Chapter One #2
No matter how many times I went to court and got to recite that opening, it still made my skin tingle with excitement.
I loved hearing my name next to that title, although I’d shortened my first name to spare the judge and jury the religious association that Magdalena conjured.
My father was always so proud that I’d kept my maiden name when I married Kevin.
Dad liked to remind me it was his last name, after all.
I mostly kept it because I loved my Italian heritage.
And since Kevin and I had decided not to have children, I didn’t see the need to have the same last name as my husband.
Also, Magdalena Ryan? It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. A complete mismatch.
Istirred my concoction of pasta e piselli and watched the peas bobbing like little green buoys in the pot.
I’d always made my mother’s signature dish on June 29, even though it came with a huge serving of one very bad childhood memory, being the anniversary of that fateful night when the spaghetti flew and our family’s story was forever split into before and after.
If someone had told me, when I was a child, that a plate of spaghetti and peas splattering against the dining room wall would be the defining moment in my family’s life, I would have called them crazy.
But my family was anything but typical. Loving?
Yes. Honest with each other? Sometimes. Crazy?
Most of the time. But typical? Definitely not.
Sometimes, I thought I was a masochist. No matter how many times I told myself I wouldn’t make this dish on this day, I always did. It comforted me and reminded me of my mother and of the before.
My mom used to say, “You can never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s marriage.” Yet at thirteen, I’d known exactly what was going on in the sham of my parents’ marriage.
My phone buzzed with a text message from Kevin: Hey, babe. Won’t be home before you hit the sack. Save me a plate of that infamous pasta dish. Team is ordering Domino’s—I know you’d kill me for eating that crap. Night night. Love you.
My tech-geek husband was working on a big special effects project with his team at Disney Studios that I couldn’t even wrap my head around.
He loved his work, which made it much easier for me to be as career focused as I was.
Ambition was something we had in common, fortunately.
Our mutual understanding that spending time in fulfilling careers didn’t amount to spousal neglect made our marriage one without a ton of drama.
Well, that and not having children, another pretty important decision to agree on for a successful relationship.
It was probably for the best that Kevin was working late and couldn’t point out that I was being melodramatic in resurrecting the dish that included family trauma among its ingredients.
I could wallow in self-pity with a glass of Chianti.
Cheers, Mom, I thought as I took a sip of wine.
Our black Lab, Atticus, whined and stuck his wet nose under my elbow, trying to get me to pet him. I absentmindedly rubbed under his chin and sighed. Atticus echoed the sentiment, letting out a satisfied groan.
Yeah, buddy, you get it, don’t you?
It had been a long workday of opening-statement prep, and I felt depleted from Marcus’s constant interruptions.
There was a lot more to do before I would feel confident delivering that opening statement in court.
I was relieved to have more than a month before the trial.
I still had to prep my witnesses, compile exhibits, and review hundreds of pages of depositions. The prep would be relentless.
Speaking of relentless... Dad. I had to call him back. He’d called a second time, and I’d let it go to voicemail. He would call again if I didn’t call him back. Kevin always wondered why I didn’t just pick up the phone.
“You know he’s just going to call you again. Besides, he’s a man of few words. Just rip off the Band-Aid, and call him.”
Kevin was right. My dad was very much a get-to-the-point kind of person. Sometimes to a fault. I lowered the temperature on the stove so the gravy didn’t overcook.
“Lena, my love,” he said, greeting me with his signature New York Italian accent.
My dad had relocated from New York to the LA area a few years before me, making us both West Coast transplants—something I never could have predicted years ago.
His accent still lingered, like a badge of pride, while I worked hard to erase any trace of that telltale sound from my voice.
But apparently not with total success—Kevin liked to tease, “You can take the girl out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the girl,” when the New Yawk dialect crept back into my speech.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Where’ve you been?” I could hear the annoyance in his voice. I hadn’t been calling him as much for the last few weeks because I’d been so busy with work. He always hated when I went radio silent. I immediately felt guilty, like a little girl who’d skipped school and gotten caught.
“Working. Big case going on that I’m heading up for the division. Trial is going to be later this summer.”
“You’ll do great. You always do. We still on for Sunday on the boat?”
The boat, his pride and joy. When I was a kid, it seemed like Dad had loved that boat more than he loved our family.
He’d certainly spent a lot of time on it—and not always alone.
My mom resented his boat as if it were his mistress.
And alongside Mom, I’d resented it too. But that was years ago.
Nowadays, when we weren’t stuck working on the weekends, Kevin and I enjoyed hitting the water for some sunshine and ocean breeze.
“Yup, we’re on,” I said.
“Listen,” he said. A slight note of hesitation in Dad’s voice made me press the phone closer to my ear. “You know how happy Oliver and I have been, right? Well, we’ve been thinking of doing something about it. Something more permanent.”
“Um...” What does he mean by ‘more permanent’? “You two live together. That’s pretty permanent.” My voice was quiet. “And... you’re committed to each other...” I stopped talking. This was feeling awkward, like I was my dad’s therapist or something.
“Yes, we’re committed. But we want to make it official.”
Official. What the heck does that mean? Have they been having an unofficial relationship until now?
“We want to get married!” He said it like it was the punch line of a great joke.
“Married?” I asked with a jolt.
My legs felt wobbly. I stumbled back and sat on a kitchen stool. Everything went still—my father’s voice, the electric buzzing on the phone line, and my breath. Even the air in the room seemed like it had skidded to a stop. All I heard was the gurgling of the gravy boiling.
“Yes, Oliver and I want to get married,” he said.
My heartbeat thumped inside my chest in a staccato pattern like horses’ hooves galloping around a track.
Dad and his partner had been together for several years now and got along great.
He was the happiest I’d seen him in a long time.
He could finally be free to live the life he’d always wanted.
The rest of us were still picking up the pieces of our life that had been strewn around years ago, like the shards of that plate bouncing off the walls of our dining room.
My dad’s words snapped me back into the conversation. “And now we can, and it will be recognized in the whole damn country.”
I could hear the smile in his voice. He’d posted on Facebook about the recent Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage, placing a photo of him and Oliver against the rainbow pride flag, but I didn’t think he considered it for himself.
After all, he was nearing his seventieth birthday.
“That’s...” I stopped, not sure what I wanted to say. That it was great news? That I was happy for them?
I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I didn’t trust what would come out.
There was something bubbling under the surface.
My jumbled thoughts matched the tomatoes boiling in the pot, one idea popping up and bursting, followed by another.
I was thirteen again, sitting in that dining room with my family frozen around the table, spaghetti trailing down the wall.
It seemed like my father was taking something from me all these years later.
But what? My parents had been divorced for so many years.
We’d all moved on. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling my father was betraying my mom, cheating on her again.
How absurd. I knew that was ridiculous. But I couldn’t persuade my heart otherwise.
“Tell me what you have in mind,” I said, shifting gears to focus on details. Getting lost in the minutiae and steering away from the emotions—that was a skill I’d mastered in my legal training and reverted to when it served me.
As my father talked about his ideas for the wedding, my mother came to mind. Was he this excited about his wedding to her? Did he know, even before he said, “I do,” that he would break her heart and his kids’ too?
“Lena, this is important to me. I want to do this. I’m ready.”
He’s ready? Well, that’s nice. It had only taken sixty-seven years and a lot of pain and suffering of everyone around him for him to be ready. He’d left a lot of broken hearts in his wake. But that’s old news. Why am I thinking about this now?
“Why not do something simple?” I asked. “Maybe go to City Hall and just get married there? Or do it in Palm Springs or Las Vegas over one of your weekend trips?”