Chapter 11
chapter eleven
Mateo
There were a few things in life that made me nostalgic. The smell of fresh wood shavings off a hot circular saw. Cigarette smoke and candied pecans in the summertime, a revved engine and the sweet scent of gasoline idling in a muscle car. Garlic and onions crackling on a stove.
Mom spent every Sunday when I was growing up bent over the gas burners in the kitchen. When she cooked, the entire neighborhood knew it. Every window in the house was open to offset the heat of the oven, and the sound of news playing on the radio whistled through the windscreens.
Just like we knew when the streetlights turned on it was time to ride our bikes home, when the dishes started clinking together and Dad hobbled off the couch toward the dining room, it was time to eat.
For my family, food was most definitely a way to the heart, and Natalia’s idea to get back in my parents’ good graces with a bowl of spaghetti and a bottle of wine was better than any other option I’d come up with.
Tally was pulling pots and pans from the cabinets when I stepped into the kitchen. She’d tied her long dark hair up into a big knot on the top of her head and was wearing an apron I didn’t even know we owned. A perfect pair of leggings hugged her ass, the sleeves of an oversized sweater were pushed up to her elbows, and she slid across the floor in a pair of fluffy slippers that swallowed up her feet. It was my favorite thing I’d ever seen. Like both my worlds colliding into one, that Sunday afternoon nostalgia and the girl I was going to spend the rest of my life with rewriting those same memories in our own font. Something about it felt like a snapshot into the future I’d envisioned with Natalia from the moment I first saw her. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.
She melted into the curve of my body as I stepped behind her and closed my arms around her waist. We swayed back and forth in front of the counter and I breathed the subtle, flowery scent of her in. “You have never looked hotter than you do right now.”
Tally’s head turned toward me, a kittenish smile playing on the corner of her mouth. “I haven’t even showered.”
“I’m so serious, all this”—I tugged her hair and pulled on the neckline of her apron—“it’s doing something to me.”
“I’m ready to be a stay-at-home house wife whenever you are,” she said, gesturing to her comfy clothes. “This is the dream. Rotating from one pair of yoga pants into another slightly different pair of yoga pants.”
“Call me old school, but I think this is your calling.”
“You think so until you taste my cooking, and then you’ll be begging me to leave dinner to the professionals.”
“You’re a natural,” I assured her. “How hard can it be? Three ingredients: meat, sauce, pasta.”
“That’s easy to say when your mother never made you cook a day in your life.”
“I have cooked the most delicious MREs anyone has ever eaten.”
She deadpanned, “You microwaved dehydrated cat food?”
“It counts.”
Tally shuffled out of my arms and stacked a few blue boxes of pasta on top of one another on the counter, then took our largest pot over to the sink and started filling it with water. My mom appeared in the archway to the kitchen as soon as she heard the burner click on and a flame spark to life on the stove, like a cat reacting to the jingle of a bell.
“Need any help cooking, honey?”
Tally shook her head. “Absolutely not. You just sit back and relax.”
Mom didn’t look at me. Instead, she pulled a stool out from underneath the breakfast bar and watched disparagingly as Tally moved around the room from fridge to counter and back again, shaking with the need to stick her fingers in a can of Tuttorosso.
The sliding glass door opened from the backyard and my father stepped into the house in nothing but a pair of board shorts and a fanny pack barely visible below his beer gut. In the couple weeks since my parents had arrived his skin had gone from cream to leather after spending hours outside. He crossed the living room, whistling to himself, and started pressing buttons on the wall thermostat.
“Jesus Christ, Dad, you want to put some fucking clothes on?”
He ignored me as he squinted at the small display screen and turned the air conditioning down several notches.
We were used to the temperature being set at a comfortable seventy-two degrees, but lately waking up in the mornings the wood floors were too cold to walk around on with bare feet and I’d had to take my robe out of retirement in the closet. I checked the thermostat when my father refocused his attention on finding a bottle of cabernet from the wine rack nearby, and noticed he’d reset the system to keep the house at a cool sixty-seven.
