CHAPTER NINE
Alex
Then
A hint of sage rose off the table. I closed my eyes and let it fill up before it faded.
When I opened them, Riley was reaching across the table for the mashed potatoes.
“Arturo Panzolini.” His mother’s voice cracked like a whip, and the flat of a butter knife caught the back of his hand before he’d gotten two inches. “Ask someone to pass it. Don’t reach over the table, especially on a day like today. You weren’t raised in a barn.”
I fought not to smile. Riley rubbed the back of his hand with his thumb. “Yes, ma’am.”
I leaned toward him. “Your real name’s Arturo?” I whispered.
“It certainly is,” his mother said, before he could answer, a trace of scorn still in her voice.
She gave him one more look, then turned to me and smiled, clearly proud of herself.
“Named after his great-grandfather. Arturo Nicolas Panzolini. Heaven knows how he came up with Riley. We’ve been calling him that for years, though.
I think I’m about done with it, to tell you the truth.
” Her eyes cut back to him. “Especially if he reaches over my table again. We raised him better than that.”
She was small—she couldn’t have weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, in a floral dress that looked like it might be as old as she was—and she’d just made a grown man apologize with a butter knife. Adorable, and clearly not a pushover.
Riley’s father speared a slice of turkey without looking up.
He was lean and dark like his son, built the same way, the two of them nearly interchangeable except for the gray coming into his hair.
“The kids on the football team came up with it,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Means courageous. That’s why they picked it. ”
“No it doesn’t,” Riley said. “I picked it because I liked it.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nine or ten.”
“You were seven,” his mother said, in a tone that wasn’t up for debate. “Fall after your father bought that ugly green truck.”
“It wasn’t ugly,” his father said. “And it wasn’t green. It was brown.”
She gave him a look. “It was as green as a gourd.”
He appealed to me instead. “It was the most beautiful brown metallic you ever saw.”
“He has selective memory,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “Don’t listen to a word of it. All the neighborhood kids had already started calling him Riley. We just gave in eventually.” Her eyes went back to her son. “Use your manners, or I’ll call you Arturo for the rest of your God-given days.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was hard not to love a man who called his mother ma’am and his father sir.
I looked around the table—the tablecloth that had clearly been handed down, the bronze candelabras, the mismatched serving spoons, the porcelain platters someone had clearly been collecting for decades.
Whatever this was, I hadn’t had it growing up.
I was old enough to know manners were not love.
At this table they kept arriving in the same chair.
Riley’s sister looked up from her plate. Addy was small like their mother, fair, with dark wavy hair down her back.
“His friend Dale actually started it,” she said, to me. “But it wasn’t the friends who made it stick. He climbed up on the couch with a saucepan and a wooden spoon, banged on the pan, and announced that from that day forward he’d only answer to Riley. During a football game.”
“That part’s true,” their father said, raising a finger. “We were watching a game.”
“Fall of his seventh year,” their mother added. “I’d forgotten about the spoon.”
“Is your real name Addy?” I asked.
She laughed. “Adriana. Addy for short.”
“Adriana goes by Addy, you go by Della, Dad goes by Tony,” Riley said. “None of those are your actual names either. Find any irony in that, Mother?”
“Those are short for—”
“Abbreviated,” his father said, still not looking up. “The word’s abbreviated.”
“Abbreviated. Thank you.” His mother nodded. “Arthur, or Art, I could have lived with. Riley isn’t even close.”
“I used to call him Dip-shit when he was little,” his father offered. “Didn’t walk till he was almost two. I had my doubts. Wish that one had stuck. I liked Dip-shit better.”
Riley closed his eyes. “Enough. Can we just eat?”
“I was trying to,” his mother said. “Then you started acting like an untrained ape.”
“We don’t need to reenact my whole childhood at this table.”
“Let’s talk about something else, then.” She looked around at all of us before landing on Riley. “When’s the engagement?”
The color went out of his face.
“Oh,” I said, before he could stop me, “you didn’t hear? We’re already engag—”
He got an elbow into my ribs. “Alex is a real practical joker. Should’ve warned you.”
I gave his mother an apologetic look. “I was kidding, Missus—”
“No more Missus.” She waved a hand at that. “Adella. Everyone calls me Della.” A nod toward her husband. “That’s Antonio.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I was joking about the engagement,” I said.
“Kind of,” Della said, pointing a forkful of turkey at Riley.
