Chapter 40
Chapter forty
Ellis brought it up on a Sunday morning.
We were in bed, his apartment that time, surrounded by his frankly absurd number of houseplants.
The fiddle-leaf fig by the window towered over me.
The pothos on the bookshelf had begun a hostile takeover of the entire wall.
His place resembled a botanical garden’s one-night stand with an IKEA showroom.
“I want to meet your mom.” Just like that. No preamble, no careful lead-in. Between one sip of coffee and the next, like he was saying he wanted pancakes.
My stomach flipped.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Ellis, she hasn’t spoken to me in months. She hung up when I told her about you. Her exact words were, ‘That white boy’s messing around.’ She’s not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.”
“I know.” He set his coffee down. “And I know that hurts you. I can see it every time your phone rings and it’s not her. Every time we pass a Dominican restaurant and you get that look.”
“What look?”
“You’re homesick for somewhere you’re not allowed to go back to.”
I didn’t have a joke. He’d described something I hadn’t been able to name, and it sat there between us in the morning light, heavy and precise.
“She won’t come here.”
“Then we go to her.”
“Ellis.”
“I’m serious. We take the subway to Sunset Park. Knock on her door. We show up.”
“And if she slams it?”
“Then we leave. And we know we tried.”
He made it sound simple. It wasn’t. Nothing about my mother was simple.
A Dominican woman who raised her son alone in Brooklyn, who cleaned office buildings at night so I could have school supplies in the morning, who hugged me when I came out at sixteen and said, “I already knew, mijo,” then spent the next eight years pretending the men I dated were just friends because knowing and accepting were two different countries with a border between them.
She accepted the hookups by ignoring them. Ellis wasn’t a hookup. Ellis was a future. And a future with a white tech guy from Long Island was something she hadn’t prepared for.
“Why do you want to do this?” I asked.
“Because you love her. And because I love you. And those two things shouldn’t be at war with each other.”
I called Sierra that afternoon.
“Ellis wants to meet my mom.”
A pause. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, Jett.”
“I know.”
“When?”
“He wants to go this weekend. Just… show up. Knock on her door.”
Another pause. Lauren murmured something in the background. Sierra and Lauren lived together now, had for a few weeks, in that little apartment with the exposed brick and the window that stuck. They were doing the domestic thing, the real thing, the one I’d watched Sierra build from scratch.
“Do you want my honest opinion?” Sierra asked.
“When haven’t you?”
“Go. Take him. Let her see what you’ve found.” A beat. “Your mom didn’t reject you, Jett. She rejected the idea of you. The actual you, with an actual person standing next to you who clearly adores you, that’s harder to turn away from than a phone call.”
“What if it’s not?”
“Then you’ll know. And you’ll stop carrying the maybe.”
A pause. Then, because I could hear it in the half-second lag before she spoke. That slight brightness, the voice she put on when she was holding something together.
“How are you, though? With Lauren. The apartment.”
“I’m fine.” Too quick. Sierra-speed.
“Sierra.”
A longer pause. Lauren said something in the background, and Sierra’s voice shifted, angled away from the phone. “Give me a sec.”
Then: “It’s good. She’s good. We’re…” She stopped. Started over. “I love her. I want this.”
“But.”
“I keep waiting for the moment I figure out how to ask for things. Like, I don’t know when I need space.
I don’t know how to say I’m tired without it feeling like I’m criticizing them.
Last week they reorganized the kitchen, and I said it was great, but then I cried in the shower because nothing was where it used to be and I never said anything. ”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a cabinet. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not the cabinet.”
Quiet.
“No,” she admitted. “It’s not the cabinet.”
I thought about everything she’d ever said to me over brunch tables and 3am phone calls. All the versions of: You’re allowed to be a person in this. You’re allowed to need things. “You know what you told me once? That asking for things doesn’t ruin it. It’s what builds it.”
“I know.”
“You were right when you said it to me.”
She laughed, that small, reluctant laugh. “It’s different when it’s your own kitchen.”
“Yeah.” I leaned back. “It really is. Tell them about the cabinet. Not as a complaint. As a thing you’re learning about yourself. That you have a specific, weird attachment to knowing where the mugs are.”
“That sounds neurotic.”
“That sounds human. They’ll love it.” I paused. “They already love you, Sierra. You’re not going to scare them off by being a person.”
The line went quiet for a moment. When she came back, her voice was different, softer, less careful.
“When did you get good at this?”
“I had a good teacher.”
Her breath caught on what might have been the beginning of crying. “Go knock on your mom’s door, Jett.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to.”
The rest of the week crawled. I planned events on autopilot. A corporate mixer on Wednesday, a birthday dinner on Thursday. Smile, charm, coordinate. Nobody would’ve guessed that behind the professional warmth lived a twenty-four-year-old kid quietly terrified of knocking on his mother’s door.