Little changes like that had started piling up around the house in seemingly inconsequential ways and making our perfectly controlled living situation more aggravatingly intolerable. Like the furniture being moved so that the recliner sat more to the left, easier for my father to see the television while he watched baseball. The mugs in the cabinet had all been shifted down a shelf to accommodate Mom’s five-foot frame. The hallway bathroom now had plastic storage draped over the back of the door full of pill bottles and toiletries that rattled whenever you opened it. Small, innocuous, bemoaning things I had to give up so I didn’t look insane.
I made a show of punching the keypad back to a livable number and my dad’s jaw twitched as he ground his teeth together.
“Mateo, grab another glass for your mom, please.” Tally flung open a drawer in the kitchen and quickly tossed a bottle opener to me as the water in the pot on the stove started bubbling. I stuck a tongue in my cheek and carried a pair of tall wine glasses to the table, stabbing a cork into the burgundy wine and twisting it open reluctantly, only for my mother to swivel in the opposite direction, right in time to see Natalia crack the long pasta in half over the pot and let it fall in.
A sound of agony tumbled out of my mother and her hand settled over her chest like a knife had just gone through it. I didn’t know anything about cooking, but I knew snapping raw spaghetti like the spine of a book was sacrilegious.
My mother meandered off the barstool and migrated next to Natalia, so I shuffled closer too, leaning on the countertop beside her, feeling protective and equally on guard. I was stressing myself out waiting for a problem to arise. External conflict, I could do. Emotional disputes made my skin prickle with something between a sweat and an itch, and my family brought it on in spades. Natalia’s shoulders tensed to her ears and she quickly covered the boiling pasta.
“Ma, you’re smothering her,” I said harshly. My mother’s light eyes cut to mine and a swallow lodged in my throat.
“I'm fine. Just taking it one step at a time.” Tally let out a nervous laugh, but her neck was blooming in red patches beneath her sweater. “I've actually never cooked for a crowd before, if you couldn’t tell." She hip-checked me out of her way then and began rooting around in the low cabinet I had been standing in front of, pulling a large frying pan out and swatting off some residual dust with her sleeve.
I clapped my cold hand over the back of her neck to give her some relief and support. "You're doing great." My control was slipping, though. I could try to mitigate calmly, but there was nothing that could get my mother to sit the fuck down and let Tally cook besides physically removing her from the kitchen. She was overwhelming to govern on a normal day, but on top of that was the egregious silent treatment.
What did they want me to do? Apologize for Angelo? Get on my knees and beg for a second chance at being a perfect son? Demote Pike back to a groomsman? Unfortunately I knew the answer, and it was all of the above.
Natalia pulled a tray of pre-rolled, store-bought meatballs from the fridge and Mom croaked. A literal frog-worthy bellow. All because they weren’t made from scratch with the tears of a thousand ancestral Italian women and a recipe handwritten on a piece of decaying paper shoved into the back of a junk drawer somewhere.
“You okay, Ma?” I dared her to say something. “They look just like yours.”
A retort was on the tip of her tongue, but instead she bit it so hard she probably drew blood. She turned away from me and sat back down at the end of the table farthest from the stove with a sulk twisting her face that set me off.
“Angelo isn’t ignoring me. I don’t know why you still are,” I said, shrugging. “He’s totally fine with not being the best man, and that should be enough for you, too. Nobody’s even going to notice, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”
Natalia started slowly placing the meatballs evenly apart from each other on the sizzling pan, and the television clicked on in the living room with a playoff football game screaming. A dull thud started spreading across my temples, different than a normal headache, though. I could pick apart every sound in the room. The arms on my watch ticking, Tally's slippers shuffling across the tile, my mother gnawing on the inside of her cheek to spite me, the pattering of my quickened pulse. Everything hit me at once.
Mom pulled her pocketbook across the counter toward her and started rummaging through it, adding to the noise, until she found what she was looking for. She unfurled a piece of paper the length of a drugstore receipt.
“I put together a list of addresses that need invitations to the wedding, Natalia."
Tal jolted at her name and the metal tongs she was holding dropped into the pan. She quickly wiped her palms on a towel hanging off the oven handle and turned around smiling. “That’s great, thank you, Anna. So helpful.”
