“You still like your burgers well done?” Marco asks through the screen door. “Or are you finally ready to try a real one?”
He’s outside on his wraparound porch playing grillmaster while Mom and I sit on his brown leather couch drinking wine that makes the bargain stuff we usually consume seem like horse piss. (Listen, I never actually said horse piss would taste good. I just said there are reasons one might want to drink it anyway.) We decided to stay put for dinner, just in case we happen to be suspects in the Short Hills investigation and somehow a random upstate bumpkin goes all MacGyver and cracks the case on us while we’re just trying to enjoy some fried calamari. I know we’re being paranoid, but you know what they say: better safe than sorry indicted.
“Well done!” Mom yells back at Marco. “I’m not trying to get salmonella up in this bitch.”
“That’s a chicken disease,” I remind her. “How many times have we been through this?”
“Whatever,” she says. “I’m not trying to get mad cow disease, either.”
“I mean, same.” I take a sip of wine and curl up with a flannel throw blanket on the couch. Everything about this scene is so chill. Marco has a soft classic rock playlist tinkling through his Bose sound system as the moonlight softly illuminates the lake view before us. I wish I could freeze time. “Think we should finally call Nonna back? I feel bad. She’s been blowing us up.”
We ultimately decided not to commit phone suicide down at the dock earlier. I get why Mom suggested it — with no phones in our possession, we’d be able to just go about life in blissful ignorance of whatever was unfolding in the aftermath of our wreckage. Are the cops and/or our disgruntled exes trying to get a hold of us? Long hair, don’t care! Phone-free, can’t see! We’re off the grid.
But then we realized that chucking our phones might create more problems than solutions. For one thing, I find great comfort in being able to check the news at any time and reconfirm the fact that we’re not actual suspects. I’ve been monitoring the coverage every hour or so, and it seems like the story is already starting to die down. Did you know there are bad things happening all the damn time? Since the fire was first reported — barely even twelve hours ago — there have been car crashes, kidnappings, shootings, drug busts, and political scandals galore. And that’s just in Jersey! I never thought I’d say this, but I’m kinda glad we live in such a fucked-up world.
“We should call her,” Mom says. “You know she’s been freaking out all day.”
“I think we should tell her we’re here with Marco,” I say. “She would be so happy to know that you guys are getting back together!” Oops. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Am I drunk already? I guess that’s what happens when the only thing you’ve eaten all day is one Italian pastry and two mini-bags of Combos. “We should, uh — we should tell her we’re here so she knows we’re safe.”
“Hold the phone.” Mom does a sassy little hand movement. “What are you talking about, ‘getting back together’?”
“Nothing. Just. I don’t know. You seem like you’re back in a groove with him. And when he was telling us which beds we could sleep in, he totally did this, like, pause where I swear he was about to say you’re welcome to stay with him in his room.” I give a forced half-laugh, which is met with silence. “You mean to tell me you haven’t been flirting with him, even a little bit?”
“That’s just how I talk.” She’s trying to be coy, but I see through it. She’s totally remembering why she loved him back in the day. “We can call her and tell her we’re safe, but we can’t tell her where we are exactly. God forbid the cops question her or something.”
Well. That killed my buzz.
Marco comes in with a platter of burger patties in his hand and looks at us on the couch.
“Hey,” he says to me in a goofy dad-joke voice as I take a swig of wine. I already know where this is going. “Does your mother know you’re drinking?”
“Ha,” I deadpan. “I guess she does now.”
“It’s not like he’s guzzling rum,” she says. “Wine has antioxidants. It’s basically salad.”
“Thanks for the nutritional wisdom, Dr. Rossi.” Marco flashes an amused smile. He is so adorably into her. “I was gonna grab a beer from the fridge, but you’ve sold me on the Chianti.”
“I’m gonna go call Nonna,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
Mom looks relieved. I could tell she liked the idea of Nonna knowing that we’re safe more than the idea of actually talking to her herself.
“Tell her I said hello!” Marco says. “How is she doing?”
“She’s fine,” Mom and I respond in unison.
“Good.” Marco pours himself a glass of wine. “I’ll pop your burger in the oven so it’s still warm when you get back.”
I slide out onto the porch and walk down the hill to have a modicum of privacy for this conversation. I have no idea if things are gonna escalate into yelling or crying and I’d rather not do anything to arouse suspicion in Marco.
