Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
My mom called on Sundays. Always Sundays, always between noon and one, always right when I was in the middle of something. She had a sixth sense for interrupting momentum. I was convinced she’d developed it during my childhood and had never turned it off.
This particular Sunday I was at Ellis’ apartment, tangled up on his couch in that boneless way where neither of us had committed to being vertical yet.
His legs were across my lap, he was reading something on his tablet, and I was scrolling through vendor quotes for a corporate gala I was planning for a biotech startup that wanted “elevated but approachable,” which meant absolutely nothing but they were paying well.
My phone buzzed. The screen lit up with MAMI and a photo from ten years ago. Her at my cousin Daniela’s quinceanera, red lipstick, hair pinned up, looking like she owned every room she’d walked into. Because she did.
I hit accept before I could think about it, which was my first mistake. You don’t answer a call from Carmen Villanueva-Castillo without a game plan.
“Mijo.” Her voice was warm and immediate, like she’d been mid-sentence before dialing and was just continuing a conversation she’d started in her head. “You haven’t called me.”
“I called you on Wednesday.”
“Wednesday was four days ago. You could be dead.”
“I’m not dead, Ma.”
“How would I know? I have to find out from Instagram that my son is alive. You posted a picture of pad thai last night. You don’t even cook.”
Ellis glanced up from his tablet. I mouthed, “My Mom,” and he nodded, returning to his reading, but I caught the shift in his attention. He was listening without looking like he was listening.
“The pad thai was from a restaurant.” I kept my voice light. “Thai Villa on Graham.”
“Is it good? Your tía Rosa says that place has roaches.”
“Tía Rosa thinks everywhere has roaches.”
“Because everywhere does. This is New York.” She paused, and I could hear her moving through her apartment.
The familiar soundtrack of pots being shifted, the creak of the cabinet above the stove, the faint radio she always had on in the kitchen playing bachata or the news, depending on her mood.
Sunset Park sounds. Home sounds. “Are you eating enough?”
“I’m eating fine.”
“You look thin in that picture.”
“Ma, you can’t tell body composition from a food photo.”
“I’m your mother. I can tell everything from everything.” Another pause. The pot sounds stopped. Here it came. “Mijo, are you seeing anyone?”
My stomach dropped. Not dramatically. Not the way it would have if she’d asked a year ago, back when the answer was “several people, none of them worth mentioning.” But now the answer was different.
Now the answer had a name and a watering schedule and hazel eyes, and was currently three feet away from me pretending to read about JavaScript frameworks.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re twenty-four and you never bring anyone home. Daniela’s getting married next October, and your abuela is going to ask. I’d like to have something to tell her besides ‘he’s too busy with his little parties.’”
“They’re not little parties. They’re corporate events with six-figure budgets.”
“Mijo. Answer the question.”
I looked at Ellis. He’d stopped scrolling. His eyes were still on the tablet, but they weren’t moving, and his jaw had that set to it that meant he was concentrating on something that wasn’t the screen.
“I’m seeing someone,” I said.
The silence on her end lasted exactly one and a half seconds, which for my mother was an eternity.
“Since when?”
“Few months.”
“Few months and you’re just telling me now? What’s wrong with her?”
The pronoun landed like a stubbed toe. Her.
Not “him” or even “them” or “this person.” Because even though my mom had been fine with me being gay since I was sixteen, her default setting still drifted toward the feminine when she pictured my future.
She’d accepted that I liked men the way she accepted that I’d moved to Bushwick with grace, publicly, and with a private undertow of hoping I’d eventually change my mind.
“Nothing’s wrong with him, Ma.”
“Him.” A pause. “What’s his name?”
“We’re not there yet.”
“Not where? I’m asking for a name, not a blood sample.”
“When it’s serious, you’ll meet him.”
“It’s been a few months, and it’s not serious?” Her voice shifted. Still warm, but with that edge underneath, the one she used when she was deciding whether to push. “Jett, mijo, you know I love you. You know I don’t care who you date.”
That was the line. She’d been saying some version of it since I was sixteen.
I don’t care who you date. And she meant it.
Mostly. She didn’t care that I dated men.
She cared about what other people thought about her son dating men.
She cared about what Abuela thought, what the neighbors thought, what Father Munoz at St. Michael’s thought.
She loved me without conditions but she worried about me with plenty of them.
