Chapter Fourteen #2
I don’t know what to say. I’m searching around for anything.
But Vin’s not quite done.
“And then, those last few months that Raff was with us, when you started getting really depressed, I wanted to be the one—but Raff was so excited about getting you back on your feet. All the Groupon stuff. I just…didn’t know how to fit myself back in.
And then he left and…nothing worked without him anymore either. ”
“Wow.”
“I know.” He’s grimacing. “All pretty ugly.”
“That’s not ugly! That’s…human! And I’m so glad I know. And I’m—”
“Don’t say sorry. Really. I’m serious. How much you love Raff is a part of…it’s part of what makes you you. So don’t apologize.”
My brain is circling this. Having Raff stay with us seemed like such a no-brainer at the time. He’s family. He was drowning and needed us. Of course we’d do that for him. But maybe once his arm was healed and he was back on his feet, maybe it would have been kinder to all of us to just launch him.
“If you could go back…” I prod.
“Oh, I definitely would decide not to care if he heard us having sex.”
I burst out laughing. “WOW. Okay! Not where I thought that was headed.”
He’s smiling, glancing sideways at me, one hand in his jeans pocket, and I just get catapulted back to our first or second date.
“Do you remember—” I start.
“Yes.”
I laugh. “You don’t even know what I was going to say!”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says gruffly. “I remember it.”
“It does matter! I was gonna say it was our first or second date. And we were walking in the park.”
“Second date, then.”
“Okay. Second date. And I laughed and went to put my hand on your shoulder but then you ducked into it so that my hand ended up on your cheek instead?”
He laughs, grimacing, the tips of his ears pink. “Yeah.”
“I thought that was so smooth.”
“Gah.” He’s pinching his face closed at himself.
“Why does that embarrass you?”
“Because…I didn’t mean to be smooth. I actually didn’t mean to do it at all.
I just…I was so into you and when you reached out to me…
I just…the idea of you putting your hands on my face…
like you were gonna kiss me…” He clears his throat and some of his pinchy embarrassment seems to be ebbing away to make room for a different, weightier emotion.
My blood is pounding hollowly through my veins.
I knew we were into each other when we first started dating.
This isn’t news, but to hear him say it, with pink ears, I was so into you.
It makes it feel oddly fresh. Like maybe those two hearts brushing shoulders while they strolled through the park actually haven’t been beaten to death by the specter of a breakup.
“We didn’t kiss then, though.”
“No.” He clears his throat. “We didn’t kiss for five dates.”
“Wow! You really got those stats memorized.”
“No one made me wait five dates for a kiss before you.”
“Made you wait. Oh, please. Because that’s how that works.”
He’s smiling again. “All right, all right. I kept choking.”
“Choking?”
“Yeah.”
“How were you choking?”
He lowers his brow while he looks down at me. “I wanted to kiss you so many times on those first few dates but I kept chickening out at the last second.”
This actually is news. Because he’s many things, but sexually intimidated is not one of them.
Difficult communicator though he is, he has a very easy sexual charisma.
Every kiss, every progression or push, it always felt so natural with him.
There was never: And now! the moment he touches my boobs for the first time.
Or: There he goes trying to get my jeans undone.
Not that things were never clumsy or funny, because sex is often both, but more that he always seemed like whatever was happening was exactly what he wanted to be happening, exactly the way he wanted it.
“You thought I’d reject you or something?”
“No. Not really. I guess…It was more like, I knew I was only gonna taste it once, that first kiss.”
I catch my toe on a cobblestone and Vin lunges forward to steady me.
“Mind the lasagna!” I shout, and it makes a lounging group of skateboarders laugh.
“Sounds like a sex move!” one of them calls to us.
Vin is still clutching me by the elbow, eyes narrowed at them. “The fuck that kid knows about sex moves, he’s like thirteen.”
“I’m actually kind of intrigued by this,” I say. “Which body part is supposed to be the lasagna, you think?”
“Oh, for the love of—” Vin shuffles me along.
