Chapter Eighteen #2
“Hi?” I squeak because I’m scared she’s about to rip my heart out.
“I’m—I’m leaving now,” she says artlessly. “I’m going. So. Bye.” And she turns on her heel and speedwalks away from us and onto the bike path that rings the park.
When I turn back toward Lauro, he’s turned away from me. His shoulders are heaving and his hands are over his face.
“Go away, Roz. I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I really am. But please.”
“Yes. Right. Okay.”
He grunts and I take that as my cue to do as he wishes and leave.
“You okay?” Vin asks as I settle myself back down on the blanket beside him. “I was about to come find you.”
“Yes. I’ll explain later,” I whisper back, because I don’t want Shan overhearing; she apparently took my absence as an opportunity to sit right next to Vin.
He looks weary. And happy. We’ve got a whopping three whole New York City stars in the apex of the sky and it’s time to go home.
But Vin and I are Vin and I, so instead of leaving with our empty casserole dish, we scour the area for trash, use Vin’s key ring flashlight to help find Reggie’s wallet that he dropped in the grass.
We’re in the middle of the park, so Vin takes ten minutes and carries Esther’s bag of lawn toys to the east side for her, putting her and Fabi into a cab.
By the time he gets back, Sari has fallen asleep on one of the blankets so Daniel hoists her and Vin hoists the portable grill.
Only Penny and Stacia are left to walk with us and Penny eventually takes pity on Liam, who is sleepwalking, and lifts him up too.
We make it to an old crappy pickup truck parked on Central Park West. There’s a terrible approximation of Starry Night painted across the side.
“Nice,” I tell Daniel in surprise. Somehow it doesn’t quite seem like his style.
“My ex-wife painted it a long time ago,” he explains in a low voice so he doesn’t wake up Sari. His eyes are friendly and sad. His cheek nestles gently into his daughter’s fall of dark hair. “Hold on to that infinity as long as you can.”
We get all of Daniel’s picnic stuff (and his kids) packed into the truck and then it putts off down the street. Penny and Stacia wave and head off in opposite directions.
And then it’s just me and Vin.
“So, what happened?” Vin prods the second we’re on the B train, both holding the pole and swaying.
I try to tell him about the fight, but he can’t stop touching me. He’s sliding my hair behind my ear. He’s pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose. He’s untangling my earring. Is it just me or did he get taller since the last time he physically adored me?
“Are you even listening?” I demand, which makes the kid in AirPods and a backpack (who is also holding this same pole) laugh. I turn to the kid. “He’s not even listening.”
“Lauro got yelled at! I listened,” Vin insists.
“Yeah, but it was the context that was important!” I say.
“What context?”
“Em isn’t someone who normally yells,” the AirPod kid supplies. “Plus, it sounds like they were probably dating at some point.”
I point at the kid. “He gets it.”
“Okay, okay,” Vin says, with a smile for me and for New York.
“I get it. It’s big. Lauro and Em. Who’d have thought.
” Now he’s straightening the straps of the tote bag against my shoulder.
With a frown, he realizes I’m the one carrying the casserole dish and takes the bag over to his own shoulder.
And then I guess that messed up my shirt because now he’s smoothing it down.
I roll my eyes at the kid. “I guess I’ll just try again later.”
The kid is laughing and looking back and forth between us. “Have a good night.” He waves and gets off at Bryant Park.
A crush of people board the train and Vin takes the opportunity to crowd me.
A suitcase rolls over my toe and Vin lifts it like it’s a shoebox, handing it from a teenager to their father.
Elbows and high heels and packs of people who just got out of Frozen.
The world is an obstacle course but I’ve got a bodyguard.
Vin plants his forearm across my shoulder blades and curls us away from the pole, which has gotten too crowded.
He holds the overhead bar for both of us and I hold his ribs.
It has been a very long day and my feet are tired but I wouldn’t mind if this train ride were six hours long.
But it ends, as all things do, and now we’re headed down our block, back to our apartment, where the worst year of either of our lives mostly took place, and to the two separate bedrooms that nearly tore us in two.
“Vin—” The entrance to our apartment building opens its yawning mouth.
This building has been here for a hundred and fifty years, it’s seen it all.
It doesn’t care about quarreling couples.
It’s six stories tall and six units wide on a Saturday night.
Someone is almost certainly getting banged into their headboard in there as we speak.
Dropping a cake on the floor, fresh from the oven.
Singing in the shower. Deciding whether or not to fuck your husband?
It’s not fazed. Nothing would surprise this rent-controlled building.
These are nerves, I realize, at going upstairs, just the two of us, and seeing exactly what’s worth fighting for. “Vin—”
But he’s not listening again. He’s suddenly got one arm braced across me, stepping in front, yanking me back behind him. There’s a large man lunging up from the stairs of the building, jolting toward us on feet like roller skates.
“Roz!” he chirps, and reaches for us. “And Hot Vin.”
“Lauro?” I duck under Vin’s arm and steady the unsteady mop of a man who falls into my arms. My heart, meanwhile, is a race car.
Perceived danger. Vin putting himself in front of me.
Blue tile and an accident that can never be undone.
But it’s fine, it’s fine, of course it’s all fine.
It’s just my friend Lauro, drunk. “Are you okay?”
I say this to Lauro, but I glance back at Vin.
Who is definitely not okay. He doesn’t love a danger surprise any more than the next man who’s had a brush with death in the last year.
I make sure Lauro is steady on his feet and then immediately return to Vin’s side.
His fingers slide over my shoulders, to my elbows, to my hands.
Verifying, for his touch memory, that I’m safe, I’m fine, we’re all fine.
I lace my fingers with his and give him a squeeze.
“Okay?” Lauro muses, blissfully unaware of anything that he’s just triggered in us. “Well, sure. But the mushrooms were a bad idea.”
