“Remember Shirley?” my mother asked.
“Of course I remember her,” I said. Lenny had dated Shirley for close to two years, but he’d broken up with her shortly before shipping out. “Did she ever marry the Hutchinson kid?”
“She did.”
“Poor girl.”
“There wasn’t a thing wrong with her,” said my mother. “But I could have told you from the very start that she and your brother were never going to work out.”
“How did you know?”
She shrugged. “Lenny would go days not seeing her. He might take her out on a Saturday night, then not think to call her until the following Thursday, when it was time to make plans for the weekend. Shirley used to call the house looking for him, and half the time, I had to make something up because I felt so bad for her.”
We had arrived in the piazza, but my pace had slowed to a crawl. I’d never heard my mother talk about Lenny’s relationship like this.
“When they broke up, I was relieved, you know?”
This surprised me. “You were?”
“Definitely,” she said. “I wanted Lenny to have a great love, and I figured the sooner he ended things with Shirley, the better.”
“I wish he’d gotten the chance to find what he was looking for.”
She reached for my hand. “Me, too.”
I suspected, standing there in front of Café Gargiulo, that we weren’t just talking about Lenny. And if I needed confirmation, I got it a moment later, when my mother asked, “Is everything okay with you and Paul?”
I stiffened. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You seem a little less like yourself when he’s around. And this invitation, the way it came out of nowhere, made me wonder if something was wrong.”
“We got in a big fight,” I admitted.
“Over what?”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the whole story, so I gave her an abbreviated version. “I told him I don’t want to have a baby over here.”
“Really?” My mother sounded surprised.
“It was a little more complicated than that, but yeah.”
“He’s got to understand that it takes two people—”
“I think maybe I’m scared of having kids,” I blurted out.
“Why?”
I hesitated. “Lots of reasons, I guess. But a big thing is I don’t want to lose one.”
“Oh, honey,” she said in a whisper.
“I saw what you went through with Lenny.”
She nodded once, then took me by the shoulders. “I want you to hear me on this. I’d choose to be Lenny’s mom a thousand times over, even knowing how it all ends.”
A tear rolled down my cheek, and then we were both crying.
“Come here,” she said, and hugged me.
