Chapter 26 — TEO
Zay’s street has one of those magnolia trees that drops its petals across the sidewalk like it’s making a point.
I step around a pile of them on the way to his building, my bag over my left shoulder because my right one doesn’t need the accommodation anymore but my body hasn’t caught up to that information yet.
The last session was Thursday. Full range confirmed, strength within parameters.
Zay wrote it in the chart and I sat on the table and watched him write it and neither of us said anything about what it meant, which is that the chart was the last professional reason for me to be in that room.
One more follow-up. Then nothing on the schedule that puts us in the same space at the same time.
I knock twice. The lock clicks and Zay opens the door and behind him the apartment smells like cooking I know he didn’t do.
“Hey.” He’s in a t-shirt and sweats, barefoot, and his face is doing a version of steady that I’ve learned to read over the last week, the one where his jaw is set but his eyes are moving, running a calculation he hasn’t finished yet.
“Hey.” I step in. Then I hear the pan.
Oil and onion and the low steady sound of food being handled by someone who doesn’t need to think about what they’re doing. From around the wall of the kitchen, a voice.
“Isaiah, your butter situation is criminal. I need to know who raised you to keep one stick in the refrigerator.”
“You raised me, Nan.”
“Don’t remind me. I did my best.”
I look at Zay. He looks at me. The look holds long enough for me to understand that this was not planned. His grandmother is in his kitchen and I am in his doorway and neither of these things were supposed to happen at the same time.
She comes around the corner before either of us can negotiate. She’s shorter than I expected, solid through the shoulders, holding a wooden spoon and looking at me with the unhurried focus of a woman who finishes reading before she responds.
I have met families before. Parents and brothers and one extremely protective cousin in a bar in Boston.
But I have never stood in someone’s grandmother’s kitchen and been the one who doesn’t know the room.
In my family’s kitchen, Zay was the guest. Here, I am.
The difference is small and obvious and I have never felt it from this side.
“Nan, this is Teo.” Zay’s voice is even. The effort in it is small, just the jaw holding tighter than it needs to. “Teo, this is my grandmother.”
“Matteo Marchetti.” I put my hand out because my nonna raised me to offer my hand first, and Nan looks at it the way she probably looks at everything that doesn’t meet her standards for greeting a person.
She sets the spoon on the counter. Takes my hand, but only to pull me closer, and then both of her hands come up to my face.
Both hands. One on each side of my jaw. Her palms are warm and small and she holds my face with the assurance of a woman who has been touching people this way for decades and has no intention of doing it any differently for a stranger in her grandson’s apartment.
“Let me look at you.”
She looks at me. Not quick. Her eyes move across my face with an attention that isn’t evaluating so much as gathering, collecting what she needs before she decides how much of herself to apply.
Her gaze catches on mine and holds, and for a second I can feel her seeing all of it.
Not just the height and the jaw. The olive skin, the blue eyes, the whole picture of who is standing in her grandson’s kitchen.
“You’re bigger than I thought.” She pats my cheek once, firm. “Isaiah said you were tall but he didn’t mention the rest of it.”
“I get that a lot.”
“I bet you do.” She lets go and picks up her spoon and goes back to the kitchen.
“Are you hungry? I’m making too much because Isaiah’s cabinets aren’t stocked for a grown man and I had to stop at Publix on the way, which means I bought enough for a week because that’s what happens when you send me to the store. ”
“Nan, I didn’t send you to the store. You showed up.”
“I showed up because your fridge had two Gatorades and a lemon. Sit down, baby.” This last part directed at me. “Both of you. Sit.”
Zay sits at the counter. I sit next to him. From the kitchen, the sound of Nan opening and closing cabinets with the efficiency of a woman who has already memorized the layout.
“The collards are going to take another twenty. I brought corn bread but it needs ten minutes. Teo, you eat corn bread?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me, I’m Nan.”
“Yes, Nan.”
“Better.” A cabinet closes. “Isaiah tells me you play hockey.”
“Left wing.”
“I don’t know what that means but it sounds like the one who gets hit.”
“It’s the one who gets hit.”
“Mm.” I hear her stir. “And the shoulder? He told me about the shoulder.”
“Almost done. One more follow-up and I’m cleared.”