“What mushrooms?” I’m thinking about everyone’s potluck dishes and coming up mushroomless.
“These ones?” he says, and pulls a little baggie out of his pocket. In it are about an ounce of wrinkly gray-brown magic mushrooms.
“Oh. God.”
“No, no,” Raff says (materializing from nowhere) as he resurrects from a pile of what looked like clothes on the stoop. “It was these mushrooms.”
A second baggie of mushrooms is produced.
“Did you know he was there?” I muse to Vin.
“If there are mushrooms, he’s always there,” Vin says with a sigh.
“So you left the park,” I say to Lauro. “Found Raff. Raff gave you shrooms. But how did you end up here?”
Lauro opens his mouth to answer but then winds up staring at the streetlight.
Raff moves him aside. “The mushrooms were here. In your house. In my stuff. Hey, has one of you been sleeping in the guest bed? Because both Lauro and I have broken hearts. That’s part of why we like each other so much.
But I think it’s a two-person thing. I mean, I don’t want you two to join.
That’s too many broken hearts. And my heart…
” He puts a hand on his chest. “My heart…I think is like…an apple? A really ripe apple? But not too ripe.” He hooks one finger into the collar of his shirt and checks things out. “Too ripe is bad. Don’t get too ripe.”
“Jesus Christ,” Vin grumbles.
“Tuck them into the guest room?” I ask Vin. “Or punt them off toward Raff’s?”
Vin drags a hand down his face. “I’ll take them to Raff’s.”
I loop an arm through his. “Me too.”
Because—I verify with a palm on his chest—his heart is still regulating and I’ll be damned if we’re going our separate ways right now.
He seems to pick up what I’m laying down because he doesn’t argue. And so we all trek off toward Raff’s.
Getting these two bozos to 28th and Ninth is like trying to get toddlers to sit down and do their taxes.
But eventually they’re through Raff’s front door. I make two bowls of ramen while Vin sets up the pull-out couch.
When we’re departing through the front door, Lauro intercepts us with two aggressive and mildly insulting thumbs-ups. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad.”
Raff is headlocking him back into the apartment. “Just ignore them,” he advises Lauro. “If you fight them on anything, they make you buy dental insurance.”
“Are we really that bad?” I ask Vin on the walk home.
He considers this. “Bad? No. Overbearing?…Well.”
“I know how you ended up this way. You’ve been a parent since you were eleven years old. But how did I end up this way?”
“Aunt Therese” is his immediate, and astute, answer.
“You think?”
“Sure. Your mother farms you off and who steps in but a woman who teaches you how to love with cooking, cooking, cooking.”
“Ugh. How boring. I wish she could have shown me something more chic. Like how to love with world travel, travel, travel.”
“She left you an apartment in the West Village. How much more chic could you want?”
“It’s hard to feel chic when the toilet literally screams for its life every time you flush it.”
“So it’s got some personality.” He’s all shrugs.
And now we’re back. To our fifth-floor walk-up, held together with duct tape and Vin’s elbow grease.
As soon as we step through the street entrance, those nerves kick in again.
By the second floor, my stomach is doing a dance step.
By the fourth floor, my muscles are screaming for oxygen.
By the fifth floor, it all hits. Today I made squash soup for work, the potluck casserole, and Vin’s chicken and rice.
Then Vin and I had the most important and hardest conversation we’ve ever had.
We finally, finally made up. He showed me the framed portrait.
We rolled around on the bed. We went to a night picnic in Central Park and helped close the thing down.
Then we corralled two inebriated ding-dongs twenty blocks north. And now we’re here.
He puts the keys in our door and lets us through. It’s orange and blue in our apartment, everything sidelit by streetlights. There is a low thrum between us and, unfortunately, I think it might be how much our feet ache.
“You know?” I say as I shuck off one shoe and then the other. “I’m starting to suspect that in all the ways that actually count, forty is definitely not the new thirty.”
He’s toeing out of his sneakers and laughing. “Oh, yeah?”
“Hey, Vin.” I lock our front door and then catapult myself into his arms. “Whaddya say we don’t have sex tonight?”
And you can tell we’ve been married for eight years because he grips me close, buries his face in my neck, and groans: “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
I’m laughing while he carries me through the apartment. “If I’d been all horned up, you would have totally done it, wouldn’t you have?” I’m delighted with this aching, exhausted, nearly middle-aged husband at two in the morning.
“Happily,” he says, and then he sits my ass onto the bathroom counter. “But instead, just imagine brushing your teeth.”
“Oooh, yes. More.”
He’s running the faucet and handing over my toothbrush.
“Picture hot water in your hands. You’re washing your face.”
“More, big boy.”
“Now you’re applying eye cream and lip balm.”
I’m laughing with the pure joy of being known by him, and thus, getting this joke.
“Don’t stop,” I say, and then hock toothpaste into the sink beside me.
“You’re stripping in the bedroom. You’re digging through the bottom drawer, your favorite drawer. You’re…sliding into those wrinkly yellow shorts with Snoopy on them.”
“Mmmm.”
“Add a sweatshirt, but, baby…” His voice has gone all low and rumbly.
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget the socks.”
I’m laughing as I slide off the counter and proceed to go about my bedtime routine in pretty much the exact way that was just described to me.
We’re slipping past one another in the bathroom, he’s handing me my headband I use for washing my face, I’m peeing with the door open while he chucks clothes into the hamper. We are so fucking good at this.
Finally, we’re washed up and grinning, standing on our respective sides of the bed. He turns his back, I hold my breath.
And down he goes.
Squeak!
I feel that exclamation point in my soul.
We meet under the covers. “Welcome home,” I whisper.
“I never left,” he whispers back.