“What’s up, Lance Armstrong? You injured again, or is there no marathon today?” my oldest brother, Emilio, asked.
“You know, I heard the health insurance companies got one of those ‘America’s Most Wanted’ pictures of you in their offices—they’re all freakin’ scared of you,” my other brother, Antonio, chimed in.
Before I could respond, my father—who was wearing his favorite linen shirt, with palm trees all over it—had placed his hands on my face and kissed each of my cheeks. “Bello mio!” He beamed with a grip as tight as Mama’s embrace.
I had been in the house a total of five minutes, and already I felt nourished. Even the brotherly joshing felt good. The hero’s welcome reminded me of the times I would return home on break from boarding school—when I’d strip out of my preppy L. L. Bean fleece, loafers, and chinos in the train station bathroom and throw on track pants, sneakers, and a New York Jets jersey before reuniting with my family. Growing up, I was always trying to fit in. I idolized Emilio and Antonio, who were sixteen months apart from each other but nearly a decade older than I. Even our names were indicative of the massive disparity between us. My brothers were born shortly after my parents immigrated to the United States and were given authentic Italian monikers in honor of relatives back in Sicily. I, on the other hand, was named after Nolan McMenamin, our Irish next-door neighbor in New Jersey and the first man my parents ever knew to own a Cadillac. When they learned that he’d attended boarding school as a teenager, they insisted I apply to his alma mater. The following fall, I became the only member of our family to receive a private education.
“Where are Becca and Emma? They still in the car? Gian-Carlo, go and help the girls in the car!” Mama directed Dad, who immediately ran to the front door at her command.
“No, Dad, come back. It’s just me,” I said, stopping him. “Emma’s at her friend’s house for the night, and Bec has a girls’ weekend out of town with some of her friends.”
Unlike the Millers, who knew their granddaughter refused to sleep at her friends’ homes and that their daughter abhorred being away from her family, my parents were an easy sell. They were unaware of the finer brushstrokes of Becca’s and Emma’s personalities.
“Dude, you’re a bachelor for the weekend and you came here? What the hell’s wrong with you? I could think of a million other places I’d be right now if my wife and kids had plans,” Emilio said, with a head shake. He shoved an entire piece of bruschetta into his mouth.
I laughed.
“Seriously, did me and E not teach you anything?” Antonio turned to Emilio and asked, “Where’d we go wrong?”
I pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and let myself believe that the comfort of the scene meant I was doing the right thing. Absent my brothers’ beer guts and receding hairlines, it could easily have been the 1980s, with the three boys in the same spots. I looked out the window to the backyard.
“Who’s that?” I asked, nodding toward a svelte brunette standing beside my parents’ pool. I knew my nieces had matured but couldn’t imagine that any of them had changed that drastically since my last visit.
Seated across the table, my brothers turned their thick necks at the same time, as if they were mirror images of each other.
“Oh, that’s Emilio Jr.’s latest,” Emilio said with pride. “My kid’s a freakin’ stud. Did you see the tits on that girl? Jeeeesus. What I wouldn’t do to die and come back as my own son. You know what I mean?”
I tensed.
“What? Did we offend you, Mr. Prim and Proper?” Emilio said, noticing my discomfort.
“Once a freakin’ tight-ass, always a freakin’ tight-ass,” Antonio chimed in.
I checked my watch. It had been only fifteen minutes, and already the near-chemical transformation into my childhood role as the tortured, stuffy straight arrow had begun. I felt as if they might shove me inside a kitchen cabinet at any given moment, just like when we were kids.
“Patatino, come here, please. I need your help,” Mama called from the counter. She was always saving me from them. I was a grown man, but would forever be, as my pet name suggested, her little potato.
I rose from my seat and walked over to where she was slicing prosciutto. She put the knife down on the cutting board, wiped her hands on the apron around her waist, folded her arms, and stared at me.
“You always tell me the truth. What’s going on?” she whispered, but her voice was demanding, hard. “I didn’t mean to snoop. It was just there,” she said, pointing at a spot on the granite.
