9. Ratatouille #2
“Hey, kid,” I called. “Come here and give me a hug.”
He escorted MJ up the steps and held the door open for Lea, who had picked up Lupe to carry inside.
I accepted kisses from her and Tommy before Joni and I followed them in.
“My favorite sisters,” Lea said as she noted the bag of groceries I put on her counter.
The inside of the house was just as neglected as the outside.
Things had been picked up in anticipation of dinner, but a thin layer of dust lay on the baseboards and windowsills, the counters bore streaks of water stains or other substances, and dust bunnies had accumulated in the corners.
A far cry from my sister’s usually housekeeping.
She and Mike had never been rich, but they’d always been clean.
Joni snorted as she hopped up on the counter while the kids wandered into the living room to say hello to Nathan. “Since when are we your favorites?”
“Since today,” Lea said as she helped me take groceries out of the bags. “Since we’re the last Zolas left in New York, and you brought food. You know you don’t have to?—”
“I know,” I cut her off gently. “I wanted to. There were leftovers at Prideview from the party, and we’ll make enough dinner tonight so you have stuff for the week.”
Lea’s eyes softened with gratitude and maybe a little shame. “Thanks.”
Joni left to help Nathan with the kids while Lea and I dove into making dinner with the same rhythm we’d had since I was little.
As we worked, more noticeable differences crept in: the weariness in Lea’s voice as she chatted about neighborhood gossip and the kids’ upcoming school schedules, the dark circles under her eyes, the way her clothes hung off her already slight form. Grief had hollowed her out.
Its twin, guilt, lodged itself in my gut.
Culinary school or not, I should have come home sooner.
There was something else behind the shadow that my strong force of an older sister had become. Pauses behind her words. Something left unsaid.
I glanced at the living room. Joni had Lupe in her lap while Nathan was explaining the finer points of Lego robotics construction to the boys.
“Hey.” I nudged Lea’s hip with mine. “What’s going on? I mean, besides the obvious. And don’t say ‘nothing.’”
Lea sighed, the weight of the world in that single breath. Her eyes darted to her kids, then back to me. “I’ve been thinking,” she began as she cut a zucchini with careful, precise strokes, “about making a change.”
I grabbed a tomato to slice. “What kind of change?”
She kept her eyes trained on the zucchini. “A change like leaving Belmont.”
“Oh? Like for Queens? Or maybe Staten Island?” It wasn’t the worst idea. “You could probably get a bigger place outside the city. And get into a better school district.”
“I was thinking a bit farther away. Like a different part of the country entirely.”
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. “You want to leave New York?”
It didn’t compute. Lea had the Bronx running through her veins more than any Zola.
Our grandparents had been part of the old Belmont, the version filled with wise guys and first-generation immigrants from the old country.
They had lived and raised their children in a part of the city where people still spoke Italian at house parties and Mass.
Until Joni and I were born, most of the restaurants and shops on Arthur Avenue were still owned by families who came from Naples, Sicily, and Rome.
But Belmont was different now. Nonno was long gone, having passed when Joni and I were just kids.
Our grandmother, on the other hand, had gone back to Rome, having decided to spend her golden years in Italy once she was finished raising all of us.
The old brown house on Hughes Street was currently rented to a lovely Colombian family, and the rest of the neighborhood had more Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Albanian residents than Italians.
And yet, Lea and Mike had stayed, dedicated to raising their family in the neighborhood they still loved.
Stupid me, I thought they’d be there forever. They were a touchstone in a world that was constantly moving.
“Why now?” I asked. “Don’t you think it’s kind of soon after Mike’s passing to make such a big change?”
“It’s been almost four months. I have to do something.”
Lea grabbed another zucchini and started chopping, her movements mechanical.
“Everything here reminds me of him. Every corner, every window, every damn crack in the sidewalk. And the kids…” Her voice broke. “They deserve a fresh start. Somewhere with better schools, like you said. More space. Somewhere without ghosts.”
I searched for an argument to make her stay. But I couldn’t find it.
Because I’d left, hadn’t I? Temporarily, but I’d still gone away, and even now, I was living at Prideview, not in the Bronx. Matthew was in Boston. Frankie lived in London. Kate spent half her time in LA.
Joni was here for now, but once her dancing got back on track, that could change.
