Chapter 2
chapter two
Mateo
It was the worst night of my life. Undoubtedly. Worse than the night I got so drunk taking swigs out of a bottle of Goldschl?ger before senior prom that I threw up peppermint and a McChicken all over the limo. It was worse than in the Army when I got stuck in the forest for three consecutive rainy days and my boots soaked through to the socks on day one. It was worse than my girlfriend's dad catching her blowing me behind the backyard shed when we were sixteen.
Because at least then my conservative Christian father didn't think I casually took it up the ass on a quiet night in. He didn't have to see the woman I was going to marry standing in the middle of our kitchen in the laciest bra she owned with an artificial, veiny dick hanging limp off her hips. And when she turned, squealing, and beelined back down the hallway, I didn't have to share the full moon view of her ass with the woman who gave birth to me.
I was surprised Tally even showed her face again, joining us in silence around the kitchen island five minutes later under the brightest fucking light we could have possibly installed. There was no hiding the red under her eyes that continued across the bridge of her nose and splashed across her permanently blushed cheeks. The black eyeliner she had been wearing was scrubbed clean, her hair up in a bun. The biggest, thickest, sweatsuit of an outfit she owned covered her head to toe.
I had to give it to Natalia, if it were John and Sistine Russo in our kitchen I'd have packed my bags and left out the back door never to be seen again. But if anyone could recover from what just happened it was my Tally. She was braver than I was. Stronger than me, smarter and more unyielding. Even when she thought she wasn't.
It occurred to me as she slid onto the barstool beside me facing Mom and Dad that this was their first official meeting. After a year of phone calls and promises to come up to New York for a visit as soon as we could, all the putting it off came back to fuck me in the ass harder than Tally was ever going to.
This is what you get, Mateo. Defy your mother long enough and she just shows up unannounced, eighteen hours from home and rummaging through the kitchen cabinets for an acid reducer. Fuck’s sake. Mom's thin lips were pressed into a line, the crease between my father's eyebrows deep and worried, worse than the rest of the wrinkles that had grown into his face with age.
"So," she squeaked. "What a story for the grandkids, am I right?"
Anxiety crawled like a spider up my spine and to the base of my skull, exploding like fireworks and touching every single limb on the way back down. I laughed weakly and tried to scratch the itchy feeling off my neck.
There was a twitch of, dare I say, amusement from across the table. My parents exchanged looks and I stiffened in my chair, waiting for the expected berating. The one I'd have surely gotten if this were anything like getting in trouble growing up. Angelo and I would sit next to each other on the couch with our chins to our chests, trying our very best not to fidget or speak, knowing our bikes were getting taken away. Saturday cartoons were out of the question. We were going to be stuck clothes pinning Mom's wet underwear to the line outside to dry, and Dad was definitely— definitely —volunteering us for altar duty at church.
But that wasn't what happened at all. In fact, the sound of a low, smoky chuckle made me think I was imagining things. I'd already descended to the pit; the underlord was mocking me. My father didn't laugh like that. The most you'd ever get out of him was a huff, or a gurgle, or something like there was inflammation in his chest that he was trying to suppress by clearing his throat. The only thing my father thought was funny was that one specific pop culture XM radio show that had inexplicably not been canceled yet.
"Not sure how many grandkids we'll be getting that way," he offered with a bite.
What is fucking happening?
The tips of my ears reddened while three of the most important people in my life started laughing together. My body didn’t know what to do; I was still teetering on the edge of a panic attack and that rush of cortisol hadn’t evened out yet. Tally reached over, reading my stress, and massaged my thigh thoughtfully, then worked up my back to my neck and gave it a gentle squeeze, taking away the tension in increments.
"I'm so sorry we didn't hear you at the door," she said. "We don't get a lot of guests here this late, as you can probably tell." Tally glanced pointedly at the firearm beside me on the table and I pushed it farther away.
"Yeah, what are you doing here, exactly?" I found the courage to finally ask.
My mother, Anna, stood from her stool and resumed what I assumed she was doing in the dark like the Hamburglar, opening cabinets and pulling a glass down. "We wanted to surprise you."
My knuckles had turned white from all the fist clenching. "Well, surprise!"
"The front door was locked, so we came around the back and tried the slider. And whaddya know?”
“I know that’s called breaking and entering.”
“That doesn’t apply to mothers. Or the Bronx.”
Natalia’s lips curled into a small smile. My parents were the polar opposite of what she was used to. I had been around the Russos a handful of times, brief dinners at their immaculate Palm Park mansion, enduring topical conversations about the weather and the stock market that I knew next to nothing about but faked it well enough. The plans we had with them were weeks in the making, more than likely jotted down on a calendar like an appointment and subject to rescheduling at a moment’s notice.