“What are you talking about?” I was thoroughly confused.
“Your phone. I didn’t mean to snoop. It was just there,” she said, pointing to a spot on the granite. “I saw the texts. There are a lot of them.”
Before responding, I scrolled through the messages I had missed.
From Becca—2:41 p.m.:
Where in the hell are you?!
From Seth—2:55 p.m.:
hey, just sent you an email with a list of surgeons. didn’t want to hand it to you in front of everyone. what’s your eta? you coming?
From Becca—3:15 p.m.:
Nol, you’re making me nervous. We’ll figure everything out. Just tell me where you are and that you’re OK.
“Oh, don’t worry, Ma,” I said, still glancing down at the phone. “Everything’s fine.” I hated lying to her.
Mama grabbed my hand and led me out of the kitchen and into her carpeted bedroom, locking the door behind us.
“What’s going on?” She directed me to sit beside her on the burgundy velvet love seat across from the canopy bed she shared with my father.
I stared out the window through the taffeta draperies, the ones with the small tassels I used to put on my head and pretend was a toupee—and tried to concoct a response. But when she lovingly placed her hand on my cheek and turned my face so that we could look each other in the eye, I broke. It was impossible to hold my head upright—it seemed to drop like a weight into her lap.
“Oh, Patatino,” she said softly. “Mama’s here. I’m gonna fix everything.”
She rocked me back and forth until my tears graduated to sporadic sniffles. I exhaled and sat up. It was the first time I’d felt like myself in days.
We watched in silence as the sun lowered behind the backyard pool. I knew she wanted an explanation, but all I could get out was an embittered “She’s incredibly selfish.”
“Who? Becca?” Mama asked. “You had a fight?”
“You could say that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Becca has breast cancer and . . .”
Mama gasped. One hand flew over her mouth; the other clutched my knee.
“She needs a mastectomy,” I continued.
“Dio mio!” she whispered, and then fell silent for several seconds to process the news. “She’ll be okay, right? A mastectomy is smart. She’ll get the implants, and it will all be fine. They do amazing things now. You’d be so shocked if I told you how many people have them. You know my friend Rose? She has. And Barbara? She has, too. I tell you, doctors now, they can go bigger, smaller, whatever you like. They can take skin from other parts of your body to make them. They can even tattoo de nipples.”
Am I seriously having a conversation about breasts with my mother? Visions of what Rose and Barbara’s nipples might look like flashed across my mind. I thought I’d gag.
“What?” she asked, clearly registering my discomfort.
I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled up the collar of my white tee like a towel to wipe the perspiration off my forehead. “I don’t think she wants it,” I said into the cotton fabric.
“You don’t think she wants what?”
“The reconstruction. The implants. Any of it.” I lowered the T-shirt but let it hover over my mouth like a mask for a moment, just as I did with my security blanket as a boy.
“She has to have the surgery to get healthy!”
“No, Ma. The mastectomies are not the issue. It’s
the follow-up part. I think she just wants to cut out the problem and move on.”
“Oh,” Mama said thoughtfully. “Hmm. Okay.”
“Okay? That’s it? Okay?” I was exasperated. How could she not see this the way I did?
“Yes,” she said calmly. “Okay. It’s her choice.” Mama wiped her palms together to punctuate her statement—that’s done.
I stood up and began to pace the floor. “Listen, I’m not trying to tell her what she can or cannot do. But what if she looks in the mirror and has regrets? What if people make jokes or Emilio and Antonio says something stupid about my wife being a man? Have you listened to your sons speak?” My voice grew louder and sharper. “I’d be handing them a lifetime supply of mockery on a silver platter!”
My fists clenched. I dug them into my pants pockets to avoid punching the wall.
“This is private business between a man and his wife. No one needs to know. Including your brothers. I won’t tell anyone. Did you tell Becca how you feel?”
I nodded.
“Oh, no!” Mama winced. “What she say?”