Who were any of us to demand that Lea live her life as a memorial to what once was when we were all moving on?
“Where would you go?” I asked.
Her shoulders sank, like she was relieved I wasn’t fighting her.
“I don’t know yet. Upstate’s a possibility.
Maybe outside of Chicago? Somewhere I can find a cheap house and live with a part-time job while I raise my kids.
Somewhere with a lawn to mow or a creek to fish in or whatever people do in the sticks. ”
The unspoken worry hung between us: money. The sale of the auto shop would pay off some debts, but it wasn’t enough to provide long-term security for a family of five.
“What about work?” I asked. “Didn’t you just start that bookkeeping job?”
Lea’s mouth twisted. “I got written up yesterday. It’s the third time. Apparently, grief isn’t conducive to perfect attendance.”
That had to be a painful slap to my sister. In school, Lea had been a shooting star. Graduated with honors and was a great accountant before she stopped working to raise her family and do the books for the garage. She undoubtedly hated being labeled a bad worker.
“Well, that’s just heartless,” I told her as I finished slicing my third tomato.
“That’s reality,” Lea corrected glumly as she started on the eggplant.
“Is there anything I can do to help? Things might get better here now that I’m back. Joni and I will take care of you. It’s our turn.”
Lea’s eyes filled with tears unexpectedly. My tough-as-nails sister. The one who never cried. “It’s not, but I appreciate it anyway.”
We might have hugged, but she turned right back to the eggplant to finish slicing in silence.
I was about to start on another tomato when I noticed a letter pinned to the fridge by a magnet.
A cream-colored envelope bearing rough, awkward script I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, sent from the Albion Correctional Facility.
“Mami wrote you?” I asked, surprised.
“Oh. Um, yeah. After I contacted her probation officer to let her know about Mike.” Lea shrugged, like talking to our estranged mother meant nothing. “I guess she doesn’t have a phone right now.”
I hadn’t seen our mother, Guadalupe Ortiz Zola, since I was barely two, and Joni was just fourteen months.
That was when she’d gone to prison for her third DWI, which caused death of our father.
The judge had thrown the book at her, which was why she’d gotten out just a few years ago.
Lea and Frankie were the only ones who had given her the time of day, connections that were short-lived after Mami tried to blackmail Frankie and her husband, Xavier, for money.
She continued with the occasional outreach, but Lea was the only one who tried to maintain at least some relationship with her.
As far as I knew, our mother—if you could even give that title to a woman who had effectively abandoned her children for liquor—had lived in transitional housing near Hunts Point before moving to an apartment in the same neighborhood, where she worked as a bodega clerk.
Part of me felt sorry for her. Her life had amounted to very little, and she had almost nothing to call her own, especially when only one of her six kids spoke to her.
The other part of me, a part I didn’t like to acknowledge, hated the woman.
Pain gnawed at the memory of being one of the only kids in my class who didn’t have a mother or a father.
Seeing the crumpled gray letters arrive occasionally on holidays and birthdays, but which grew less frequent the older we got.
Realizing that it wasn’t just prison that kept our mother from us—it was her own choice to not have relationships with her children.
She was everything I didn’t want to be. Someone who chose substance over her family. Drinks over everything else.
Drinks like you had last night.
Guilt clawed. How many drinks had I indulged in? Three? Four? I’d lost count.
Maybe it was the alcohol that made Lucas’s kiss so powerful and raw.
Maybe nothing last night was really as it seemed.
“She wants to see us.” Lea set the eggplant into a strainer and started tossing it with salt. “All of us.”
I snorted. “Good luck with that. Mattie and Frankie won’t be paying her a lick of attention, and I’ll be honest, I’m not really interested either.”
“Everyone deserves to know their family, Marie.”
“I don’t know if she even deserves that term.” I couldn’t quite keep the edge out of my voice as I went back to slicing another Roma. “What does she want anyway?”
“The usual: Forgiveness. Understanding.”
“She can get that from a priest. She tried to screw Frankie over. You want to be next?”
“That was more than a year ago.” Lea shrugged. “She said she’s different now. Said she’s learned.”
“Like she was different every time she promised she’d remember our birthdays the next year?” I still remembered the single cards we used to get every June. One birthday card for six of us because she couldn’t be bothered to remember her own kids individually.
Mine fell in October.