40. Chapter 40 #2
“He’s not the same Luigi you remember; he passed away a few years back, but with the same name,” Mario clarifies with a smile, the same smile I remember. I bend down to stroke the dog’s head, accepting my touch as his tongue hangs out, then focus on walking forward.
Mario keeps his arm around mine, the entire time it takes us to walk to wherever he’s leading me.
He asks what I’m doing here, how much he can’t believe that he ran into me and yet again how tall I’d gotten.
I was about an inch taller than he was, which, given the last time we saw each other, was a grave improvement.
“…I moved after I realised you and your mother weren’t coming back; I now live just outside of town,” he explains with a sad smile, tugging me along. I want to say something, but at the same time don’t know what to say. Instead, I copy him by keeping a smile on my face.
He greets several people passing by and a few neighbours, introducing me as his son and how happy he was to have me visit, as if we didn’t spend the last twenty years apart.
“Benvenuto a casa,” he exclaims, opening his arms out wide.
After twenty-five minutes of walking, he points towards the house in front of us.
Luigi 2.0 is freed from his leash and runs into the front garden, while I take in the house.
It was almost identical to the old house I just saw, only it was more accurate to my memory, it being that same shade of blue, the reason it was easy to find it when I was younger - it was the only blue house in town, the carpenters’ home.
The only big difference was that it was far bigger. It must have over six bedrooms. A proper house for a family.
“Sì, your mother didn’t know it, but I had worked on this house long before you came and… I planned on saving it for us, but alas, it wasn’t in the cards,” he reveals as if that isn’t the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever heard.
He really did consider us family after only knowing us for a few months.
He had planned an entire future for me, and my mother ruined it.
What would have happened if we stayed? If I had grown up in this one house instead of the hundreds I had.
If I’d grown up with Mario as my father and been here when Luigi, the First, died.
Would I still be a lawyer?
Had severe commitment issues and an unhealthy attachment to receiving love…would I still have met Luna? All thoughts fuelled me with a range of emotions, emotions I wasn’t used to feeling, but I was going to let myself feel every single one, because I now know it’s not a bad thing to feel.
“Come, let me give you the tour,” Mario beams, pulling me by the arm.
As we enter the house, I remove my shoes.
A habit I picked up from Luna. I slide my feet into a pair of house slippers by the door, finding it crazy that not only were we a similar height, but we were also the same shoe size.
I look around the hallway of the house, and it looks identical to how I remember it.
Apart from the new bedrooms, bathroom, and extra living room, it was as if he copied the old house and pasted it into a new one.
Everything was the same, right down to the smell.
On the column that led to the garden, there were markings replicated in pencil from the beginning of my growth spurt.
Another memory resurfaces: Mario recorded my height every week I was here.
It’s the second time tears brim on the edge of my eyes before I brush them away.
The next squeeze of nostalgia is the last room on the tour, located on the second floor, which is the copy-paste version of my bedroom.
All the way down to the mini posters I used to collect during my prior travels, the wooden toy car Mario and I were building together and Luigi the First’s old bed at the foot of my bed, even though he never used it and preferred to sleep in my bed with me.
Mario quietly steps out of the room and closes the door, giving me a few minutes alone in the first real bedroom I ever had as a child.
It may not have been in the same place, but it damn sure felt like I stepped inside a time capsule.
I made my way over to my bed and sat in the middle; it creaked under my weight.
The faint memory of struggling to sleep the first night I spent here, having never slept in a bed which made such noise before.
It was nothing but the high life before we lived with Mario.
It’s why, for weeks after I left, I couldn’t sleep without hearing a creak.
But reliving that makes me think of my mother - but this wasn’t about her.
This was about me, about being home and, for the first time as an adult, feeling a sense of belonging; I wasn’t sure I’d feel again.
“Now, tell me everything.” Mario blurts brightly, as we’re sitting in the living room with a beer in hand and Luigi 2.0 sleeping on my feet. I wasn’t sure where to begin, as I didn’t want to start our reunion with ‘This is what my mother and I robbed you of and abandoned you.’
So I started with the easiest thing, filling him in on how Min-Joon and his mother were, as he’d met them both when Min-Joon visited for the summer; then I told him about Theo.
It was painful watching him find out that my mother had a child that wasn’t his.
Though he smiled through it, talking non-stop about how much he couldn’t wait to meet Theo and how proud of me he was for taking my brother in.
I then told him about Luna and everything in between.
By the time we’d had one of the deepest talks I’ve ever had, the sun had come up.
****
It was a brand-new day, and no matter how unnerving it was telling my life’s story in the space of a few hours, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Mario, Luigi, and I crashed in the early morning, sleeping until noon, when I woke up to the heavenly smell of freshly made brunch coming from the kitchen, and I ate solid food for breakfast for the first time in forever.
Sitting at the table in Mario’s kitchen, laughing as he told me all about his addiction to espresso, it was his turn to fill me in on what he’d done all these years.
Which, to be completely honest, was exactly what he’d done back then.
He still worked as a carpenter, mostly in the summerhouse he’d built in the back garden.
Something he said he included in the plans for this place because my mother always complained there was always sawdust everywhere.
Now with his own private place to work, that was no longer a problem.
The more we talked, the sadder I felt for him. After all these years, even after what she did, he still loved her, cared for her, and hoped that one day she would make her way back to him.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that day would never come, at least not in this lifetime.