“If there are mushrooms, he’s always there,” Vin says with a sigh.
“So you left the park,” I say to Lauro. “Found Raff. Raff gave you shrooms. But how did you end uphere?”
Lauro opens his mouth to answer but then winds up staring at the streetlight. Raff moves him aside. “The mushrooms were here. In your house. In my stuff. Hey, has one of you been sleeping in the guest bed? Because both Lauro and I have broken hearts. That’s part of why we like each other so much. But I think it’s a two-person thing. I mean, I don’t want you two to join. That’s too many broken hearts. And my heart…” He puts a hand on his chest. “My heart…I think is like…an apple? A really ripe apple? But not too ripe.” He hooks one finger into the collar of his shirt and checks things out. “Too ripe is bad. Don’t get too ripe.”
“Jesus Christ,” Vin grumbles.
“Tuck them into the guest room?” I ask Vin. “Or punt them off toward Raff’s?”
Vin drags a hand down his face. “I’ll take them to Raff’s.”
I loop an arm through his. “Me too.”
Because—I verify with a palm on his chest—his heart is still regulating and I’ll be damned if we’re going our separate ways right now.
He seems to pick up what I’m laying down because he doesn’t argue. And so we all trek off toward Raff’s.
Getting these two bozos to 28th and Ninth is like trying to get toddlers to sit down and do their taxes.
But eventually they’re through Raff’s front door. I make two bowls of ramen while Vin sets up the pull-out couch.
When we’re departing through the front door, Lauro intercepts us with two aggressive and mildly insulting thumbs-ups. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad.”
Raff is headlocking him back into the apartment. “Just ignore them,” he advises Lauro. “If you fight them on anything, they make you buy dental insurance.”
“Are we reallythatbad?” I ask Vin on the walk home.
He considers this. “Bad? No. Overbearing?…Well.”
“I know howyouended up this way. You’ve been a parent since you were eleven years old. But how didIend up this way?”
“Aunt Therese” is his immediate, and astute, answer.
“You think?”
“Sure. Your mother farms you off and who steps in but a woman who teaches you how to love with cooking, cooking, cooking.”
“Ugh. How boring. I wish she could have shown me something more chic. Like how to love with world travel, travel, travel.”
“She left you an apartment in the West Village. How much more chic could you want?”
“It’s hard to feel chic when the toilet literally screams for its life every time you flush it.”
“So it’s got some personality.” He’s all shrugs.
And now we’re back. To our fifth-floor walk-up, held together with duct tape and Vin’s elbow grease.
As soon as we step through the street entrance, those nerves kick in again. By the second floor, my stomach is doing a dance step. By the fourth floor, my muscles are screaming for oxygen. By the fifth floor, it all hits. Today I made squash soup for work, the potluck casserole, and Vin’s chicken and rice. Then Vin and I had the most important and hardest conversation we’ve ever had. We finally,finallymade up. He showed me the framed portrait. We rolled around on the bed. We went to a night picnic in Central Park and helped close the thing down. Then we corralled two inebriated ding-dongs twenty blocks north. And now we’re here.
He puts the keys in our door and lets us through. It’s orange and blue in our apartment, everything sidelit by streetlights. There is a low thrum between us and, unfortunately, I think it might be how much our feet ache.
“You know?” I say as I shuck off one shoe and then the other. “I’m starting to suspect that in all the ways thatactuallycount, forty is definitelynotthe new thirty.”
He’s toeing out of his sneakers and laughing. “Oh, yeah?”
“Hey, Vin.” I lock our front door and then catapult myself into his arms. “Whaddya say wedon’thave sex tonight?”
And you can tell we’ve been married for eight years because he grips me close, buries his face in my neck, and groans: “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
