Chapter 6 Learning to Play in Summer #2
“He sleeps in the trailer a lot,” she said, reaching down to ruffle Luca’s hair as he sat on the floor.
“And to his credit, he uses the bathroom and shower there more than he does at home.” She grimaced.
“I just have to pee a lot, and, well….” She made a sweeping gesture with the same hand she’d used to tousle Luca’s hair. “One bathroom.”
“You know,” Isaac said slowly, glancing around his big house, “I’ve got more room than I can handle here. You’re welcome to stay here until you can find a place of your own.”
Luca and Allegra both stared at him.
“Uhm, that’s really nice, Isaac,” Luca said slowly, “but that’s also crazy talk.”
Isaac shrugged. “Believe it or not, Todd and I had a giant argument in my head right before I said that, and then I remembered he was dead and had no say.” He laughed quietly to himself for a moment before sobering.
“No. I stand by it. If I were to run a classified and advertise for a roommate, I could run a background check, stage interviews and meetings, and still know less about that person than I know about you. Allegra, I know your grandparents—they’re lovely.
I know your brother—he’s a stand-up guy.
And I know that if you and I have a problem, they will both give you a place to stay while you figure out another solution.
” He smiled at her kindly. “Although I’m not sure if you and I are going to have any problems.”
“She’s a slob!” Luca blurted, at the same time Allegra said, “I’m messy!”
To his credit, Issac thought about it. “I know it seems like it,” he murmured, glancing around, “but I am not, in fact, particularly meticulous.” His eyes fell on the window that overlooked the porch and the front room.
“That window is clean because Todd hired people to wash them, inside and out, once a month. I like the look, so I kept them on. Same with the rest of the house—maid service once a week. And the rest of it is, you know, simply me. My bedroom has unfolded laundry on the bed, and”—his lips twitched—“I’ve been folding my stuff and putting it on the dresser instead of in it. ”
Luca felt a small measure of warmth at this. “I take it Todd would not approve?”
Isaac shuddered. “No, he would not have,” he said, and Luca felt again that terrible combination of anger at the dead and helplessness because it would forever go unresolved. But Isaac was excited now and on a roll, so Luca let it go.
“It’s a fine solution,” he said. “I know where your office is, Luca—it’s on the way to the school.
Luca comes by in the evening to work on your grandparents’ place, so he could drop you off.
I cook four or five nights a week, and usually I give leftovers to Roxy—you’ll love her, by the way.
” He paused. “And she’s got three kids, all of them still in diapers.
She’s got life hacks like you can’t believe.
But anyway….” He gave Allegra an almost pleading smile.
“Look at the place, you guys. It’s huge.
The backyard is big, and it’s fenced, with a porch and shade.
This place is made for a family, and all it’s got right now is me.
” He set his yarn work on his lap and raised his hands in supplication.
“You can decide on rent, but I swear, I’d do it rent-free.
We could do yarn work in the evenings while listening to audiobooks or watching TV… .”
“All the murder shows,” Allegra said promptly. “Please tell me you don’t watch documentaries.”
“Only if they’re about murder!” Isaac said, his face almost transported with happiness.
“I think we could make it work. There’s a suite downstairs—a large bedroom with a bathroom and a smaller bedroom on the other side—and something similar upstairs.
Right now, the upstairs one has Todd’s office in it, but…
.” And now there was a dawning joy. “But it would force me to clear that out! I think it’s down to two file boxes and his computer, which could be repurposed anyway.
” He smiled prettily at Allegra. “Feel free to snoop around. With the exception of the yarn room and the master suite, the rest of it can be redone.”
Allegra bit her lip, glancing around. “How about I start with a bedroom and a bathroom?” she said hopefully. “And then, if it seems to be working between us, we’ll make plans for, uhm….”
“Seven months from now?” Isaac supplied so she wouldn’t have to.
“Yeah.” She glanced at Luca. “He’s right. There’s a lot of space here. And it’s not that far from the office. And, you know, if I took downstairs and he took upstairs, we might not bounce on each other’s toes.”
