“I did,” said Giovanni. “Don’t worry.”
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” said Cord. He rolled down the car window, hoping the fresh air would help. Rye’s Purchase Street rolled past: June & Ho, Crisfield’s Prime Meats, Rye Eye Care, Royal Jewels of Rye. Giovanni had grown up walking to the Smoke Shop to buy his parents cigarettes, he’d told Cord. Rose had always given Giovanni an extra dime for Swedish Fish candy.
“I don’t know what you’re so ashamed of,” said Giovanni now.
Cord looked at him. Giovanni’s mouth was set in a grim line. “I…” said Cord.
“This is a happy occasion,” said Giovanni. “I’ve been to eight thousand wedding showers for my sisters and cousins and tonight it’s aboutme.Sorry,us. I find it pretty disturbing that the only person who thinks we’re doing something wrong, Cord, is you.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cord.
“Get yourself sorted out,” said Giovanni, pulling into his parents’ driveway.
Cord felt a sense of dread; there was no other way to put it. The lonely voice was his father’s, telling him tofocus and get your act together, for Christ’s sakewhen Cord couldn’t catch the baseball in the backyard.
“We’re here,” said Giovanni.
“I’m sorry,” said Cord. He had a hard time getting out of the car. He felt foggy, disoriented, as if he might pass out.
“What is it?” said Giovanni, his face pained. “Why can’t you just be proud of who you are?”
Before Cord could answer, the door to Giovanni’s childhood home opened, and Rose came running out. She was overweight, wearing polyester slacks, a T-shirt, and an apron. She had shoulder-length gray hair and wore Pan-Cake makeup and fabulous fake eyelashes. Right in the driveway, she enveloped Cord in a hug that smelled of floral perfume and tomatoes. Cord relaxed in her embrace. The lonely voice was silent. “I made ziti for you, Cord,” said Rose. “I made ziti.”
How wonderful it felt to be held by a mother who knew you.
REGAN WOKE IN HERdaughter’s bedroom. It wasn’t uncommon for her to sleep next to Flora—Regan was an insomniac and she just felt safer snuggled next to her sweet-smelling daughter than next to her husband.
For a moment, Regan lay still, watching Flora breathe. The curve of her nose, her lashes against her impossibly milky skin! For a moment, Regan questioned her plan. She promised herself that she would make sure Flora was okay, even afterward.
Regan rose, stretched, and padded down the hallway in her silk pajamas. Matt was fast asleep in the master bedroom, one arm tossed out, as if reaching for something. His mouth was open and he snored loudly, without shame. What must it be like, wondered Regan (not for the first time), to access such abandon? Regan thought that her insomnia likely had roots in her fear of losing control. Her high school art teacher, Alphonso Ragdale, had once told her she was most beautiful while she slept. Besides the obvious-in-retrospect creepiness of the comment, Regan wondered if it had made her feel (on some unconscious level) that she mustalwaysbe lovely in sleep, a belief that kept her from being actually, messily, at rest.
Regan’s mind whirred. Her mother had called the day before with the bizarre news that she had won a Mediterranean cruise. Charlotte wanted Regan to join her on the cruise, along with Regan’s siblings. “Please, honey,” said Charlotte. “Please, let me fly you to Europe before I’m gone.”
Regan’s mother loved theatrical pronouncements.
“Please!” cried Charlotte.
“I don’t know what to say.” The last thing on earth Regan wanted was a trip without her children and with her mother and siblings.
Five sessions with an online therapist had taught Regan how toxic her family was. She should, said the online therapist, accept that they were estranged. She should make peace with it. And she was trying. But Regan missed them; she just did. Sometimes she dreamed of playing with her sister and brother on a giant trampoline while Charlotte watched, pouring lemonade. They were so happy, jumping and jumping! In the dream, Regan didn’t even pee a little the way she did in real life when she jumped on a trampoline.
“Come on, honey,” said Charlotte. “Come on, cute little Regan-doodle!”
Something in Regan relaxed when her mother called her “Regan-doodle.” After Winston died suddenly of a heart attack, Lee and Cord were always too busy to spend time with Charlotte. When they moved into a rental home, it was Regan who hung out in the tiny kitchen when Charlotte got home from work; Regan resting her elbows on the butcher-block table, settling on a tall stool and swinging her legs.
“What would I do without you, my Regan-doodle?” Charlotte would say, easing off her high heels and pouring a glass of wine, poking through the refrigerator for a snack.
Regan would flush with a ten-year-old’s happiness, telling Charlotte to sit down, arranging a vegetable platter with hummus, refilling Charlotte’s drink. Sometimes, Regan would make up stories about imaginary mean-girl friends. Charlotte loved to hear that Regan was happy and very popular, though in truth she was lonely and embarrassed by her used clothes and wrong-side-of-the-YMCA address.
Every weekend, when her mother and siblings slept late, Regan gathered their discarded laundry and washed it in the basement, placing baskets of folded, clean clothes outside their rooms.
Regan sighed, missing being a barefoot ten-year-old with French braids and freckles. What would that girl do in Regan’s situation? Regan winced, understanding how pathetic that girl would think the adult Regan was: so passive! And ahousewife? That girl, Regan knew, would jet out of town.
Regan had tried to make Matt love her again. For years, she had tried. And then she gave up slowly, and told herself it was enough to live as roommates, as friends. But Regan would never let a friend treat her the way Matt treated her. Worse: the girls saw him treat Regan badly, and he had begun to make comments about the girls as well. Regan had broached divorce only once, after a few glasses of wine. “Maybe we’d both be happier…” she ventured, “if we tried a separation…”
He had turned toward her, his face cold. And then he’d thrown his glass to the floor, where it landed with a very scarythud. “Shh,” said Regan. “The girls.”
“The girls?” said Matt. “Now you’re worried aboutthe girls?”
