My mother set the coffee cups down on the dining table. “Well, absence makes the heart grow fonder, so we’re kicking you out. Not permanently, of course, but it’s time to concentrate on your personal life as much as you do on us and your work.” Her loving smile hit me like a punch in the stomach. “It’s no good to be alone so much. Don’t you want a partner, maybe a husband?”
So much hope and love resided in her words that it physically pained me to hurt her, so I looked to temper my words with a little humor. “Who would have me?”
Grandma shot me a withering look. “I could give you a name.”
I chose to ignore her. “I’m happy as I am and not as pathetic as you may think.”
“No one said you were pathetic, but you have to admit you’re pretty much a hermit. Even on the weekends, you stay in your apartment or come here. Much as we love seeing you, it isn’t right for a young man to spend all his time with two old ladies.”
“I spend time with Carmen and Amy too.” They were my best friends, who also nagged me to find someone. Everywhere I turned, it was like Noah’s Ark with people trying to find me a partner. “I date and go to the ballet and the theater.” At their skeptical expressions, I shrugged. “Maybe not much in the past several months…okay, year, but I’m concentrating on the grief-support group I started, which has helped many people. Not only that, but two of them are together now.”
“Really?” My mother grew misty-eyed. “That’s wonderful.”
“Yeah. Two guys who’re really perfect for each other and realized it once they were able to move past some serious abandonment issues.” Presley and Nate were now engaged and planning a wedding, and I couldn’t be happier for them. And they still joined the Lost in New York meetings occasionally.
“You never answered my earlier question.” Like a feisty, annoying terrier, Grandma refused to let go.
“What question was that?” I took my coffee and gazed at her with wide eyes.
“That look didn’t work on me when you used to lie about practicing your bar mitzvah lessons, and you haven’t gotten any better.” Her whiskey now finished, my grandmother’s color rose high in her fair cheeks. “Are you still seeing him? Ezra, the one you knew in high school. Gloria Goldberg saw you talking to him a month or so ago. I can’t remember the days so well, but him I remember.”
“Of course you do,” I muttered. “Look. He and I have talked a bit, but there’s really nothing left to say. A promise made at seventeen isn’t meant to last. We’ve both moved on.”
“Hmm.” Her arthritic fingers trembled slightly as she picked up a cookie from the plate my mother had brought in. “So he’s married?”
“No.” I raised my cup to my lips. I suddenly had a desire for an Irish coffee.
“Dating anyone?”
To hell with the coffee. Straight whiskey. I cast a longing glance at the bottle of Jameson.
“No. Look, Grandma—”
“No, you look. It’s time you listen to someone instead of thinking you know best because you’re the professor and the doctor.”
Startled by her fierceness, I bit my tongue. But that didn’t mean I had to take her advice. “Okay…”
“You’re not happy. Don’t try and deny it, because you won’t change my mind. You think I don’t notice? I’ve spent almost every day with you since you were born except when your parents used to send you to sleep away at camp, and when I had my episode.”
Episode. Another word for her heart attack. Something I’d have liked to forget. I’d never been so scared in my life.
“Your mother, God bless her, isn’t going to push you, but I have no problem. You need to stop coming here. Go out and find someone to make you happy. If it isn’t going to be Ezra, then someone else. But we don’t want to see you until it’s Sunday night and you’re filling us in on your weekend dates.”
* * *
“Damn, Roe. Nettie doesn’t play.” Carmen snickered and handed me a beer. I’d gone straight over after the brunch with my family to commiserate. Their light and airy loft, filled with artwork from Carmen’s native Puerto Rico and with her wife’s—Amy’s—hand-thrown pottery, was a place I could relax. Carmen flopped on the sofa next to Amy. “What did you say?”
I shrugged. “What do you think? I told them fine, kissed them good-bye, and came over here.”
“But you’re stressed, aren’t you?” Amy studied me with limpid brown eyes and twirled the end of her long braid of silvery hair round and round her fingers. “I can tell. Have you given any thought to that Bikram Yoga class I mentioned a few weeks ago?”
“Babe, I can’t imagine Roe in that class.” Snorting with laughter, Carmen tangled her legs with Amy’s, her deeply tanned toes, painted in bright-blue polish, a direct contrast to Amy’s pale, unpolished ones. In herMake Love Not Warsweat shirt and faded leggings, one would never guess that Dr. Carmen Acevedo was a world-renowned psychologist.
Carmen added, “He’s way too uptight.”
Stung, I set my beer down, untouched. “Uptight? I’m not uptight.”
At my words, Carmen fell out with laughter, rolling on the couch next to Amy. “Are you joking? Sweetie, you’re so tense, even your twitches have twitches.” Dark eyes full of concern and compassion met mine. “I wish you’d tell us how to help. You’ve been like the walking dead for a while now, and I’m sorry I’ve been so busy with the hearings I didn’t have time to sit you down like a good friend would and talk it out.”