Luca realized that for one reason or another, they were both looking at him for permission.
He glanced at Euclid, who was still baking in a sunbeam, super pleased with himself.
“You sure you’re ready for this, Isaac?” he asked. “You, uhm, just got a cat.”
Isaac shrugged. “I remember right after college—I mean, I was a mess, but I shared a two-bedroom flat with four other guys. Can you imagine? One of us always ended up on the couch.”
“Which one?” Allegra asked.
“The one who didn’t have a hookup that night,” Isaac said. “And only two of us were gay. Trust me. Awk. Ward.”
Allegra’s laughter burbled through the house, and Luca had a sudden shaft of good feeling, as bright and clear as Euclid’s sunny spot.
“You won’t be lonely,” Luca said, still doubtful.
He’d had one of those flats too—he seemed to recall he wasn’t speaking to any of those guys anymore.
But then, he’d been young and prideful and wounded by his parents’ rejection.
Like Isaac kept proclaiming about himself, Luca too had been a mess, and even after he’d spent two years at his grandparents’ place, he’d still lived in his office trailer for a few months before getting his own apartment.
“I’ll think about it,” Allegra said, but she giggled to herself for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
ON THE way home, after Isaac cooked for them and they watched two episodes of one of Allegra’s favorite “murder shows,” which Isaac was rewatching, Allegra sat next to Luca as he drove them back to the apartment, her yarn bag with her WIP, as Isaac called it, (short for Work In Progress) at her feet, along with some extra yarn for the thing she was planning to start next.
She kept making happy sounds that Luca could barely hear under the classic rock station, and he liked those sounds better than the knowledge that the “classic rock” he was listening to had been cutting-edge when he was in middle school.
Like Isaac, his “I’m a mess” days were further and further behind him.
“What?” he asked finally, turning the music down.
“I really wanna,” she said, smiling into the warm spring night.
“You really wanna?” he asked. He didn’t even have to ask what she wanted to do.
“He’s nice, Luca. And he’s right. He knows our grandparents, he’s part of our community. And he’s got stupid amounts of room there. And he seems….”
She paused to ponder, and he tried not to grip the steering wheel too tight. He really wanted her opinion, good or bad, of this guy he’d been crushing on.
Isaac still seemed like that giant box of yarn.
Tangled, yes, but so, so full of… possibilities.
“Seems what?” he asked, in agony, when it appeared pregnancy brain was about to eat what she’d been thinking of saying.
“Seems… open to a new life,” she said thoughtfully.
“I know his husband passed, and you say the relationship wasn’t, you know.
Happy. But this is more than that. It just feels like his house is becoming more colorful, and he got a cat, which is amazing, and…
I don’t know. Like he wants more than color in his life.
He wants people in his life. And jeez, Luca, doesn’t that sound like exactly the opposite of the people we grew up with? ”
Luca grunted. “You’d think—” He stopped in the middle of the sentence and then had a solid epiphany. “Huh.”
“What?”
Well, Luca had insisted Isaac finish his sentences.
“Mom and Dad,” he said, and even when he said it, he remembered the mom and dad from their childhood.
“They were good parents, right? I’m not crazy stupid about that, right?
I mean, aside from the church thing, which drove us a little nuts, they were…
they were good. There were trips to Disneyland and family jokes and new clothes.
Mom taught me how to cook, Dad taught you engines—we had a good childhood, right? I’m not deluded about that?”
“No,” she said, her voice aching. “No. They were good parents. I thought so. And then….”
And then Luca had come out to them the summer after he’d graduated, thinking, Hey, I’m eighteen, and they’ve been good parents. They’ll still love me, right?
“They kicked me out,” he said, and to his shock he heard the same bewilderment in his voice now, twelve years later, that had been in his voice then, when Allegra had met him in the backyard with his bank book and his money and a suitcase full of clothes.
“I don’t understand,” she said, sounding exactly like he did.
“I’ll never understand why they thought that was okay.