A few family members from New York made sense to ask about. I sure as hell didn’t know their addresses off the top of my head, but a list that folded over on itself didn’t sit well with me at all. I plucked it out of my mother’s hand and turned it over.
“I'll have to see how many extra invitations I set aside.” Tally left the stove to come peek over my shoulder, and her sharp nails tightened around my arm. “By chance are any of these the same household?"
My blood pressure spiked rolling down the list of names. "Who the hell are all these people? Mr. Thomson, my high school principal? The Osmonds from church? Darren and Steve who cut your grass? The last time I saw half these people was at my confirmation in the seventh fucking grade, Mom. I have no obligation to them. They don't know me anymore, and they sure as fuck don't know Tally. They're not coming.”
"There are so many people back home who can't wait to see you two married," my mother said to Natalia, in a guilt-tripping, sing-songy way. My fiancée smiled sympathetically, and that manipulation pissed me off even more. She was too good of a person, and she was easy to exploit because Mom knew that Tally wanted to impress her. She also knew from the dress fitting that her relationship with Sistine was rocky at best, and that she’d be eager to please as a consolation.
Looking toward the living room for some support, I found my father still standing three feet in front of the television completely nonplussed and holding his glass of wine on his belly like a shelf. Muscles on both sides of my jaw clenched and relaxed over and over again, and the dull headache I had was now piercing, spreading to the base of my neck, like knuckles knocking against a door.
"We’ll make it work," Tally said enthusiastically. She took the paper delicately out of my hand before I could crumple it into a ball and throw it. "Maybe we can make some compromises. That way everyone is happy."
I admired her faith in my mother to comply. What I knew, and the reason I was getting so worked up about it, was that Anna Duran didn't compromise. It'd been that way my whole life. Part of the contention in our family was my unwillingness as a teenager to let her get her way. When I left for the Army against her every beg and plead it was like metaphorically putting a stake through her heart.
"Don't bother," I said. "After the first five it's like reading off the phone book."
Natalia spread the list out in front of my mom anyway, running her dainty finger down the blue ink. Neighbor of twenty years and their adult daughter I used to run through the sprinkler with, the deli owner down the block who gave me my first job, my high school baseball coach and his wife, my orthodontist. People who had vague impacts on my childhood, and the last shred of connection I still had to the Bronx that my mother was trying so hard to keep relevant. I slid open a drawer on the island and pulled out a pen, then went down the list crossing names off finitely.
My mom tried to tug the paper back across the counter in her direction but I swiped it out of her hand. She reached over and grabbed a corner and pulled; I smacked my large palm down over the center. She held firm to the top of the looseleaf and added two sets of fingers, and this time when she pulled, it ripped the paper in a jagged pattern. My barber's name got split in half.
"Oh look at that, Benny got cut," I said sharply.
"Mateo…" Tally murmured. I was pleased with myself for standing my ground until her attention darted to my mother, sitting there with her eyes puffy and watery, a faint quiver on her lips.
My shoulders dropped and all the fiery adrenaline hit me square in the gut. "Oh come on," I said. "It's just a list, Ma. It's not a fucking big deal."
Her mouth twisted, and she crossed her arms over her chest. Her refusal to speak to me, especially now, only amplified the overstimulation I was feeling. It made me irate. If she couldn't be an adult about this I wasn't going to be forced to be one either.
"You're trying to guilt-trip me, Mom, and it's not going to work. I refuse to let you play the victim here." I jabbed my finger into the table and realized it was shaking. My entire body was. Like I’d gone into some kind of manual overdrive and I had no control over it. Then my breath caught, but my pulse continued thudding and thudding until a cold sweat licked up my neck. I paused and tried to regather myself but failed, voice shaking. "You've done this my whole life, all right? Made me feel like shit for making my own choices and not yours. And I let you give me the cold shoulder for the weekend about Angelo, but I'm putting my foot down here."
The tightening feeling in my chest got worse. I was holding onto air that I physically couldn’t expel, my body rejecting my attempt to stand up for myself. I was well aware that something foreign and unexpected was happening to me and there was nothing I could do about it but try to fight back as my vision clouded, and my head grew heavy.