John Russo was an anesthesiologist, Sistine a nutritionist and self-proclaimed guru. The kind that went on podcasts and answered questions live on social media about the negative effects of random household staples on your spiritual health. They had four perfect daughters and sent all but one of them to expensive private colleges that set them up for success in lucrative career fields. That all but one was the best thing that had ever come out of that family. Bat shit crazy, the black sheep, and so beautiful most of the time I didn’t know what to do with her.
The last time we’d seen Natalia’s parents I was asking her father for permission to marry her and I couldn’t tell if he thought I was joking or was all too happy to have someone take on the burden. “All my luck to you,” John had said. “You’re going to need it.”
Then there were the Durans, a working-class, blue-collar family from the moment Enzo Duran stepped off the boat in 1914 on Ellis Island and started slinging building material. My father, his father, and his before him. I was the only one who joined the military when I turned eighteen and left the business to my younger, less-inspired brother and hadn’t heard the end of it since.
“We’re glad you’re here,” Tally said. “It’s about time I met the family. I mean, we’re getting married! This was so overdue.”
“When is your return flight?” I asked.
A sharp slap disguised as a caress came down on my shoulder. “Mateo needs to know how much time he has to show you all our little city has to offer.”
I actually needed to know how much time I had to hide how utterly insane my family was from my future wife so that she didn’t call off our wedding before it even happened. I could handle Mom and Dad in small, concentrated doses, with guidelines and set plans, a heads-up at the very least. When those things didn’t exist, shit like my mother and father catching me in my underwear about to get pegged started happening.
“We didn’t book one,” Dad said.
My mother found her way to the refrigerator and popped the door open, glancing inside. “Mateo, someone really might have robbed you. There’s nothing in this fridge.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t book one?” I addressed my father.
“We do a lot of takeout,” Tally answered Mom. “But we always try to cook on Sunday!”
The door to the refrigerator closed slowly. “We’ll just have to run to the store, then. Keep some staples in the house. Italian bread, tomatoes, cold cuts for sandwiches. You waste a lot of money not making him lunch for work.”
“I haven’t bought lunch in thirty years,” Dad boasted.
Natalia had never made a man a sandwich in her life and she wasn’t about to start.
“We’re getting away from my question,” I cut in. “Let’s focus on the important things here. Like what prompted this spontaneous, one-way ticket to Florida, and where you’re staying.”
We would run in circles all night long with the small talk and my parents wouldn’t think twice about it. But it was late, the kitchen was turning into a sauna, there was a catch coming I knew would knock the wind out of me, and the only place I could stand being jerked around was in the bedroom.
“We came to spend time with you and get to know Natalia before the wedding,” Mom finally said. “She’s a part of the family now; we ought to know our new daughter, don’t you agree? Your father retired, so we figured we could spend the next six months down here for the winter like the rest of the retirees and help with planning in whatever way we can.”
A distinct feeling hit me, like heartburn mixed with the stomach pain that accompanies getting halfway through your coffee and realizing if you don’t get to a bathroom in two minutes you’re going to be a grown adult who just shit their pants. The kind where you need a minute, where sweat starts to accumulate on your temples despite being in an air-conditioned house.
“When you called last week and told us Frankie moved out to Colorado, we decided to take the leap and buy the plane tickets. You finally had an extra room, and you’re always telling us the offer is on the table to come for a visit.” My father pointed this out as if updating them on my life during our weekly phone call was me summoning them to the beach.
I’d told my parents off-handedly a hundred times that they had an open invitation, knowing full well that they would never leave New York, especially not without a place to stay. It was etiquette, pure obligation. Did I think they’d ever show up unannounced and use that invite against me? Never in a million years.
“If that’s not a problem…” Dad added after sensing my hesitation. “We could always find one of those rentals, if it is.”
The saturating guilt was settling like cement in my stomach. I was either the worst son in the world, or I was putting Natalia in a position she wasn’t prepared for and neither of us would survive. I lost no matter what.
My attention swept to her and I could see the cogs turning in my fiancée’s tiny little head. Her lips thinned, the thinking finger came up to rest on her chin, and she glimpsed innocently in my direction, a shrug living on the edge of her shoulder. I knew that look; it was her deciding to be the hero. A muscle in my jaw tensed and my head started a slow, involuntary shake back and forth.
“Natalia, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Our fingers linked and her dangling feet plopped to the floor as I whisked her off the chair. We made it halfway down the hallway and out of sight before I nudged her into the wall and closed her in with my hands on either side of her head.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Oh, my naive, do-gooding, hospitable princess. The worst part of this was that I wished I could welcome my parents with open arms. It would have been so much easier than trying to explain to her that my parents were better experienced from afar and that’s why I’d kept them there.
