Xo,
Gracie
P.S.—A disaster? I hope everything’s okay! I’m happy to listen if you need an ear.
TO:Grace Landing ([email protected])
FROM:Colin Yarmouth ([email protected])
RE:Last night
100%. Send them. I’ll get them back to you ASAP. (Assuming none of my clients kick the bucket, of course.)
And I’ll pick you up at 4pm on Saturday. I think we might be going for Greek food, if that’s okay with you. Your joke from this morning got me in the mood for it!
Everything’s fine, no worries. I’ll fill you in when I see you.
C.
TO:Colin Yarmouth ([email protected])
FROM:Grace Landing ([email protected])
RE:Last night
Perfect. They’re attached. Thank you!!
4pm it is. You can be my personal Uber. I’ll pack extra Tums in my purse. Can’t wait! Xo.
While my leftovers are reheating in the microwave, I respond to Melly’s texts. Her mom was kind enough to inform her that I was loitering on the beach in the cold, so she wanted to make sure I hadn’t slid into a dark place. Then, I call my mom back, without bothering to listen to her voicemail. She always calls to check in on Friday. That way, she says, if she calls any other day, I know to immediately panic because it’s an emergency. Similarly, if she doesn’t call on a Friday, I should also panic because it means that she and my father have been assaulted and left for dead.
We have quite the system.
It’s funny too; one might have thought that after my parents moved out of the Bronx and up to Westchester about ten years ago that Momwould have mellowed out a little. Well, one could not have been more wrong. I grew up in an attached row house in an area of the Bronx called Morris Park. We lived with my elderly grandmother (an Italian woman who made the world’s most delicious Sunday sauce) because my grandfather was killed in the Vietnam War in 1969, and my father—at the ripe old age of fourteen—pledged to take care of his widowed mother for the rest of her life. Now, I love my grandmother dearly and still visit her at Riverdale Assisted Living once a month, but I wholeheartedly blame my mother’s neurotic behavior on her.
I will never forget my first day of freshman year of high school. After Colin christened me “Elvis,” I came home, dumped my bookbag on the ground, kicked off my shoes just inside the front door, and marched straight back through the house to my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. In a row house, it is hard to go unnoticed. The only windows are at the front and back of the house, and a long hallway, marked with bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and pantry doors, runs the entire length of the space. Since there was no way to tiptoe to my room, I indulged my teenage angst in a full-on stomping march, the perfect opening act to my feature performance of flailing my limp body on my bed in complete meltdown mode.
“Ihatemy life!” I screamed, loud enough for all the other families on our block to hear.
Cue my mother.
“Honey, what is it?” she asked in a melting pot accent of Albanian-meets-New-Yawk that is unique to her. Her big blue eyes peered out from under her thick bangs and blinked in concern.
“Our name is sostupid,” I wailed into my pillow.
“What do you mean?” she wondered.
“Ourname! Today in school, the cutest boy I ever saw in mywhole lifecalled me ‘Gracelanding,’ like as if my name was a thing you woulddo, and then asked out loudin front of the whole classif I was, like, Elvis or something! It was awful!” I cried. “I’m never going back to school again.”
“That’s a bit clever, actually,” she replied. “I never thought of your name that way.”
“It’s notfunny, Mom!”
“I’m sorry, Graciebear. I wasn’t making fun of you.” She smoothed my hair and handed me two Oreo cookies from her apron pocket. “Here. Cookies make everything better.”
I gratefully accepted them and began to munch, catching my breath. “Mom?” I asked. “What kind of last name isLanding, anyway? I’ve never met an Italian person with a last name like that. Why can’t I have anormalname, like Russo, Rossi, or Ricci?”
She looked around like a thief getting ready to swipe the diamond out from under the nose of the sleeping guard in a Disney movie. “You’re right, baby. Landing is a silly name. My last name was Hiri.”
