Chapter Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
CHARLIE
The house on Cemetery Street looks different after some time away and especially from the back of a hired town car.
Dario wouldn’t hear of Charlie making his family pick him up from the airport, just as he wouldn’t hear of Charlie flying economy home.
“My soon-to-be fiancé deserves the best,” he had said.
Charlie was amazed how differently you could be treated on the front side of a flimsy curtain. Complimentary champagne, a spacious seat that reclined all the way back, an eye mask and slippers, and food that actually tasted good. He could get used to these kinds of amenities.
Now he halts in the back seat, peering through the tinted window at the overgrown grass and landscaping showcased in the weak light that spills from the peeling windowpanes.
Two weeks seems such a short time when looking at a calendar, but Charlie feels a seismic change inside himself. Will his family notice the difference?
As he ventures up the front walk, he wishes Dario were beside him.
Their parting outside Villa Meraviglia was mostly wordless and as bittersweet as an Amorina Indulgence bar, their dark chocolate with orange bitters artisan selection.
As much as he longed to stay in the celebratory safety of Dario’s Italian hilltop villa, his family needs him too much, and of course he missed them dearly, so he steps through the door.
In the entryway, his family holds up a poster that says, Welcome home, Charlie!
His heart squirms a little. Somehow, the house on Cemetery Street doesn’t quite feel like home anymore.
As they pass through the hallway and into the kitchen where a BBQ dinner is already laid out to be eaten, something seems off, and it’s not only his father’s distant indifference.
These people are still his people, but perhaps this place is no longer his place.
They gather around the table. While he loved Paola’s cooking, he missed Dad’s BBQ. Corn on the cob gets passed alongside baked beans and chuck burgers. Charlie slathers his with barbeque sauce and frizzled onions. The all-American flavors he didn’t know he missed until now.
Sitting back at his usual chair, he can’t help but feel he dreamed up the last two weeks.
How could something so spectacular have happened to someone who comes from this?
The wooden table they eat at has a wobbly leg and the plates they use are dollar-store paper.
The chandelier overhead has a lightbulb that’s been burnt out for several months.
The windows are thrown open to let in a cross breeze because even in the evening the Pennsylvania humidity wreaks havoc that their ancient AC system can’t mitigate.
Throughout the meal, he regales them with tales of Europe.
In his sketchbook, he drew pictures of monuments and dishes he enjoyed.
It’s what he’s got in place of photographs.
He lost all of those to The Great Phone Fall at the well in Perugia.
He never wanted to pay for cloud storage. Now he regrets it.
Though, in a way, the sketches are more indicative of his time in Umbria. His perspective shines through in every stroke of his pencil in a way his phone camera could’ve never captured.
“Is this the Cotogna boy?” Grandpa asks, tapping on a face within the pages.
It occurs to Charlie as his family flips through his doodles that he drew a lot of Dario. Dario captaining his boat. Dario lying out beside the swimming hole on Isola Polvese. Dario teaching chocolate making in that silly chef’s hat. Dario Cotogna might be the muse of all muses.
“Yes,” he says, trying not to be embarrassed.
“Quite the looker,” Grandma says. “You can tell you really love him by the way you have captured him.”
When the sketchbook is returned to him, he stares at the drawings and considers what Grandma said.
He was willing to enter a loveless marriage for money because he’d never been in love before.
It was an intangible idea hovering way out of reach.
He didn’t know what it felt like or how it changed you.
But it’s clear now by the drumming of his pulse and the racing of his heart that he’s in love with Dario Cotogna, and that nothing will ever be the same.
Charlie smiles and doesn’t negate the sentiment nor confirm it. The first time he uses the l-word should be with Dario. “I can’t wait for you all to meet him.”
“So he’s coming, then?” Dad asks. Only the second thing he’s said since “Hello, Charlie.”
Charlie nods, heart abuzz. “In a couple weeks. He had some work to attend to, but once he has that settled, he will come out. He is really excited to meet you all.” Over his half-eaten corncob, he adds, “I hope you’ll give him a chance.”
“Of course we will,” Grandpa says, sounding light.
Dad gives a gruff, slow nod that’s at least better than a “no way.”
Behind the glass of the liquor store, Charlie sketches away. Italy inspired him to keep working on his craft.
Lost in a design, he barely notices his phone vibrating. He pops in one earbud and is surprised to hear Dario’s dulcet voice. “It’s two in the morning. What are you doing up?”
“I’m too excited to sleep.” Dario arrives later this week. “I did it! I spent nine hours on the jet without a single panic attack. I slept, I did paperwork, I answered calls. I got my backup prescription filled just in case. I think this is all going to work.”
Throughout the week, Charlie received updates.
Photos pinged in of Dario packing a bag, driving to the tarmac and loading his luggage on the jet even though there was no pilot aboard.
Dario’s therapist told him to think of it like a rehearsal.
The more prepared you are, the less the unexpected can faze you.
“Proud of you, Candy Man,” Charlie says, smiling, knowing he shouldn’t be taking a call while working, but he already put in his two weeks’ notice to his boss. To say the least, he did not take it well, but Charlie couldn’t care in the slightest.
“Grazie.” He beams. “I’m proud of me, too.”
He wishes he could crush Dario’s handsome face with a kiss.
“How is your family?” Dario asks.
“My grandparents are thrilled to meet you, my dad is cagey about the whole thing, and my mom is holding the middle ground,” he says.
Things in the house on Cemetery Street have been tense. The court sent a notice of the foreclosure proceedings. They have twenty days to contest or accept. Everyone tries to act normal and prepare for Dario’s visit.
