“You’re friends with Sis?” The gun wobbled in the woman’s hands, lowered. “I’m so… When I saw you there… Youscaredme. We’ve been so—I would never—”
“Did you yell something?” Sicily said, thumping down the stairs,her voice just ahead of her arrival. She entered the kitchen and froze at the sight of the gun. “Umma?”
“Can you please come tell your, ah, this woman? That I’m not a villain?” I sounded jollier than I felt. I felt sick. A gun in the closed room was a black hole, pulling everything toward it.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, but to Sicily.
“Just a misunderstanding,” I said. “And now your… your mother? Is going to return the weapon to the secure lockbox where it’s kept at all times, right? Right now?”
“Do we have a lockbox?” Sicily asked.
The woman wasn’t done stumbling over herself to Sicily. “I didn’t realize—and with everything going on with Mom—”
“Go put the gun away?” My voice was a higher register than I meant it to be.
“Right,” the woman said. “Right.”
We listened to her footsteps down the hall until Sicily took a shaky breath. “I didn’t know we had a…”
I turned on her. “If that’s yourmother, then what am I doing here?”
“I have, uh, two mothers?” she said.
Such riches. “So when you said yourparents…okay. You could have said so.”
“I wasn’t sure what you would think,” Sicily said.
“I’m not a homophobe, come on.”
“Well, I didn’tknow!” Sicily cried. “You do sing country music.”
“Nowwho’s jumping to conclusions?”
I was still shaken by the gun. Even with all the times Alex had been held up, he wouldn’t keep a firearm in the bar. Gun on the mantel, he’d say with foreboding, without finishing the thought. I didn’t know quite what he meant by it. But my personal theory was that a gun introduced was a gun that could hurt someone. Him. Me.
And here,thatgun. That gun was a danger to—
Sicily.
I sat down heavily at the counter.
Oh boy. It was a gut punch to find that I cared what happened to Sicily, not in some general humane, Sarah McLachlan singing-for-the-animals way but in a very specific—sisterly, I guess?—way. God, it was all such a racket, feelings. Having to care for people, to put so much effort and concern out into the world without any of it necessarily coming back to you. Knowing, actually, that it had never come your way and if it did, you weren’t equipped to accept it.
Years ago I’d seen a reference to a 1960s medical experiment on baby monkeys and made the mistake of clicking to read more. In the experiments, the infant monkeys were taken from their mothers and given to a wire-monkey mother withspikespoking out so that the babies were punished for clinging to it. The poor things never learned that foundational, original trust.
The baby monkeys never got over the spikes. Would you?
I hadn’t, had I? What had Marisa been but wire-monkey mother, with spikes?
Maybe I wasn’t as dead-eyed as all that. Maybe I’d been swept up by Alex in time—given hope in time—not to turn full clown-school sociopath.
But if Alex had no spikes, he was still a bit of twisted wire. Protective of me, sure, but also of himself, holding everyone out at fingertip’s distance. I’d always known, had been taught at every turn, that if you let people in, they could wreck your heart.
So excuse me for never letting many people close. If I was honest, I’d meant to keep it that way.
“So that was— What did you call her? Umma. What’s that?”
“Myumma,” Sicily said, glowering at me. “Not yours. And she’s not…”
