“I don’t like tomato sauce,” she said, after a pause.
“No tomato. Easy,” he said, grateful for her response no matter what she said. “Wait. No tomato at all?”
“Nope.” She shook her head and sniffed. “Do you think they will still let me be Italian?”
“Are you kidding me? Tomatoes are Mexican. They’ll get over it.”
He brought her up to his apartment, flipped on the air conditioning, and gave her the Wi-Fi password. She refused tea but accepted water, and had already settled deep into his couch when he dashed out again. His plan was to stay true to his word and not expect her to talk, so instead of asking her what else she might like on her pizza, he bought everything—four kinds of cheese, two kinds of mushrooms, eggplant, basil, and even a jar of Nutella because a dessert pizza seemed like it would make anything better—for anyone. He was back at the house in fifteen minutes, but unsurprisingly, Lora was sound asleep on the couch.
He made the mistake of sitting down to check emails before getting started on the dough. Blasting through almost all of his city hall correspondence was no trouble, but when he switched over to check his personal account, he found an email from Jason Evans somewhere between updates from two New York spots that he didn’t have the heart to unsubscribe from: the Elk coffee shop and B&H Photo. What could Jason be emailing for? If he wanted to catch up quickly, he would have texted. Andrea’s finger hovered overthe track pad as he considered whether he wanted to open it when he heard Lora cough. He turned back to see her stretching wide, looking around, reanimating. He closed the laptop.
“Hi,” he said, still perched on the stool at the kitchen counter.
“Hi,” she said, sliding up on the couch.
He glanced down at his watch, realizing that an hour had passed since he got back from the grocery store. “I think I got a little diverted from the pizza dough. But if you’re hungry, I can find something. I might have—” He stood, ready to ransack the fridge for something edible besides pizza toppings.
“It’s OK. I’m not hungry.”
“Something to drink maybe?” he asked, his head behind the refrigerator door. “I have white wine, a bottle of Ichnusa, pomegranate juice?”
“Maybe the wine,” she said. “But not too much.”
“No problem. I will do an Italian pour.” Andrea pulled two wineglasses out of a cabinet and set them on the counter. He poured a few ounces into the bottom of each glass and brought them over to the couch. He handed her a glass, clinked his to hers, and settled onto the other end of the couch by Lora’s feet. She pulled them away to give him space, but he gently moved them back toward his thigh. “No, no. Stay.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking a sip. “For… being kind.”
“You don’t have to thank me. What happened today was very unexpected. That has to be hard,” he said. “I’m sorry, I said we didn’t have to talk about it and I mean it.”
“We can talk about it,” she said, twisting the stem of the wineglass in her fingers. “I just feel a little bit embarrassed.”
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear that kind of news,” he said quietly. “There’s probably not a correct way to react.”
“For me, it feels wrong to accept something from him when I’ve been trained my entire life to exist without him. My mom made me strong, taught me everything. And whatever she didn’t know, she showed me how to figure out myself.” She took a sip, but he stayed silent, waiting.
“I know those fairy-tale stories of the woman who’s waiting for the guy to sweep in and fix everything,” she went on. “I had friends like that in high school—girls who were raised to expect Prince Charming would come knocking on their eighteenth birthday. That’s not me. That’s not what I was taught. Which is another reason I’m so disappointed in myself about my ex—it’s the one time I dropped my guard in that way. My mom told me that I didn’t need anyone to come knocking because that man who wanted to ride in on a white horse would inevitably hold me back and, worse than that, when he rode right back out again, I’d be left with nothing.”
“So, you think that if you accepted something from Ivo, you’d be betraying your mom in a way.”
“It seems disrespectful to how hard she worked to keep me feeling loved all on her own.”
“You don’t have to answer this question, but has anyone aside from your mom made you feel any different? Like maybe they could love you and you didn’t have to think about protecting yourself from it?”
“You mean like in a relationship?” she asked. He nodded. “I would have had to give someone the chance to get close enough to be able to answer that. I was always too busy,too driven. I multitask everything—even went to community college in Florida while my mom was sick. When I was taking care of her in the end, I had no time, but I told myself, even if I took one class a semester, I wouldn’t lose momentum. I buried my mother, sold our house, paid off her medical debt, and moved north, all while my friends were rushing sororities and spending their parents’ money at the American Eagle outlet. Who was going to make me feel anything at all, let alone feel something close to safety? Because that’s what you’re talking about, right? It’s the idea that someday there might be someone other than me making sure that I’m OK.”
“Yes,” he said, looking right into her eyes. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“It wasn’t going to be my ex,” she said. “Although I am not sure if I would have admitted that in the beginning. I tried to overlook our differences and not think too much…” She trailed off.
“I guess that didn’t work,” said Andrea.
“It was wrong from the start, really. I wanted to believe that deep down, Charlie was different from his family but somehow couldn’t distance himself from them, their power, and all of the influence they had—over everything. If I told myself that, it let me off the hook for not being a good judge of character. The truth is that I got swept up in his world and lost myself until I couldn’t ignore reality in the form of photos of me in theNew York Post. What an idiot I was.”
“Sorry, but this sounds like a TV show.”
“It kind of was—and too much for me,” she said. “Unlike my mom, I never wanted to be famous—much less infamous.”
“Now you’ve got me wondering—who was this guy?”