“She told me that only someone who was supremely self-absorbed would find out his wife had cancer and then immediately worry what his idiot brothers thought about it. Then she got all philosophical and said something like, ‘The true test of someone’s character is not making Phi Beta Kappa or winning a popularity contest, but how he conducts himself in a crisis.’ Seriously? She’s gonna lecture me like I’m a child?”
I whipped my hands out of my pockets and smacked my palms against the floral wallpaper. “Fuck, that hurt!” I screamed.
We were quiet for a moment.
“So this is why you came home, eh? To run away from all of this?”
I shrugged my shoulders tepidly.
“What? There’s more?”
“No, no, it’s nothing, Ma,” I said, unconvincingly.
She folded her arms across her chest and stared at me, waiting.
“Work’s not so great lately,” I finally said. I didn’t have the heart to reveal that both my personal and my professional worlds were in shambles.
“You want to leave your firm?” she asked, as a smile spread across her face. “Come work for the family! Finally!”
From the moment I decided to take the law school entrance exams, my parents had fantasized about the day they could retire and I would take over the business end of my father’s menswear franchise. My brothers were great with the customers, but my parents wanted me running the back office and overseeing the company. To their dismay, it never appealed. In fact, to me, it was a last-resort scenario.
“Maybe now’s the right time, no? Just say you’ll think about it. Okay?” She clasped her hands together as if she were about to recite her nightly prayers.
I nodded politely to appease her.
“So, where are Becca and Emma?” Mama asked, returning to the original crisis.
“Emma’s in the city with Arlene and Jerry, and Becca’s at our friends’ country house for the weekend.”
Mama nodded. “And you’re supposed to be there, too, eh?”
“Yes,” I said sheepishly.
“Then go,” she said with certainty.
“I can’t, Ma,” I said, collapsing onto her bed. “I’m too tired. From here it will be at least a three-hour drive. I just want to sleep.”
“So sleep. But when you wake up in the morning, you’re gonna take my new Cadillac,” she insisted, and walked over to a white leather tote bag on her dresser to fish out a set of keys. “You’ll love it! GPS, sunroof, satellite radio, and nice, soft beige leather seats.”
“Ma, really, I don’t want—”
She lifted an index finger in front of my face to shush me before she continued. “I listened to you; now you listen to me. She’s your wife. She needs you. You need her. I got a minestrone soup frozen in the extra refrigerator in the garage. It’s her favorite.”
“Ma, it’s the Fourth of July. No one wants soup!” My temples were beginning to throb.
She straightened her posture, pursed her lips, and raised one eyebrow; it was the look that never failed to silence all four men in her house.
“Okay, fine, I’ll go in the morning,” I lied, and wondered where I could disappear in her luxury sedan over the next two days.
“That’s my boy,” she said sweetly, and grasped my hand. “Come on, the family’s waiting. I have trays for you to bring outside. Let’s go eat.”
Chapter 8: Jordana
It’s nearly noon on Friday, and I don’t know where the hell Becca is!” I shouted from behind the wheel of my SUV, as if I were talking directly to my husband’s face, instead of to a Bluetooth speaker on the dashboard. “It’s ruined! The whole damn weekend is ruined!”
“It’s not ruined, and I’m sure she’s fine,” Sal said calmly. “Just focus on the road. You can control only what you can control.”
“Come on, Sal, admit it. This is totally strange,” I said, lowering my decibel level.
“It is what it is. You’ve contacted her. I’ve reached out to Nolan. We can’t do anything else.”
I took a deep breath and marveled at Sal’s ability to remain calm. No matter what the crisis, he could handle it, and that in turn empowered me to at least attempt to do the same. I might have a closet full of breezy bohemian apparel, but my husband, in his stiff, custom-made designer business suits, was the naturally unflappable one. In fact, Sal’s cool composition had been evident since birth and was the reason his parents had chosen to name him Salil, the Hindi word for water. Just like water, they believed, he had a serene presence. They were right.