Grandma has been trying to clean. Charlie has been cleaning up after her attempts when she’s not around.
Dad has been pretending it’s not happening.
Mom has been inquiring after every one of Dario’s food preferences, so the house is well-stocked because that’s the best way she knows to show she cares.
“It is good to know what I’ll be walking into,” Dario says darkly.
“It’s some ivory tower mentality bullshit that I know he’ll get over once he meets you,” Charlie says, and then a thought pops into his head. “Do you own clothes that aren’t five-piece suits?”
“Of course… Somewhere…” On the screen, Dario peers around his bedroom.
“Just curious. Slatington is not the kind of place where formal wear is seen outside of funerals.” Charlie witnessed a lot of those as a child from the upstairs windows.
Hearses were more common on his street than ice cream trucks.
“But come in what makes you feel good. I want you to be comfortable.”
“You make me feel comfortable, Charlie. If jeans and boots will go over better, I’ll get Gabriele on it right away,” Dario says. “Getting there is the hard part, so once I’m there I don’t want anything standing in the way of your family getting to know me.”
A person stands in the light Charlie has been using to sketch and clears his throat.
Charlie looks up from his page to see a veritable ghost from his past on the other side of the glass.
Max has gotten taller. His face is rounder, and his dark brown hair is shaggier.
A patchy beard takes up most of his face but there are red splotches that appear to be ingrown hairs, angry as if his face is rejecting the look.
They don’t speak. Not at first. They’re clearly both trying to figure out if they can pretend they don’t know each other.
“Dario, I’m going to have to call you back. I have a customer. Get some sleep. Sweet dreams,” he says.
“Buona notte.”
The call clicking off in his earbud sends a chill down his spine.
“Hey, there, Charlie,” Max says in a low, raspy voice that’s unrecognizable from the one he had at eighteen.
Slatington is a small town, so they’ve run into each other here and there, but they’ve always maintained a safe, unspeakable distance.
“I didn’t think you worked here anymore.
Didn’t I read somewhere you won a contest to stay with an Italian prince? ”
“Still here and still working,” Charlie says, unbothered with correcting him about the prince thing when he’s this thrown off guard. His eyes track back down to the wedding band on Max’s hand, slowly enough that Max catches it.
“You got married?” Charlie asks.
“Oh, ha, yeah.” He waves his hand as if he forgot all about it. “Thought you might’ve seen it on Freida’s social media.”
“Was she in the wedding party?” Charlie asks. A self-consciousness he thought he once shed zips up around him. Makes him feel trapped.
Max’s face turns a shade of red that camouflages his acne scars. “Oh, no, ah, she’s my wife.”
The news that his former friend and his former secret boyfriend are married and living back in Slatington lands with a splat. “I see. Congrats. When was this?”
“A year ago?” Max says, sounding nearly uncertain.
“Cool,” Charlie says.
“Yeah.”
Awkwardness pulses through the air.
“Could you grab me a vape refill from back there?” he asks, eyes trained beyond Charlie.
Charlie moves on autopilot, pulling down the pink lemonade flavor.
He recalls Max downing icy cups full of the sugary drink during summer months as they loitered at the old quarry.
Funny how a decade can pass, your attitude can change, and yet a single person can still fling you back like a computer retrograding through old operating systems.
The pinch of Charlie’s shoulders and the sting in his sinuses makes him wonder if he ever quite shed the feeling of being eighteen alone on a porch hoping his best friend/secret boyfriend would tell him it’s all been a big misunderstanding.
Max standing here now is a symbol of everything Charlie couldn’t move past while stuck in this one-horse town.
“Haven’t had this flavor in a while,” Max says, mouth curving up. Charlie wonders what else Max hasn’t had in a while. His cheeks heat with the memory of school nights in the shed behind his house. What it felt like to finally kiss and connect with a boy.
For a few years after, Charlie convinced himself he imagined everything between them.
That Freida had been right. That’s how he sort of felt about his time in Italy, too.
But that was easier to prove. All he needed to do was lift his shirtsleeve and see the tattoo there to know someone on the other side of the world was thinking of him and holding him in his heart.
“Your arm okay?” Max asks.
Charlie had not realized he was rubbing the spot where the eye candy tattoo is. “Yeah, all good. Cash or card?”
Max taps his credit card to the reader while Charlie bags up the beer and the vape juice. Questions swirl through his mind then disintegrate to mental dust. It is not his business if Max is living an authentic life married to Freida. It is not his concern if Max is happy.
In his head, he had imagined this moment countless times in those years following high school graduation. There were so many colorful and creative ways he could tell Max off for hurting him.
But he looks at Max now, shaky fingers punching in his pin number on the keypad, and all he sees is a scared boy in the body of a man. Saying any of those things, dredging up the junk from the basement, would only clutter Charlie’s own mental space again.
He will not let the bank take his house, he will not let his dad take his happily-ever-after, and he will not let Max take his peace of mind.
“Take care of yourself,” Charlie says, pushing the goods back through the window.
In a neater version of this situation, Max might have reached for the bag and then stopped himself, taken a breath, and acknowledged how he acted all those years ago. But not all love interests are heroes. Not all relationships get happy endings.
Charlie doesn’t even get a “You, too.”
All he receives is a head nod and a receipt with Max’s signature on it.
For a moment, he stares at the still-childish scrawl of Max’s script and wonders if like Slatington, Max has stilled in time.
The beating of Charlie’s heart reminds him that he is anything but frozen. He is hot-blooded and running toward a brighter future with Dario Cotogna.