“I know, Ma.”
“I just want you to be happy. And safe. And eating enough vegetables.”
“I’m eating vegetables.”
“Fried plantains don’t count.”
“They absolutely count. They’re a plant.”
She laughed, and the sound caught me sideways.
That particular ache of loving someone who loved you back but might not love every version of you equally.
She was my favorite person on the planet.
She’d held me together through every hard thing I’d ever survived.
The tattoo on my ribs was her handwriting, for God’s sake.
Libre, in the cursive she used for birthday cards and letters sent back home, because she’d been the first person to tell me I could be free.
But free had meant something specific to her.
Free to be gay, sure. Free to live in Brooklyn, fine.
Free to throw events and make his own money and have his little friend group.
But free to bring home a white man from Long Island who had never eaten mangú?
Free to be serious about someone her mother would side-eye?
Free to build a life that looked nothing like the one she’d imagined when she’d written that word on the back of an envelope for her son to tattoo on his body?
I wasn’t sure.
“I gotta go, Ma. I have work stuff.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Events don’t take weekends off.”
“Bring me some of that pad thai next time you come. If it doesn’t have roaches.”
“Bye, Ma. Love you.”
“Te quiero, mijo. Call me before Wednesday, or I’m coming to your apartment.”
I hung up and set the phone face down on the couch cushion.
Stared at the ceiling for a second. Ellis’ fiddle-leaf fig painted shadows across the plaster, and somewhere in the bathroom Jack the fern was existing peacefully, unbothered by mothers or pronouns or the weight of being someone’s only son.
Ellis let the silence settle. “She sounds nice.”
“She’s incredible.”
“You didn’t tell her about me.”
The observation landed with precision. He said it the way he said most difficult things, with care, like he was checking the depth before stepping in. But I heard the question underneath: Why?
“I told her I’m seeing someone.”
“You told her you’re seeing someone whose name she can’t know yet.” He set the tablet down. Looked at me fully. “A few weeks ago, you were frustrated I couldn’t say ‘boyfriend’ at work. And you just called me ‘someone’ to your mom.”
The accuracy of that hit me in the sternum.
“It’s different,” I said.
“How?”
I sat up. His legs slid off my lap, and the loss of contact cut sharper than it should have. “Because your coworkers are people you see eight hours a day and then go home. My mom is, she’s my mom, Ellis. If she reacts badly, I can’t just transfer to a different department.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because the way you’re looking at me right now feels a lot like the way I looked at you in your hallway that night.”
He was quiet for a beat. Then, “Maybe that’s because I finally understand what you were feeling.”
That one landed. Sat in the air between us, turning.
“She’ll come around,” I said. “When I tell her. She will.”
“When?”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually.” He repeated the word the way you’d hold up a cracked glass to check if it was still usable. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Your pace.” He picked his tablet back up. Settled back against the arm of the couch. But he didn’t put his legs across my lap again, and the three feet of cushion between us had teeth.
I wanted to explain. Wanted to tell him that my mom had held my hand at sixteen and said, “Mijo, you’re still mine, no matter what”, and that I was terrified, physically, gut-level terrified, that introducing him would be the thing that finally found the edge of her no matter what.
That the acceptance she’d given me was real, but maybe not infinite.
That I’d rather keep him in a sealed room than risk watching her face change when she met him.
But I didn’t say any of it. Because saying it would make it real, and I wasn’t ready for it to be real yet.
“I’m going to make coffee,” I said, got up, and left him on the couch with Jack and Diane and the silence I’d built between us.
I came back from the kitchen with two mugs and a steadier face than I’d left with. He hadn’t moved. Same end of the couch. Tablet face down now. The same late October light cutting across the floor.
“I made you coffee.”
He took it. Set it down on the side table. Patted the cushion next to him.
I sat.
He didn’t put his legs back across mine.
Didn’t reach for me. Just stayed close enough our knees touched and let the silence do whatever it was going to do.
Jack’s leaf in the corner trembled under the radiator’s hot exhale.
Late-afternoon light filtered through the slatted blinds, casting stripes across the floor.
“I’m not going to push you,” he said, quiet. “About the name. About telling her.”
“Okay.”
“I just want you to know I’m not going to.”
“Okay.”
His knee pressed harder into mine. Not insistent. Anchoring. The careful Ellis tic translated into touch.