I clenched the steering wheel in frustration for the entirety of my ride upstate. Though Becca’s behavior was atypical, a last-minute ditching by Nolan was not shocking. There was a reason he had been the youngest employee in the history of Gordon, Michaelson & Stewart, LLP, to make partner: until Emma was born, he practically lived in that office. His dedication and diligence were admirable, but at times they clouded his judgment. I’ll never forget how he invited people to a small surprise party in their apartment for Becca’s twenty-ninth birthday. Only hours before the guests were scheduled to arrive, he called me to say a deal had “exploded” and that he was running late—could I save him and get everything ready? I said yes, of course, but all I could think about that night—aside from being grateful I had steered clear of a job in corporate law—was how unfazed Becca seemed that her husband missed the first half of the celebration. I wondered if there had been other disappointments to which she had grown numb.
Two hours after the start of my journey, I turned off the highway and made the mile-long drive from the main country road up the mountain to our gray-shingled Cape. I slowly inched toward the front porch along the rustic dirt-and-pebble path we called a driveway and parked beside the geraniums Sal and the kids had planted in the spring. Seeing the flowers reminded me of my twins, whom I already missed, although I knew Sal’s parents were spoiling them on Long Island. I had never stayed at the country house without the boys, and the absence of their backseat bickering on the car ride up felt unnatural—almost as unnatural and unsettled as I felt about Becca.
Within twenty minutes of my arrival, I had unloaded the car, refrigerated the food, chilled the wine, opened the curtains, removed the dust bunnies from under the couch, fluffed the pillows, and arranged a vegetable platter with hummus dip on the kitchen island. What difference does it make if I have an immaculate home if the guest of honor is a no-show? I thought. Just as I was about to hop into the shower to get ready, I heard the sound of tires slowly crunching over the dirt road leading up to the house. I glanced at my watch. There was at least another hour before anyone was supposed to arrive.
Through the front window, I could see an unmarked white van pulling up to the porch, and I remembered a conversation Sal and I had not long after the geranium planting. We’d seen wasps by the back deck and wondered if there was a nest nearby. Maybe Sal finally called the pes
t control guy, I thought.
“Oh, hey,” I said, projecting my voice from the open front door and waving to the van’s driver, who was invisible behind the tinted windows. “You can pull around back if you like. It’s easier to get to the deck that way.”
Between the early July heat and infinite chores, I was drenched with sweat. As I fanned myself with the collar of my favorite Dave Matthews concert tee—the faded and nearly sheer one I had worn since college—I noticed that the driver didn’t intend to move his van. He stepped out onto the dirt driveway, wearing polished black dress shoes. The open van door and darkened window blocked the upper portion of his body. I squinted at the shoe. It was an unexpected choice for an exterminator on duty.
“Hey, um, I’m sorry, but are you here for the wasps?” I asked, walking toward the van.
“WASPs? Wow! I’m not even out of the car, and we’re already having a discussion about religion and ethnicity,” the man said. His voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.
I continued to squint, resting my hand against my eyebrows to block the midday sun, and then the van door slammed and everything became clear.
“Holy shit!” I cried. “Adam!”
“Jordy!” he said, with the exact tone and eye twinkle I spent my entire senior year of high school trying to block from memory. It was that innate sparkle that had first attracted me to Adam. He was a talented artist with an encyclopedic knowledge of music and film who played intramural ice hockey and requested a subscription to the New York Times as his fifteenth-birthday present. We started off as friends, but then one day, in the middle of tenth grade, he said he would marry me if I could correctly identify the European singer we were listening to on the radio. I could visualize the artist, and the woman’s name was on the tip of my tongue, but when I blanked, I was genuinely disappointed in myself. Not because Björk’s name escaped me, or because I was thinking about marriage, but because I felt I had blown an opportunity to become his girlfriend. It wasn’t long after that, however, that we did start dating.
Other than a thick five o’clock shadow, the addition of funky horn-rimmed glasses, and a splash of salt and pepper on his sideburns, Adam hadn’t aged a bit. He still had the same slight but athletic physique and cool-guy vibe—as if Zac Efron had dyed his hair black, shrunk a few inches, and become an observant Jew.
The Cast Page 11