Epilogue
Mateo
3 months later
The moving truck whined as I hopped down onto the street with the last box of things from my parents’ house in the Bronx. Angelo had driven eighteen hours behind the wheel of a twenty-six-foot U-Haul to follow them down to their new place in Pompano and help unload and move them in. Sweat dripped from my temples and down my back beneath an old cut-off Army T-shirt, and my hands clammed up underneath the cardboard as I lugged it inside and dropped it on the long marble island next to forty other ones.
September in South Florida was consistently hot, and we’d hit a record-high heat wave just in time to take a hundred trips in and out of a box truck instead of riding it out in the comfort of an air-conditioned house. The one Mom and Dad bought was a two-story, three-bedroom with an office and a garage. Enough backyard space to add a pool if they wanted to, and a neighbor on one side instead of two. They could take a long stroll to mine and Tally’s if they felt like it, or hop in the car and be on our doorstep before a Billy Joel song played all the way through.
“Last one?” Mom was twirling around in her brand-new kitchen, stacking plates in the cupboards as she unpacked them. It was weird to see her in a place that wasn’t our childhood home. The dishes were the same off-white ceramic I used to eat off of in the small confines of our breakfast nook, and the coffee mugs were the same mismatched souvenirs from vacations growing up. Now they sat in newly sawed-off, builder-grade cabinets next to a stainless steel refrigerator that didn’t showcase our Little League photos or house any handmade magnets.
“That’s the last of it,” I told her. She opened the fridge and tossed a can of beer out of the lone box sitting in it at me, and I took it to go as I walked out the back door.
After the wedding, Tally and I went on a two-week honeymoon out of the country to the Caribbean. It was exactly the decompression we needed to reconnect on a primitive level. It was like returning to our base selves after a period of heightened stress. We barely left the hotel room for the whole first week. I was inside of her more than I was out. We woke up and fucked. Ordered room service and fucked. We fucked in the shower while we washed off the fucking from before the shower. It was hedonistic and borderline primal, but it reminded me just how much I missed her for the six months we were living under the same roof yet somehow miles away.
We even managed to livestream a few times for our subscribers on the cam page. They loved the change of scenery, and for the first time in a long time, pressing record didn’t feel like a job we had to finish before time ran out.
Life had resumed to perfectly normal. I saw Dr. Brinckler at the VA bi-weekly, and our talks stayed informative and entertaining, filling in my void of insecurity with tools and techniques instead. Seeing a therapist turned from a chore into a bright spot in my schedule, and if I didn’t know any better I’d have said Henry and I were friends. He regularly turned down my offer for a drink outside office hours, but chuckled when I brought him a real grocery list notepad as a gift.
TechOps was thriving, and Angelo was committed to taking night classes on the basics of cyber security, malware, coding, and computer hygiene to be ready to take on a job with me when he came down to Florida. My parents went back home after Key West and put their house on the market, and it sold for over asking price in less than a week. It took a few months to negotiate contracts and empty out the house, and that gave Angelo enough time to close out his open contracts with Duran it was so much bigger than that. Everything had changed, and I was ready for it. It felt like I was born for it. My heart doubled in size in an instant to make room for all the love I was holding for our child already.
“Is this the new best day of our lives?”
“So far.” Tally beamed.
The one thing I was sure of was that every best day of my life belonged to her.
The End.