“Good. Bodies need looking after. You’re lucky you got him.” She says it without weight. A fact about her grandson, offered in the same register as the butter commentary. “Hand me that dish. The blue one on the shelf.”
I get up. The blue dish is on the second shelf and I reach for it and my right shoulder lifts without hesitation, the full extension that used to catch and stall, and my hand closes around the rim.
I bring it down and hand it to Nan. She takes it and sets a square of corn bread on it and pushes it back toward me.
“You eat that while you wait.”
“The collards aren’t done yet.”
“The corn bread is done. Eat what’s done.” She looks at me with an expression that is not open to discussion.
I eat the corn bread standing at the counter. Warm and dense and good in a way that doesn’t need me to understand where it came from.
“Nan, I need to know how you made this.” She looks at me. Then at Zay. Then back at me.
“You cook?”
“My nonna would disown me if I didn’t.”
“Hmm.” She stirs the collards. The hmm is not a yes. It is not a no. It is a woman deciding how much of her kitchen she’s willing to share with someone she met four minutes ago. I know that sound from my nonna. “You come back. I’ll show you. Recipes don’t teach nothing.”
I take that as a yes and eat the rest of the corn bread before she changes her mind.
“That magnolia out front,” she says, pointing the spoon toward the window. “Three years it’s been dropping petals on my car.”
“It drops on everyone’s car, Nan.”
“It drops on mine specifically. I park in the same spot every time I come here and every time I come back out there’s petals on the windshield. Three years.”
“Have you tried parking somewhere else?”
She turns and looks at me. “I’ve been parking in that spot since Isaiah moved in. I am not going to rearrange my life because a tree has a grudge.”
“She wrote a letter to building management,” Zay says.
“I wrote two letters. The first one was polite.”
“What was the second one?”
“Specific.” She stirs the collards. “They haven’t done a thing about it. I told Isaiah to follow up and he didn’t. You follow up on things?”
“I follow up on things.”
“Good. Someone needs to.”
Her hand lands on my arm while she’s reaching past me for the salt.
Not deliberate. Just contact, her palm on my forearm, the casual weight of a woman who touches people because people are meant to be touched.
She leaves it there for two seconds while she adjusts the seasoning and then it’s gone and she’s back at the stove.
I’m laughing. The sound surprises me a little because it’s full and easy and I haven’t heard that version of my own laugh in weeks.
The pressure of the last month left marks in the places where the ease used to live, and right now, standing in this kitchen with corn bread in my hand and Nan’s magnolia grievance carrying the certainty of a woman who will outlast a tree, the ease is finding its way back.
Not forced. Not performed. Just warmth and a kitchen and a laugh that sounds like mine used to sound.
I look up and Zay is in the doorway. Leaning against the frame, arms loose at his sides, watching us.
Not the way he watches at the facility. Not the way he watched me last week.
He’s watching with his whole face open, his jaw soft, and whatever is behind his eyes isn’t organized into compartments.
It’s just there, visible, and he doesn’t catch it.
Nan reaches up and puts her hand on my cheek. Her palm warm and dry, her fingers curling around my jaw, and she holds it there while she tells me the corn bread needs more honey next time and she’s going to leave the recipe with Isaiah, who will lose it, so I should remember the honey myself.
I look at Zay over her hand. His face hasn’t changed. The two people he is softest with standing in his kitchen being soft with each other, and the wall between his worlds isn’t falling because there is no wall to fall. It was already gone. He just didn’t know until he saw us standing here.
Nan pats my cheek and goes back to the collards.
We eat at Zay’s small table, three plates, the collards and corn bread and black-eyed peas she brought from home in a container that has her name written on the lid in permanent marker.
“So, Teo. Your family. Where are they?”
“Jersey. My parents and three older sisters.”
“Three older sisters.” She sets her fork down. “So you’re the baby.”
“I’m the baby.”
“I can tell. Isaiah, can’t you tell?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“You can tell.” She picks up her fork again. “Your mama cook?”
“My nonna cooks. My mother tries.”
“That sounds familiar. My daughter is a good woman but she uses too much garlic.”
“There’s no such thing as too much garlic.”
“There is if you’re my daughter.” She points her fork at me. “Your grandmother. She makes her own sauce?”
“Sunday gravy. Every week since before I was born.”
Nan considers this. The consideration of a woman evaluating another grandmother’s work from across several state lines. “What’s in it?”