come to the office before? Maybe I’ve met her ...”

Monica waved the specter of her two older children away. They had spouses -- well, Anjali had a boyfriend, anyway -- and could fend for themselves. They were out of the house, at least, which could no longer be said of Ashok, who’d been getting up to all sorts of shenanigans since The Big Break-Up last year.

“Yes, maybe,” she said. “She’s got a boyfriend.”

“Good for her?”

Monica shrugged. “He’s alright. Ashok, on the other hand, well ...” She raised a suggestive eyebrow. “He’s quite single. Much like yourself. And sweet as pie. Much like yourself. And very handsome.”

Danny waited two beats, then three, before venturing “much like myself” with a laugh.

“Naturally.”

“And you were thinking ...?”

“It’s a good thing you’re a lawyer and not a detective, is what I was thinking,” she said, signaling to the beer-bellied young proprietor that he should refill her chardonnay.

“Shouldn’t you be looking for a suitable young wife?” he teased. “You didn’t arrange a marriage for him when he was a little boy?”

She pulled another face, this one with a you’re-not-so-clever tongue stuck out. “It fell through,” she deadpanned. “Because what, you’ve seen one Mira Nair film and you’re going to tell me how it is in Indian culture? You know the ‘old country’ I come from is Albuquerque, right? If you’re fishing for a dowry, you can forget it.” They laughed. “I was this child’s mother, don’t forget. Dear, they practically brought him to me in the hospital swaddled in gold lamé -- we gave up on a ‘wife’ for Ashok a long time ago. But a mother can never have too many swell son-in-laws,” she said. “I’d rather grow old by your pool than in some nursing home.”

Danny laughed again. “Can I meet him before the wedding? At least see a photo? I’m not committing to anything until I get a look under any veil.”

Monica’s eyes brightened under her bouffant bob. “So you’ll let me set you up?”

“How tall is he?”

“I don’t know. Five-eight?”

Hot dog. “What the hell,” Danny said with a shrug. “But lunch is on you.”

Monica shook her head. “Guess again,” she said. “I said no dowry.”