Chapter Fifteen #2
A week later, you and I were in my room doing homework.
The door was propped wide open, so no one would get weird about us being in there.
We barely even kissed at my house, as much as I might want to.
The whole idea still made me nervous. It was five-thirty, and dark already.
An arc of headlights swerved in our driveway.
My dad was home. He wasn’t always home for dinner, but he was that night.
I gathered up my papers and stuff. I said, “Okay, great job, us,” or something like that. Something to indicate that we should wrap it up, and that maybe you should go home. I was nervous about it, you in my room and Dad home.
“Yeah, I should probably head out,” you said.
The front door opened and closed. All at once, I heard my father’s heavy footsteps as he climbed the stairs, and in a hurry, too. Shit, you know. Shit, he sounded mad. His feet did.
And then his frame filled my doorway. I was already on my feet. I was bracing myself.
“What do you say?” my father boomed to you.
“Is tonight the night?” you asked.
What?
“Tonight’s the night!” He winked at you, and you winked back. The wink had gotten absolutely zero practice since the last time, so you still squinched both eyes.
What the hell?
“They’ll be here in a half hour.”
“Oh, great!” you said.
“I told ’em six on the dot.”
“Perfect!” you said.
“Bella, get your butt down there and set the table.”
“Okay…” It came out okaaaay. When we headed down the stairs, I gave you a Tell me!
look, and you gave me a smug I’m keeping my secrets one.
A part of me loved it, that you and Dad had some surprise you’d planned together.
The together was completely unexpected and pretty adorable, honestly.
But how could I not be worried. You might get swooped up in my father’s largeness, my own maroon flag.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, my mother had a pan in her hand and was turning up the gas on the stovetop. “Oh, Mars! Are you staying for dinner?”
“I guess I am. But you won’t be needing that.”
“What? This?” She held up the pan. It seemed really heavy.
“Not tonight,” you said.
“Are you cooking?” she asked, puzzled. Well, make that two of us.
“Sort of.”
Mom looked my way, her eyes questioning.
“Don’t ask me.”
The two of you chatted as I set the table.
You asked her about her day, and she told you that she’d gone to Bellevue Botanical Garden, where she sometimes liked to get coffee and read, even on a gloomy day like that one.
And then you told her that you used to love to go to this garden in Palo Alto, one with tons of roses and herbs and a carriage house you always imagined living in.
Two more things I didn’t know. Three, because Mom told you that she was thinking about volunteering there.
You told her that you’d work for free in a garden anytime, and she smiled, all happy and relaxed.
“What is he doing?” Mom asked, meaning my father, because now came the creak of the pull-down stairs to the attic storage. We heard shuffling and booms, as if he was moving boxes or furniture, who knows what. A few minutes later, he was there with us, too.
“Look what I found.” He handed you some stapled-together construction paper, faded to a pale blue. I stood beside you, gazed down at The Mitey Voyager by Angelo Vittorio, with a crayon drawing of a white circle with legs.
You opened it, so carefully, too. Inside was the cursive Excellent!
from my dad’s teacher. “ ‘Voyager is a twin space prob launched like a slingshot to understand outer space’,” you read aloud.
“ ‘It is a grand toor of the planets. They have visited Jupiter, Saturn, and Urnus, and will soon go past Neptune!’ ”
“I love the exclamation point.” Mom laughed.
“You got an excellent, even if your spelling sucks,” I said.
“Hey, now,” Dad said.
“If they’d have called it Urnus, that planet wouldn’t have been bullied,” you said, kissing up.
The doorbell rang. I moved to answer it, but you stopped me.
“Sarah, would you get that?” my father said.
You and my dad were grinning at each other like a pair of goofs. Whatever was going on, you were thrilled with yourselves.
“Okay, you guys. I don’t know what’s happening here…” Mom said, but she looked pleased. “Meg?” we heard her say as she answered the door.
Meg was one of our delivery people. This, I had to see.
“Okay, your order of one extra-large Sarafina. And a family salad?” Meg handed over the box and bag.
“A Sarafina? We don’t have a Sarafina,” I said, as Meg flashed a thumbs-up to Dad, who flashed one back as she headed down our steps.
“A Sarah-fina! Get it?” Dad was downright giddy. “A Sarah-fina!”
“Really?” Mom looked like she might cry.
Now I felt like I might, too. My throat was getting all tight with tears.
She’d been the only one in the family without a pizza named for her, I realized.
It was a sudden realization, too. We never really thought about it.
It never actually even occurred to me. And why didn’t she have a pizza?
The pizzas were my father, I guess. His heritage, his lineage, us. It’s just the way things were.
“Open it,” Dad said.
Mom set the box on the table and lifted the lid, as if it were precious, a velvet box holding expensive jewelry. This was our jewelry, the thing that we held as valuable.
Inside, I saw two discs of salami soppressata for eyes, a mushroom-slice nose, anchovies arranged in a smile. Arugula hair.
Now Mom smiled back at it. She smiled so hard.
“Makes you happy to look at, doesn’t it? You make me happy,” my father said to her.
Tears fell down her cheeks. “Oh, Ang,” she said.
He handed her one of the paper towels on the table, and she blew her nose.
I didn’t know what was going on here, what you were doing to us, for us.
Just, a person could shift things with their noticing.
Just by seeing, you could. Seeing with kindness.
And I could tell that Mom saw you now, too.
She didn’t need to pour on a bunch of compliments after all. I felt it.
It seemed like a miracle.
We sat down, a family circled around a pizza.
And she ate two pieces. Two. She didn’t even pick off the cheese.
Lately, I’d been taking pictures of everything, but I wish I’d gotten a picture of that—her biting the triangle right off the end of that slice, her eyes shining.
I’m not saying her eating disorder was solved or anything.
Of course not. Things that take a long time to build take a longer time to unbuild; that’s something I know for sure.
But it was just a normal night, a human family on our spinning planet, and what was normal about it, what was just everyday, felt precious.
I gave you the infinity sign across the table, and you gave it back. I was so grateful.
“Oh, this is so good!” my mother said, and it was, it was.