Ellis stayed steady. He didn’t ask me every day if I’d changed my mind, didn’t pressure or prod. He showed up at my apartment Tuesday night with groceries and cooked chicken and rice, not my mom’s way, but close enough that I sat at my kitchen counter and blinked at the ceiling for a minute.
“Too much salt?”
“No. It’s perfect.”
We were clearing the table when he pulled out his phone.
“I mapped the subway timing.” He slid his phone across the counter toward me.
“If we leave by twelve-fifteen, we hit the D at Atlantic with a six-minute buffer, which means we’re not rushing, and I found the cross street.
There’s a bakery two blocks from her building; I was thinking we could bring something. ”
He had a list. An actual bulleted list. Contingency routes. Approximate arrival windows. A note about parking, even though we were taking the subway.
Something in me tightened. I opened my mouth before I could catch it.
“Should I print this out? Color-coded tabs might help. Maybe a laminated cheat sheet in case I forget my mother’s name mid-doorstep.”
Ellis went quiet. Not dramatically. He didn’t leave the room. Just went still, that particular quality of stillness I’d learned to read. The withdrawal. The door easing closed.
I set down the dish I was holding. “That was a deflection.”
Ellis looked at me. “I know.”
“You were doing yours, too. The spreadsheet.”
A pause. “Yeah.”
Neither of us said anything for a beat. The kitchen held the smell of rice and something almost like my mother’s house.
“I make spreadsheets when I’m scared,” he said after a long pause.
“I know it looks like I’m treating it as a project.
But I’m terrified, Jett. I don’t know your mother.
I don’t know if she’s going to look at me and see everything she’s already decided, and I can’t optimize my way out of that, but I keep trying anyway because it’s the only thing I know how to do with fear. ”
“I know.” I crossed back to him. Put my hand on the counter, close to his. “And I deflect when I’m scared. Because if it’s funny, it can’t touch me.”
“Is that what that was?”
“That was the worst possible time for it, yes.”
He picked up his phone and set it face down. “We don’t need the list.”
“Bring the bakery idea, though. That part was good.”
“Bakery stays.” The corner of his mouth moved. “We could’ve just said that part.”
“I know.” I squeezed his hand. “We’re getting better at this.”
“Faster every time.”
We finished the dishes. The kitchen smelled like rice and a thing that almost went sideways and didn’t.
Thursday, movie night with The Inner Circle.
Ellis was actually there. He folded into the group like he’d always been part of it, sitting on the floor with his back against my legs, laughing at Calliope’s running commentary during the horror movie, passing the popcorn bowl to Raven without being asked.
Lauren asked him about his houseplant collection, and they talked soil pH for twenty minutes while the rest of us pretended to understand perlite.
At one point, Sierra caught my eye from across the room. She raised her eyebrows. I knew what she was asking.
I nodded. Saturday. We were doing this.
She nodded back. That was all we needed.
Friday night, Ellis slept at my place. We lay in the dark, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing absent patterns on my shoulder.
“Are you nervous?” I asked.
“Terrified.”
“You don’t sound terrified.”
“I’m doing my quiet panic thing, seem totally calm, but internally I’m running through every possible scenario including your mother chasing me down the block with a chancleta.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“She wouldn’t chase you. She’d… look at you. And trust me, the look is worse.”
“I’ve met your look. I survived.”
“My look is nothing compared to hers. I inherited maybe thirty percent of her disapproval face. She operates at full capacity.”
He kissed the top of my head. “Whatever happens tomorrow, I’m glad we’re doing this. Together.”
“Together,” I repeated. The word tasted different now. Heavier. More real.
I barely slept. But Ellis radiated warmth, his heartbeat stayed steady under my ear, and sometimes that carried you through the night.
Around three in the morning, I came fully awake. The city hummed outside. Ellis hadn’t moved, still warm, still even. Everything exactly right.
And the thought arrived, unbidden: what if this is as good as it gets?
Not as a threat. Just a quiet, animal fear.
The kind that showed up when things were too good and your body, trained on years of loss, started scanning for the catch.
He was going to wake up and realize he’d made a mistake.
Or my mom was going to open that door and say something that couldn’t be unsaid.
Or we’d make it through all of it and find something smaller waiting on the other side, something ordinary and corrosive the big dramatic stuff had been covering up this whole time.
Ellis shifted in his sleep. His arm tightened around me, automatic, like even unconscious he knew I was in my head.
I pressed my face into his shoulder. Breathed. Cedar, sleep, and the warmth of someone who had stayed.
The fear didn’t go away. It just got smaller, held against something real. Small enough that I could put it in my pocket and carry it instead of letting it carry me.
I closed my eyes and finally drifted back to sleep.