My chest tightens at the thought.
It is strange how I can feel sympathy for him now and still remember being angry at him then. Angry because he was too serious. Too hard, too watchful.
I was just a child and didn’t understand.
But he was a child, too.
A tall, furious, terrified child pretending not to be.
The role took a toll on him. Of course it did; how could it not? It took his confidence in ways none of us understood then. It made him drop out of school to care for Mama. It made him think survival meant sacrifice, and silence, and carrying everything alone.
I shake my head and finish the line.
I still cannot believe he hid the fact that he had gone back to school from all of us.
High school. College. An MBA. Secretly, as if education were something shameful instead of something that should have had every one of us cheering loudly enough to embarrass him.
It took Teresa to get him to say it out loud.
Teresa, with her sharp eyes and sharper mind, and that impossible ability to see through Vito’s walls like they are made of glass. She got him to open up about things the rest of us had spent years not knowing how to touch.
And after only knowing him for a few weeks.
It makes me ashamed to think of it.
Which is why this dinner is so important. I can’t let it happen again.
So yes, maybe the tension between Vito and Lucia had to be released. Maybe that disastrous dinner did what it needed to do. Maybe all the things they said had been sitting on everyone’s chests for too long.
It is better now.
I hope it is better now.
That is what tonight is supposed to be.
A dinner where Lucia can sit at my table with Vito, and Nico, and me, and maybe we can be something like siblings instead of survivors, trying to keep our heads above water.
Like actual siblings who care about each other.
Well, almost all my siblings will be here.
Not Alessandra and Sebastian, Luca and Elena’s two little ones.
That part makes me feel a little guilty, though not enough to change it. They are still so young, and if they come, it becomes a full family affair.
I have no problem with them coming for the evening. There are children their age here, but it won’t be so simple because Elena will want to come, and I will feel guilty and give in.
But then Papà comes. And the uncles come. The entire orbit follows.
I love them, but tonight is not that. I will include Alessandra and Sebastian in sibling dinners when they are older, when the age gap is less, and they can attend without Elena and Papà being involved.
Tonight is Lucia, Vito, Nico, and me.
Spouses and children, too.
Well.
Their spouses and children.