“Thanks for coming, Vin,” I say happily, almost looping my arm through his but just patting the lasagna instead (an alternate, more tame sex move).
“So, who are we bringing food to, again?” he asks.
And so I tell him about Esther and Fabi, which leads me to Reggie, which leads to Shan, to Stacia and Cindy, to Penny, to Em, a brief word on Lauro (to which Vin raises his eyebrows and says nothing), and lastly to Daniel.
Which gets us all the way to the stuck buzzer of Esther’s building, onto her elevator that smells like soup, and through her front door, where she’s beckoning us and demanding we put our shoes there! No, there!
“Well, come in,” she says. “Good lord, you’re tall.”
“Sorry,” Vin says.
“Why would you be sorry about that?” Esther asks.
“Oh.” He’s stymied. “I guess I’m not?”
“Good. Fabi! Company!”
Fabi emerges down a long pink hallway decorated with gilded family photos. His eyes light up when he sees me, but he stops in his tracks when he sees Vin.
“Who’s that?”
“This is my husband, Vin,” I tell him. “He’s terrible at kung fu.”
Vin is handing off the food to Esther, yes, ma’am-ing her, but he does a double take at me. “What did you just tell him?”
“Nothing. Oh, Fabi, do you play the trumpet?” There’s an open case in their living room. It’s sitting atop a floral print couch under a windowsill where they’re growing basil.
“No, that’s Abuela.”
Esther’s back from the kitchen with two cups of something for Vin and me. “Horchata,” she says to me, handing one cup over. “Horchata,” she says to Vin, handing the other cup over.
“Thank you,” Vin and I say in unison.
“Esther, you play the trumpet?”
She points to a photo on the wall and I lean in to see a young dark-haired Esther, raising a trumpet to the sky, grinning, with her arm around a man with a saxophone. They’re on a stage, sweaty and exhilarated and obviously in love.
“Mr. Esther,” she tells us with a smile.
“He’s dead,” Fabi informs us solemnly. “Abuela says he rolls over in his grave when I eat spaghetti with my fingers.”
“Wanna hear me play?” Esther asks. “I’m a better musician than I am an artist.”
“I love your drawings, Esther!”
She waves one hand in the air and trots toward the trumpet. “I do the drawing class for something we elderly call ‘enrichment.’ And because Daniel would forget to charge anyone for the class if I wasn’t the registrar.”
She picks up the trumpet and turns to Fabi. “54321,” she tells him.
I think she’s telling him to count her down, but she jumps directly into playing, tearing into those first euphoric, jaunty notes of “My Favorite Things.”
“Five,” Fabi says. “Four.”
Esther’s fingers are curved and strong, her eyes closed. There’s a knot in my throat when she goes up an octave and trills.
“Three, two, one.”
Bang bang bang! A little dust falls from their light fixture when the upstairs neighbor stomps from above.
Esther tears off midnote and glares at her ceiling. Then she resumes the trumpet and finishes the phrase she’d been in the middle of. On principle, it seems.
She carefully lays the trumpet back in its case. “It’s not as bad as it seems,” she says. “I get two hours to play on Sunday afternoons while he’s playing pickleball at the Y.”
“Is two hours a week enough?” I ask her.
She shrugs.
“You want me to go up there and talk to him?” Vin asks.
When I glance at him, I double-take with a start. Esther glared at the ceiling, but Vin is trying to incinerate it with his gaze. His hands are on his hips and his eyes are narrowed darkly.
Esther’s mouth is dropped with glee. “Roz, your husband is flirting with me.”
That drops his eyes back to her, a little light returning to his gaze. “You should be allowed to play at least a little bit every day. He can’t expect you to be quiet at all hours.”
I glance up and see Fabi still lingering at the edge of the living room, his eyes returning and returning to Vin.
I elbow Vin and mutter out of the corner of my mouth, “Quit being intimidating.”
Vin’s hands drop from his hips so fast his arms nearly fall off. He folds them in front of him in an absurd attempt to look smaller. If I handed him a tutu right now, I’m positive he’d put it on.
