9. Ratatouille #3
“Marie. She’s trying.”
“No, you’re trying.” I pointed to where her kids were cheerfully using Nathan as a jungle gym in the living room to Joni’s delight.
“Everyone has it hard, you more than most over the last few months. But you’re getting by without throwing yourself down a bottle.
She’s just trying to find caretakers twenty years too late. ”
Lea didn’t argue. She’d been thirteen when the accident happened, already half-raised by that time anyway, along with Matthew.
She’d borne the brunt of the abandonment, first through our parents’ addiction issues, and then to their outright absence, which had forced her to become more mother than sister overnight.
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to say yes.
” She paused. “But if there’s anything Mike’s death has taught me, it’s that you just don’t know how much time you have left.
And I don’t want to hold on to this anger anymore.
I’m just…I’m angry all the time, Marie. So angry.
I need to find a way to forgive someone, at least. It might as well be her. ”
Two hours later, we were all stuffed with ratatouille. The kids were conked out in the living room while Lea, Joni, and Nathan all sipped meditatively on the last of the wine Nathan had brought. I stayed with seltzer.
Mike’s chair sat at the head of the table. No one sat there. I had a feeling no one ever would. again.
As we chatted, I was struck by how different love could look. Joni and Nathan’s passionate balance. Lea and Mike’s twenty-year partnership, now severed by death. And our parents’ toxic, destructive romance that had left us all scarred.
For the first part of my life, I hadn’t ever wanted to fall in love. It seemed like a recipe for disaster. Then I met Daniel. But now, looking at my sister and the wreckage her husband’s death had left her, I was back to feeling unsure about the whole idea.
How would I deal with it if I loved someone like that and lost them?
“You never finished telling me what happened at the party,” Joni started after Nathan had finished a story about his latest surgery.
Lea perked up. “You went to your boss’s party after all?”
I sighed. “He’s not my boss. Well, he is sort of, but really, it’s his mother. And, well, I guess, his older brother pays the bills, but?—”
“She went!” Joni interrupted cheerfully. “And let me tell you, he could not keep his eyes off our girl. Her look was fire!”
“He did seem enamored,” Nathan agreed.
“And what did your boss do when he found his employee attractive?” Lea asked in that overbearing way that put my teeth on edge.
At least she sounded more like herself.
Heat flooded my cheeks. “We danced a little. And he asked me to meet him later.”
Joni squealed and smacked the table. “I knew it! I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off you! Then what?”
“Yeah.” Lea looked a bit more suspicious. “Then what?”
I shrugged. “I told you, Jo. He had to go. He had a family matter, I think.”
Both my sisters looked incredibly let down.
Something held me back from telling the full story. What happened between Lucas and me was embarrassing, yes, and probably unethical on a number of levels.
But the moment also sort of felt like ours. Just ours.
I wasn’t ready to share it yet. Maybe I never would be.
“That’s it?” Lea pressed, leaning forward to put her elbows on the table. “You danced with the boy you’ve been obsessing about for a decade, he asks you to meet up, and all you have to say is ‘he had to go’?”
Nathan cleared his throat. “If I may, you seemed taken with him when we arrived, Marie. But when we found you later, you appeared fairly upset. Your eyes were red, and your face was swollen. It looked like you’d been crying.”
Trust Nathan to notice what others missed.
“I was just tired,” I lied. “It was a long day.”
Lea sat back in her chair, studying me with the penetrating gaze that made her the bane of our existence growing up and meant that Nonna could trust her when she wasn’t around. “You know what I think?”
Here we go . A lecture was on its way. One about not getting involved with my employer, not getting my hopes up, and not doing anything interesting ever for the rest of my life.
“I think you’re scared.”
Joni nodded emphatically. “Yep. Yep, yep, yep . She’s been in love with this guy for a decade, and now that he’s finally noticed her, she’s freaking out. It’s Marky Marino all over again.”
“I never had a crush on Marky Marino,” I said. “He snapped my bra in the sixth grade.”
“And tried to talk to you after school at the bus stop. You told Nonna you were sick for three days. Freaking. Out.”
“I did not freak out!”
“When Mike and I first got together, I was terrified.” Lea changed the subject like we were still seven-year-olds fighting over the best Barbie.
“Here was this ex-con, totally forbidden by Nonno, if you remember, totally wrong for me. And yet, he made me feel like I was the only woman in the world. All I could think about was what would happen when he figured out that I wasn’t worth all that appreciation. ”
Why? Why was it Lucas Lyons’s face and not Daniel’s that flashed through my mind when she spoke of her history with Mike?
“But you know what I learned?” She smacked the table. “Life is short. The love of my life was here one day, and the next he wasn’t. Just like that.”
Her voice cracked. Joni refilled her wineglass without being asked.
“I spent so much time when we were young being careful,” Lea went on. “Pushing him away. Waiting to have kids. Waiting to do so many things with him. And I still got hurt. But you know what? I wouldn’t trade a single day of the last twenty years, Marie. Even knowing how it would end.”
Tears pricked my eyes. Usually, Lea was the practical one, the one who told us to be sensible, to think things through.
“If you want this Daniel guy, then go after him.”
“But you said?—”
“Forget what I said. Job be damned. Life’s too short to spend it wondering ‘what if.’”
I tried again. “But what if ?—”
“What if he breaks your heart?” Lea predicted. “What if it doesn’t work out? Marie, what if it does work out? What if this idiot is your person, and every day you wait is just one more day you could have with him in this short life that you gave away because of fear?”
I stared at her. Joni did too. Even the boys paused in their Lego construction to listen to their mother.
Nathan stood up from his chair, then pulled Joni up too and kissed her. Right there in front of all of us.
“Ew!” MJ and Petey both crowed until Tommy shushed them as he rocked Lupe to sleep.
Lea and I watched them until it was clear they weren’t going to stop, and then Lea turned to me.
“Just do it,” she said simply. “Seize the day. Because take it from me, Marie, none of us knows how much time we have left with the people we love.”