Chapter 16
The Return of the Rossis
The following week—the week of Fourth of July and five weeks until the Rose Festival—Hell descends on Vero Roseto in the form of a “delightful” surprise. My brother and sisters are popping in. Well, some of them. Aunt Ro invited my three oldest siblings to bunk in the East Wing (once again kicking me to the basement) and stay for the local fireworks. She pitched it as a family reunion, but really she’s enlisting additional free labor to get this deck rebuilt.
I know Ro. She’s always running two cons at once.
When the children storm in, Ben and I are cooling off in the kitchen. Hollering and slapping walls, three toddler boys with inky-black hair race inside, followed by a quieter, similarly dark-haired boy of five, who walks in and waves politely. “Hi, Uncle Grant,” he says. “We saw six trucks coming here and three tractors.”
“Hey, Angelo,” I say, stooping to wrap a hug around my nephew. Little Angelo eyes Ben warily, too young to realize he’s a friend of the family. “That’s Ben, my friend. The tractors are heading to the grape orchard, but those trucks? They’ve got sooooo many planks of wood on them. Me, Ben, your mom, Aunt Traci, and Uncle A. C. are gonna build a deck so we can all watch the fireworks this weekend!”
“A. C. too?” Ben asks with a hint of fear as he rummages through a box of Triscuit crackers. “That’ll certainly be interesting.”
The last time Ben was around my oldest brother, he was closeted like me and the air was thick with A. C.’s clumsy gay jokes. A. C. has massively chilled out, but this will be interesting. As usual, Ro doesn’t give people a heads-up on who they’re collaborating with on projects. She just throws conflict-heavy people together and yells “Surprise!”
She’d make a great reality show producer.
“There’s gonna be fireworks?” Angelo asks, tugging on his fingers.
Somehow, I’ve upset him.
“He doesn’t like fireworks,” my sister Kimmy says, rubbing a firm, loving hand on her son’s shoulders. Kimmy is twenty-eight, as tall as I am, and dressed in a plain pink tee with basketball shorts drooping past her knees. She’s sporty, with strong shoulders from a lifetime of winning volleyball championships, and her dark hair is piled high in a messy bun.
As Kimmy lands a hearty kiss on my cheek, she waves to Ben, who is shrinking into the corner by the fridge as Angelo’s wilder brothers sprint back into the kitchen, this time with toy lightsabers.
“Memorial Day,” she explains, “our neighbors were shoot-ing off these damn explosions—just real cannons. Shook the whole house. The German shepherd next door’s roaring, crying, hates it. Angelo, eh…” Kimmy hands her son a baggie of green pepper slices, which he anxiously gobbles. “Well, he didn’t like it much either. Can’t seem to get him excited about the Fourth.”
“Little man, don’t worry,” I tell Angelo. “These fireworks won’t be anywhere near us, and they’re put on by the city, so they’re more like the ones you see at Disney.” Finally, the boy looks up from the table, a hopeful smile forming. I wink at Kimmy.
As the former Most Sensitive Boy in this family, I am sympathetic to Angelo’s inner plight, which if he’s anything like me is turbulent. Especially since—like my mom with my dad—Kimmy married a redneck who does not understand his lovebug of a son one iota.
The flurry of entrances doesn’t stop as my second-oldest sister, Traci, runs me over with a hug. Traci, twenty-seven, dark blond, and muscular in a white tank and khaki pants, is every child’s favorite aunt. Angelo and his brothers drop what they’re doing to throw a hug on her, but when she sees Ben by the fridge, her mouth drops.
“BEN?” Traci asks, racing to him. “I gotta get on my tiptoes now?! You were so little. Ro warned me, but I didn’t want to believe it.” Ben and Traci laugh together as she refuses to break apart the hug. “This is so unacceptable, ahhh!”
Maybe this visit won’t be all bad.
Finally, my brother, A. C.—the oldest Rossi child—lumbers inside carrying his toddler son.
It’s a Big as Hell family, and this isn’t even close to all of us. I’m the baby—and I mean the baby. I’m five years younger than the next-youngest kid—something A. C. would later throw in my face. I was the “Band-Aid baby” who was supposed to hold together my parents’ flop marriage—their last-ditch attempt to make it all work—but surprise, babies don’t function like that.
As Kimmy and Traci hug each other, Ben taps my wrist. “I’ll leave you all to it,” he says. “Gonna let Ro know everyone’s here.”
“You can just text her,” I say, struggling to hear him over the chattering.
“Nah.” Ben’s eyes flick briefly—angrily—toward A. C.
“He’s better now. Let’s just say hi.”
“He’s not my brother, and I don’t feel like it.” Ben shrugs, lobbing another Triscuit happily into his mouth. “And what do you mean, he’s better now?”
Glancing over Ben’s shoulder, I spy A. C. still in the middle of roughhousing with his wild pack of nephews. Still, I lower my voice. “No more jokes.”
“What a saint. Y’know, when we were little, there wasn’t a dirtbag comedian he wouldn’t defend like they were your mam. Did he ever apologize?”
“Basically.”
Ben’s eyes narrow as he munches, lost in thought. “You’ve been kicking me in the nutsack all summer over our thing, but you’re cool with your homophobic brother over basically an apology?”