“Things are just going well the way they are,” I said, looking between them. “It’s way too early to be thinking about engagements.”
“Antonio proposed to me after six months,” she said. “This might be your first visit here, but I’m aware you two have been seeing each other about that long.”
“In my truck, in the parking lot of a taco place outside town,” Antonio said. “We were eating out of the bag. She asked for another taco and I handed her a ring instead.”
“The brown truck?” I asked.
“The green one,” Della said, laughing. “Heavens, no. Not that thing. A black Chevy. The same one we had our first kiss in. We spent a lot of time in that truck. Had to sell it a few years later, when money got tight.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“If it means something to you, you protect it.” She folded her hands.
“Trucks. Trinkets. Photos. Jewelry. People.” Her eyes flicked to Riley, then back to me.
“Six months is a long time, and I’ve been after him to bring you by for most of it.
He doesn’t bring girls home. The last one was his prom date, and that was only for pictures. ”
“Don’t worry, Alex,” Addy said. “It’s not about you. He’s never brought a girl home before. Not once, not since I’ve been old enough to notice.”
Antonio shot her a look. “Adriana.”
“It’s fine,” Riley said.
“It’s not,” his father said. “Manners.”
“I was trying to be nice,” Addy said, coloring a little. “I wanted her to know it’s not that she’s not good enough, or whatever she’s thinking right now. It’s the opposite. He’s always been particular. Mom used to say he’d rather be alone forever than waste his time on someone who wasn’t worth it.”
Something in my chest turned over, slow and warm.
I didn’t have all the reasons for it, but Riley’s carefulness with me suddenly made a different kind of sense.
The rule about waiting until I turned twenty-one that he’d held to even when it plainly cost him something.
He hadn’t been protecting himself from anything.
He’d just never decided, before me, that anyone was worth the risk.
A year ago I would have called it luck and waited for it to bounce. I let it stay.
“Can we eat in peace?” Riley said. “Please?”
“We’re just acknowledging an accomplishment,” Della said. “It’s exciting.”
“Glad I could add a little excitement to your life,” Riley said.
“Last time you brought someone home you were seventeen,” she said, fighting a smile. “That’s a long time ago.”
“E. Nough. Mother.” He stood. “Seriously.”
She looked him over. “And where do you think you’re going?”
“Pie.”
“I haven’t served the pie.” She nodded him back toward his chair. “Sit down. We’re eating and talking.”
“I want pie.”
“You’ll have it when we’re done eating.”
“I am done eating.”
“You’re not winning this one, son,” Antonio said. “Sit.”
Someone knocked at the door.
“Oh, Lord.” Della’s napkin hit the table. She crossed her arms and looked at Antonio. “I thought we might get through one meal.”
“My uncle,” Riley told me, glancing at his father. “Dad’s brother. Pete.”
Every face at the table changed at once.
“Well?” Della raised her eyebrows at Antonio. “He’s your brother. Are you letting him in or not?”
“He drinks,” Addy said, finishing her wine in one go. “A lot. Brace yourself.”
Antonio went to the door. When it opened, a voice loud enough to rattle the windows filled the house.
“Am I late?” Pete shouted it, and I flinched.
“We’re already seated,” Antonio said.
“Want me to carve the bird?”
“We’re already eating. Come in.”
The two of them came into the dining room.
Pete was lean, like Riley, and that was where the resemblance ended.
His jeans were stained in places that looked permanent, his plaid shirt looked pulled straight from a hamper, and his boot cuffs were rolled over raggedy square toes.
Long hair, unkempt, put me in mind of Sparks.
He looked to be in his mid-fifties, older than his brother.
He scanned the room, and his eyes went wide and theatrical when they landed on me. He raked a hand through his hair and set both fists on his hips. “Well. What do we have here?”
“Hi. I’m Alex.”
“Alex.” He wrinkled his nose. “Short for Alexandra?”
“No. Just Alex.”
It was the truth, though not the whole of it.
My father had never let anyone shorten it to something softer, and he’d never had to, because he hadn’t started with a nickname to begin with.
He’d handed the courthouse a name that could just as easily have belonged to a son, and never once, in nineteen years, offered me a reason why.
I used to tell myself it was practical. The kind of name that looked capable on a resume before anyone got a good look at the rest of you.
I’d started to suspect it was something else.
That some part of him had wanted a boy badly enough to go ahead and name one, and he settled for handing me the name instead of the outcome.