“Hey, while you’re here, change a lightbulb for me,” Esther says, puttering past Vin and assuming (correctly) that he’ll immediately follow along in her wake.
“Fabi, wanna get dinner on the table with me?” I ask, and he scampers after me.
Esther’s kitchen is clean and dated. I’m positive that in thirty years, Fabi will see plates exactly like these ones in an antique shop and clutch them to his chest and shed tears for his wonderful, perfect Abuela who raised him so well.
He and I slap a salad together. “Cut up a peach for Abuela,” he tells me. “She likes an after-dinner peach.”
And then we get everything plated for the two of them, complete with ice in the water glasses.
“Well, looky here,” Esther says, coming back into the kitchen. Vin is wiping grease off his hands with a rag, so I’m assuming her list of while-you’re-here’s extended a bit past a lightbulb. “Somebody made me dinner.”
“Who’s your super?” Vin is grouching. “That light fixture is dangerous. Call him and—You know what? Never mind. I’ll come back tomorrow with my tools and fix it. Just don’t touch it in the meantime. Hey, Fabi, you like Messi or Reynaldo?”
Fabi jumps at being directly addressed by the frowning giant washing his hands at his Abuela’s sink. “Oh! Um. Messi.”
“Of course. He’s the greatest soccer player in the world. I would say in history but then there’s Pelé and Marado—”
“Maradona!” Fabi finishes his sentence, brightening up quite a bit. “Do you play soccer?”
“I did in middle school and my little brother did all through high school. But I didn’t keep up with it, so now I’m old and bad.”
This makes Fabi laugh.
“You have a soccer ball or should I bring one tomorrow?” Vin asks. “After I fix the light fixture, we can go down to the park and kick the ball around, if that’s okay with Abuela.”
It’s moments like these that put Vin’s young adulthood in context for me. He’s only six years older than Raff, but that means they were eleven and five when their dad died. Which means that Vin has spent a lot of time kicking a soccer ball around with a kid Fabi’s age.
“I have two soccer balls,” Fabi says quietly, his eyes going to his Abuela to make sure this plan is good with her. He’s already bouncing on his toes.
“Good luck,” says Esther to Vin. “He’s fast. Like a mosquito.” She does a buzzy-buzzy-mosquito finger as she walks over to Fabi and gets it stuck in his armpit, tickling him to within an inch of his life.
“Abuela!” he gasps, hysterical and weakly falling halfway to the floor.
“Wash your hands,” she says to him. “And you two, either make yourselves a plate or scram. I’m hungry.”
We give hugs and waves and excuse ourselves out the door, and Vin gives Fabi a fist bump.
I’m happy and overfull with things to tease Vin about. I poke him in the elevator. “You want me to go up there and talk to him?” I drop my voice low to mimic his.
His ears are pink again. But he puts his palms up and shrugs. “What?”
“Big Vinny DeLuca was gonna go up to the neighbor’s house and list his options for him?”
He’s laughing. “I wasn’t going to threaten him, I was going to negotiate quiet hours for her!”
“With that beard, everything is a threat.”
His hand goes up to his facial hair. “A little old lady can’t practice her trumpet because the asshole upstairs is making a big deal about it? Come on. You can’t tell me you weren’t mad about that.”
“Well, sure, but this is life in New York City. I was mad but I wasn’t about to go knock on the guy’s door.”
“Good.” He’s alarmed. “You should not be knocking on a stranger’s door.”
“You’re the only one who offered that!” I’m throwing up my arms, mock exasperated. I soften. “Thank you for helping her. You don’t have to go back tomorrow.”
He shrugs. “She’s your friend. And I want more horchata. It was good.”
We step off the elevator and back onto the street. I check my phone for train status. “Oh, it looks like the 4/ 5/ 6 is back up and running. We can catch it at 96th.”
He nods and we start strolling down Lex. There’s the tiniest little bubble of disappointment in my chest. I sort of wish I hadn’t checked my phone and we were retracing our steps across the park instead of walking to the train.
Walking with Vin through the park felt like a little vacation from our normal lives. I want more.