He’s got me there, but A. C. is benefiting from his crimes being more indirect and, frankly, constant. I clear my throat. “He supported me when I came out.”
“That’s what people are supposed to do, sweetums.”
“Well, how was he supposed to know we were gay when he was making those jokes?”
“Because you were a…” Chuckling wickedly, Ben holds up a limp wrist.
“No, I wasn’t.” I playfully smack his shoulder. “You were.”
“No.” He scowls. “I was?” I shrug. “Okay, I’m sorry you’re too scared of your brother to take as hard a line with him as you do with everybody else, but that’s between you all. Leave me out of it. Kisses!”
I can only sputter petulantly as Ben skips out through the parlor, throwing a peace sign A. C.’s way as he vanishes. Damn Ben! He’s comparing our situation with my thing with my brother and, like, not to be rude to my family, but the reason I’m angrier at Ben is because he really mattered to me back then and my family…is nice, but there’s a lot of them, so keeping an emotional distance from one of them just isn’t as much of a problem as it was losing Ben.
Having watched Ben leave, Traci creeps toward me, her eyebrow arched, and whispers, “What’s going on there?”
“Nothing,” I say. It’s not until this moment, my shoulders slouching with disappointment, that I realize I wish there was something to report.
Two bearish arms—each the size of a log—clamp around my chest and hoist me in the air. As tall and built as I am, A. C. still has size on me. Nearing thirty, A. C. has a full black beard, receding hairline, and a stomach as round and hard as a boulder. “BABY BRO,” he cries, deadlifting me as I fling my legs in the air helplessly like Woody when Andy is looking.
My nephews applaud A. C.’s antics as I regain my balance in a room that’s spinning. “You got me,” I chuckle.
“Was that Ben McKittrick I saw running out?” A. C. asks. Not wanting to get into it, I smile and nod. A. C.’s eyebrows shoot up. “You two, uh…?”
Disappointment once again pummeling my chest, I shake my head. “No, we’re just fixing the place up together.”
A. C. nods, his narrowed eyes computing. “He wasn’t leaving fast ’cause I got here, was he?”
I wince. There’s no point lying. A. C. is as shrewd as me and Ro.
Pain crosses my brother’s face. “Shit,” he whispers, trying halfheartedly to laugh. “I was that bad, huh?” Wincing again, I shrug. “Any chance you could…”
“Apologize for you?” I shake my head.
A. C. nods, accepting his penance is not yet complete. I don’t even know if an apology will cut it. Ben is a much more physical person than an emotional one. If their bad blood is going to stop, they’ll probably have to fight it out. It worked for Ben and me, wrestling in the rose garden and hurling mud at each other.
That night, while Aunt Ro fries up chicken cutlets and bread patties for the family, the kitchen explodes with joy. The guests spread across the East and West Wings leave out their used room service trays, and I bus them. As I bring down the trays, I pass my quartet of nephews (three rodeo clowns and one gentle soul, Angelo) playing action figures by the laundry flap in the hallway. Angelo carefully sets Hulk and Doctor Strange along the flap’s edge, teetering on the brink of a fatal plunge down the laundry chute.
Smiling to myself, I leave them alone to create their own memories of Vero Roseto. As I descend the stairs, Ben is waiting on a step halfway down. Still in his damp gardening outfit, he crosses his arms and observes the boys playing.
“You’re right, you know,” I whisper. “About A. C.”
Ben doesn’t look away from my nephews as he smiles. “Of course I’m right.”
“I promise, I’ll say something to him.”
“Aw, don’t, I was just being a daffodil.” He shakes his head, something weighing heavily on his thoughts. As I inch closer, his shoulders tense. “If you’re in a good place with your brother, don’t make waves just for me.”
“But I want to.”
“Remember, I’m not sticking around.” The air between us thickens as an invisible hand crushes my insides. He’s already said it so many times before, but things have changed. Haven’t they? Plus…I’m not sticking around either.
Ben watches me pitifully, dark circles forming under those shimmering eyes. “Do it for you. ’Cause if things go bad in the family, and I’m not here…I don’t want to be the bad guy again.”
I must’ve really let him have it back then. Was I that much of a beast?
With nothing more left to say, my and Ben’s attention drifts back to my nephews on the landing. Next to the laundry chute flap, the twins whack lightsabers at their lined-up action figures, and down they go.
“That’s why we’re doing this, you know,” I say, tapping my elbow to Ben’s. “Rebuilding everything. It’s so we can keep the house and let them have everything we had.”
“What did we have?” Ben asks, smiling sadly. He shakes his head. “Nobody’ll ever have what we had.”
My heart moans at the thought.
“Nobody,” I agree. Without thinking, I land a kiss—soft and brief—on Ben’s ear. Intimate, not romantic.
There’s no Ben Rule against little kisses!
I leave Ben on the stairs. Each step away from him hurts. We were doing so well as adult friends, no acknowledgment that anything was ever anything between us. Now anger is flooding back alongside the lovely memories.
I’m so tired of holding on to this baggage.
But every time I want to let go, it’s like my hand is fused to the handle.