Sylvia nods. “Happy to have you at the table,” she says.
I know Sylvia always liked Stone, but she loves Leo, too. If Iasked Sylvia who she enjoyed more, she’d probably say something like:Why choose? Can’t I have them both?
Stone pours more wine for me. I drink much less than I used to, partially because my hangovers got exponentially worse on the other side of thirty-five and partially because for the past three years I have been maybe-pregnant. People are always saying that you can’t be just “a little bit” pregnant, but those people have never done repetitive fertility treatment. I’m a little bit pregnant all the time.
But not today.
I take a long sip and feel my stomach get liquid and warm.
Marcella lowers her voice. “It was good to see Bonnie last week,” she says. “She looked well.”
I think about the woman we saw—curled up on the couch, barely bigger than the blanket covering her. A hot rod of anger pinches my stomach. No, actually, she does notlook well.
Stone shakes his head. “She doesn’t,” he says. “But thanks for saying.”
My mom opens her mouth and then closes it again.
“Will you hand me the bread?” Sylvia says.
Stone obliges at the same time my dad reaches for the water pitcher. Their hands collide, and the water pitcher spills, pouring all over dad, before falling to the ground and shattering.
Immediately, Marcella springs into action. “Honey,” she says. “Hang on. Hold on. Don’t stand up!”
I see her run into the kitchen. She grabs one of the dish towels that are flung over the lip of the sink and runs back. She starts with his pants, flicking off dollops of water.
“Marcie, honey, I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“Hold still. Here. There could be glass.”
Dad sits there, his hands at his sides, as my mother gets on her hands and knees and begins to pick up the shards from the floor.
“Marcella, please, let me help.” Stone is out of his chair and crouching down next to her.
“Please just get a trash bag,” she tells him.
Stone looks to me and I stand, too, and we go into the kitchen.
“Under the sink,” I say.
He ducks and recovers one. We look back at the table. Sylvia, who has never once put down her fork, is eating happily. My parents are still caught in their hysteria dance. My mom bends on the floor, collecting glass shards in the palm of her hand. She looks up when Stone hands her the bag.
“Thanks.”
Stone returns to me. “When will she learn it’s just water?” he says.
I realize I’m not embarrassed, not even a little. Because Stone knows. He knows my parents, he knows their dance, the way in which they orbit each other. Once, in the eleventh grade, my mother missed volleyball playoffs because she was taking my dad to a dentist appointment.
I remember thinking there was nothing strange with this until Stone said it: “Why?”
Because that’s who my parents are; they do everything together. Because that’s who my mom is, terrified. And it was the worst in those early years—right after the accident, right when Stone and I got together. He was there for the crux of it, and I was too young and shell-shocked myself to protect him from anything. I didn’t shield him, and so he saw it all. He saw the mess and the terror and the precarious way we were a family, defined by ourreactions to one another. My mother’s fear of losing my father, my father’s fear of upsetting her.
Tonight, standing with Stone in the kitchen, watching my mother pick up glass like it’s radioactive, like it could kill my father, like maybe, actually, it is—feels like a kind of relief I didn’t know I needed. Because he sees it, too. I’m not alone in it; he’s standing right here, witnessing.
I protect Leo, I think. And I hide it, too—my own fear, my mother’s—in ways I never thought to when I was with Stone. Here he is, seeing it all—and none of it is a surprise to him. None of it is making him turn away.
“Watch your thumb!” Marcella says.
I feel Stone’s hand on my hip. It’s gentle, brief, merely a tap. I look to him and he swipes Sylvia’s cooking wine off the counter.