Why it was okay to kick you out, just like that.
Why it was okay to kick me out when I was eighteen, because they found out I was still talking to you.
How…?” Her hand rested protectively on her abdomen, and she said, “This is why Isaac can’t finish a sentence that begins with his late husband’s name, isn’t it? ”
“Yes,” he exploded, grateful for his little sister in many, many ways. “I was just thinking that.”
“Okay,” she murmured. “Okay, then.”
“Okay what?” he asked, not sure what they’d resolved.
“Well, we know that me and you and Isaac have a lot more in common even than we first thought, and moving in together might be a good thing for him and me, right?”
Luca grunted. “It’s weird when you read my mind like that.”
She gave a delicate little snort. “And we learned that before I have this baby, Luca, you and me, we’ve got to go talk to Mom and Dad, at least once, and tell them why we’re mad.”
Luca was an amazing driver, which was good because anybody else would have wrecked the truck. “I’m sorry? You took a left turn while I was still going straight. The hell?”
“Because as much as that conversation might suck, Luca, at least we can still have it. Poor Isaac—it’s taken him a year and a half to start to figure out all the stuff he wants to say to Turkey Todd, and the guy is dead.
The least we can do is go say our piece to Mom and Dad while they’re still alive.
So we can finish our goddamned sentences, you think? ”
Luca grunted again, hating what she’d said. Hating it. Hating. It. “Hatechu,” he muttered, even his inflection right back to when that word had meaning in middle school.
“Yeah, Luca. You hate me. What’d I do?”
“Right,” he grumbled. “Goddammit. Goddammit, Allegra Maria Carolina Giardino, why do you have to be right?”
She chuckled without joy. “Don’t get too upset about it,” she said. “First we’ve got to move me into Isaac’s, then we have to see if it will work, and then we’ve got to beat the Todd out of poor Isaac so he can see what a catch you are.”
“Why does all that come first?” he asked, not that he minded that plan, really.
“Because,” she said with a sigh, leaning back in her seat and rubbing her still-flat tummy some more.
“Because we don’t want to walk up to them pregnant and scattered and crammed in the same apartment with no happy ever after in sight, do we?
Your business is gonna make it—hooray! And I’m going to have this baby—also hooray!
But we want to walk up to them in a place of power and say, ‘We can organize our lives, bitches, and aren’t you sorry you didn’t want to be a part of them! ’”
Luca chuckled. “How very dramatic,” he said. “I swear, you got me so charged up I could go do that right now.”
“No.” She yawned. “Tomorrow, I go tell Nonna and Pop Pop. That’s going to be hard enough. Seriously, I like this plan. Let’s do this plan.”
“Mmm… it’s too easy to back out of this plan,” he said shrewdly.
“There will always be a reason to back out of it. Let’s say…
let’s say October. Your birthday. You’ll be seven months pregnant and twenty-six, and no matter where we are in our lives, you and me, we can go visit the ’rents and say our piece.
That way, when this baby comes into this world, you’ll know two things. ”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The first is that you’re strong enough to clear the air with Mom and Dad, so you’re strong enough to raise this baby,” he said, and he saw her nod.
“The second?”
“That you’re strong enough to raise this baby and be happy with who they are, not who you thought they would be. You can be a good parent through and through—you can see this kid to their kids and beyond. You don’t need all the old memories to do this right. You can goddamned go make your own.”
“Righteous,” she said, nodding some more. “Okay. Fair. You don’t need a boyfriend to do this. I don’t need a man. We can go announce our adulthood and walk away.”
It sounded great. Grandiose, but great.
And then Allegra brought him right down to earth.
“But I still hope you and Isaac get together, because he’s a sweet guy, and today was a lot of fun.”
He smiled to himself. “It was, right?”
“Seriously. I can’t wait to show Nonna my scarf. She’ll be over the moon that somebody could finally teach me. I can’t wait to start helping with the crib blanket. I’m going to have so much fun.”
Yeah, Luca thought, liking the idea more and more. Yeah.