“You weren’t about to do what I think you were just about to do…were you?” Her lips twisted into a pout and I tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear.
“What was I about to do that you think I was about to do?”
“You know exactly what you were about to do that I know you know you were about to do.”
“Well if you know what I know”—she stuck a pointy finger in the dip at the center of my chest—“then we know the thing I was about to do is kind, and helpful, and the least we could do for your parents if they’re going to be here for six months.”
Fuck she was cute, and good-willed, and had a terrible relationship with her own family that made the prospect of entertaining mine seem like a walk in the park. What she didn’t know—but should have been glaringly obvious after the last thirty minutes—was that my family had no boundaries. There was not a statue of couth erected in the Duran house. I wanted to protect her as much as humanly possible.
“Right, well, if you know what I know , then you’d know that offering to let my parents live in the room across the hall from us for six months is equivalent to castration. Do you want to castrate me, Tally? Do you want to take a sharp knife to the seam of my jewels before I can get you pregnant?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You can’t fuck me with your mother in the house?”
“I can fuck you anytime, anywhere, anyway I please, sweetheart. But if my mother’s big girl bloomers get tangled in the dryer with my T-shirts, my dick will probably turn into a gummy worm.”
“I don’t think that them staying here could get any worse than what happened when they showed up.”
She was probably right, but I knew in my gut that if it could, it very well would. And considering our line of work, the chances immediately doubled. “Why test it?” I shrugged.
“You’re hardly home anyway, and the cam business takes up most of my time. If I’m not filming and editing, I’m usually bored or shopping. So look at this as an opportunity for me to bond with your parents, Matty. They’re part of you, and I want to know every part. I promise to be a perfect host; it’ll barely even feel like they’re here.”
I laughed. She seemed to believe that allowing Anna and David Duran free rein of our house for months was going to be like taking care of a pair of elderly, self-sufficient cats. Cats that disappear outside for a few days at a time and you don’t worry about it because eventually they’ll show back up meowing at the front door in the middle of the night.
“I could really use the help with wedding planning while you’re overbooked at work because Frankie is gone,” she continued. “Plus, it saves them from renting a place. Your mom will get to spend time with her baby boy, and you can take your dad out golfing, drive him around downtown, introduce him to the neighbors…”
My hand scrubbed disparagingly down my face over day-old stubble. It was sharp and graying through the once reddish-brown beard from my twenties. The gesture reminded me I was a thirty-five-year-old man afraid to establish any type of boundaries with my parents because I hadn’t needed to since I left home for the military almost two decades ago. I would rather avoid them than invite them to stay at the house because that's where I was most comfortable. An arm's length away from the overbearing and intrusive love-bombing. Here, I could just call home every week and get an update on which bars Angelo got banned from for being drunk and disorderly again.
My aversion to my parents wasn’t fair to Natalia. She deserved to know the family she was marrying into. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I wasn’t sure if Mom and Dad would be a better fit than her own parents, but I did know that she’d been given a sour hand there, and not allowing her the chance to feel a sense of belonging with the Durans was nothing more than me being selfish. I didn’t want to overwhelm her, but it was me who was really worried about being overwhelmed.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “If I agree to this, we need to establish some ground rules.”
“You’re the boss.” She knew I’d love hearing those words slip through her lips.
“First of all, we need a safe word. And not the sexy kind. The complete and utter opposite of the sexy kind. This is one for if and when either of us needs out, and needs out fast.”
“Simple enough.” She nodded. “Coconut.”
“Coconut? You got nothing else? Nothing more original?”
“Palm tree.”
“Seriously?” I parried.
She deadpanned, “Rigid purple fucking dildo.”
“Fine, coconut it is.”
Tally lifted a small, victorious fist. “What else?”
“If you’re dead set on this, we need to be extra careful working from home .” I raised an eyebrow. “I’m still trying to figure out how you talked us out of this first one, but we don’t have room for second or third offenses. My parents are old school, Tal. It’ll send them to an early grave.”
“Pick up a deadbolt for the bedroom door and hide the corkboards in the closet. Got it.” She tugged her bottom lip between her teeth and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Anything else?”
“Yes.” I pulled her closer by her chin, talking against her lips. “We have to prioritize our relationship. You don’t get it yet, but this is about to be a full one-eighty from what we’re used to. There’s a reason I left New York and didn’t go back. I need my girl with me, on the same page, every step of the way. Understand?”
Tally pressed up on her tiptoes and took my mouth with hers. Her eyelashes fluttered against my cheek and I deepened the kiss, tangling my hand in the hair at the base of her neck.
“I vow to follow all your rules, Mr. Duran,” she said.
“Then it looks like we have ourselves a shitshow, Mrs. Duran.” I smiled. “Hope you brought your pooper-scooper.”