"I'm not a bad son," I forced out. I didn’t even know why I said it. I didn't believe that I was, but the silence from my mother was making me feel like I needed to fill in the gaps. "Dad, come on, help me out here."
My breaths went from miles apart to shuttling in and out. I was begging for air. The harder it was to find some, the harder I tried until I was hyperventilating. And the more aware I was that I was hyperventilating, the harder it was to stop.
“Coconut,” I struggled out. “Coconut.”
There was a hand immediately at the nape of my neck, and it took a second for me to realize it was a concerned Tally comforting me while the room started to spin.
"Matty? What’s happening?" My body turned toward Tally’s voice before my brain did. It was like looking down a tunnel at her. "Baby, come sit down."
I found a chair and dropped into it, and then Natalia was in front of me on her knees, holding my face and telling me to focus on her. Her sweet, worried eyes and heat-stricken cheeks. The rogue baby hairs that stuck out of her bun and fell onto her forehead. I counted her eyelashes.
"Oh my god, David!" my mother's panicked voice rang out. "David! He's having a heart attack!"
I held up my hand, my right ear ringing, and I rolled my neck back and forth like that might stop it.
My father sprang into my peripheral with beady, brown eyes boring into mine. “What do you mean? Call 911!" he yelled.
“He’s not making any sense. He’s talking about coconuts!” My mom rushed me, putting a cold hand to my forehead. She was hysterical. "Oh my god, I gave him a fucking heart attack! Is your face numb? Are your arms numb? Oh God, please Lord."
"Give him some space!" Natalia shouted back. She ran her sharp nails down my jaw and mimicked slower breathing. "Keep focusing on me. Do what I do."
"I'm calling 911," my dad announced.
"Don't!" Natalia and I cried in unison.
My mother crowded me again, invading the little bubble between Tally and me while my father paced in the background asking questions I couldn't hear anymore. I closed my eyes and winced away from the noise.
"Anna, I say this with all the respect in the world—I need you to back the hell up.” Tally's stern, commanding tone slowed me down on impact. One of my eyes peeled open to see my mom taking reluctant steps backward, leaving me alone with my fiancée. Her hands trailed up my legs, my sides and arms, and settled at my collarbone. One palm resting over my heart as it returned to a more stable beat. "Hey. Are you here with me?"
"I'm here," I assured her. "I'm sorry."
Tally shook her head. "Don't apologize to me. I'm sorry I didn't see it happening sooner. You said the safe word."
I was so grateful for her, maybe more so at that moment than ever, knowing that my mother's approval meant so much to her and she was still willing to raise her voice and stand up for me when I needed it. The room around me edged back into focus again and I stood from the chair, pulling her into my chest. "I love you.”
My parents crept toward me again, treading carefully this time.
"Are you okay, Mateo?" Mom asked. “You scared us.”
"Near death is what it takes for you to talk to me again?" I joked, tugging her into my other side. “I'm okay, just don’t ask me to invite the mailman to my wedding. You've been warned.”
She sighed away an argument.
My dad stood with his hands on his hips. "Does that happen a lot?"
"Never," I said. "Must have been a freak thing.” That was the easy answer. The one I would give rather than field questions I didn't have an explanation to, because it had happened to me before—in smaller, less catastrophic ways. If I worked myself up about existential things late at night, or if I thought too hard about some of the shit that went down in Delta. Sometimes panic crept in and made it hard to breathe, but I’d learned to bring myself back to a neutral state without any help. This time was different; it was like those smaller moments on steroids.
Natalia rubbed my back, her fingertips trailing up and down my spine and bringing me all the way to the ground, steadying me.
“What was that about coconuts?” Mom’s eyebrows pinched together.
A small chuckle burst out of me and I was about to make a ridiculous excuse, but my nose twitched first, catching a whiff of something charred. They all noticed the same thing I did simultaneously. The room was hazy, and the stove was crackling ferociously as we all turned and took in the very burnt, rock-solid meatballs in the frying pan alongside a full pot of overcooked pasta. Things had an affinity to being burnt to a crisp in this house.
We ordered takeout, and ate in silence.