“Madonna mia.” Nonna picks up on the first ring. “You and your mother take off with my car and then you ignore me for hours on end. Real nice. Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? All day I’ve had agita —”
“I’m sorry.” I try to sound as calm as possible as I cut her off. It helps that I’m standing before a moonlit lakefront oasis. I look up and there are actual stars in the sky. Lots of them. “Whoa,” I mindlessly marvel out loud.
“What ‘whoa’?” Nonna asks. “Are you okay? Tell me what’s going on before I have a heart attack.”
“We’re fine. Mom was driving all day and I fell asleep in the car. And then by the time we got — uh — here, she fell asleep. And then my phone died. And then I fell asleep… again. It’s been a long day.” I take a breath. “But we’re fine. Your car is fine. We’re excited for this vacation! I’ve already forgotten about Luke.” Huh. My nonsensical rant has culminated in an actually true statement. “So it’s working.”
“Good,” she says. “But where the hell are you?”
“I…” — am an idiot who really should have figured out how the hell I was gonna answer this extremely predictable question before I called you — “don’t know exactly. A few hours away. It’s like, a vacation place on a beach somewhere. We’re renting an Airbnb for cheap. Since it’s the off-season and all. It’s super nice.”
“How many nights do you have this Air-bean-bean for?”
“Until… Friday?” It feels so dishonest to say something definitive about the future, but I need to at least get Nonna off our back for a few days. “We’ll be home Friday.”
“Something’s not right about this. I have a bad feeling.” She stops talking. The silence is thick with disappointment. “Have you seen the news? That medigan your mother’s been seeing was on Channel Five today.” It occurs to me that Nonna doesn’t even know Mom and Richard broke up. Just when I thought she couldn’t be more clueless about our situation. “His house burned down. You believe that?”
“No way! Really? That’s crazy.” I am definitely trying too hard. “Did he tell the reporters how it happened? Was it an unattended candle? I bet it was an unattended candle.” Shit. I’m not sounding surprised enough. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe his house caught fire.”
“Oh, mio Dio! Joey.” She sounds like she’s ready to have that heart attack she was talking about a minute ago. “Joey, Joey, Joey.”
Was I really that unconvincing?
“What?” I ask.
“I knew it,” she says. “I knew it the second I saw him on that screen.”
“Nonna, don’t be crazy! What do you think you know?”
“You think I don’t know how your mother operates?” she says. “This was all Gia. And now she’s gotten you mixed up in it. How could she do this to you?” Her breathing gets heavier and heavier. “I need to sit down.”
“Please stop.” I should have never walked out here and called her. Everything was so great five minutes ago. I had wine. I had a burger. Now I have a melodramatic Italian grandmother in the throes of a total breakdown. “You’re jumping to an insane conclusion. Mom and I had nothing to do with this! You think we’re criminals? Calm down.” I hear her attempt to inhale on the other end. I don’t care how convinced Nonna is of her theory, there’s no way I’m going to admit anything to her. If we confirm her suspicion, we implicate her as an accomplice. At least now all she has is a feeling. I need to convince her that her feeling is wrong. “What did Richard say to the reporters?”
“He had that same guilty smile as always,” she says. “Said he just got off a plane from California. There was a neighbor who saw a car in the driveway, but the dumb putan’ can’t even remember what kind it was.”
“See? It couldn’t have been us.” As if Nonna is a one-woman jury and the lack of evidence on Channel Five is proof of our innocence. “You saw us this morning. Did we look like we just burned a house down?”
“Yes!” she responds. “And then you ran off with my car.”
Mom was right. We should have just thrown our phones into the lake.
“We didn’t do anything, okay? Please chill. We’ll be back Friday and everything is going to be fine. Stop acting like a crazy person.”
“I hope to God that I am crazy,” Nonna says. “Put your mother on the phone.”
“She’s still sleeping.” I force a laugh. “Imagine: Mom and me burning down a house. Nonna! That is nuts. You’re just looking for things to worry about.”
“Tell her to call me when she wakes up.” She sounds a little less frantic right now. Hopefully she’s at least questioning her theory. As she should. It’s really an insane conclusion to jump to. Even if it happens to be completely accurate in this case. “I don’t like being ignored.”
“She’ll call you tomorrow. I love you, Nonna.”
“Mhm,” she says. “Love you, too.”
I swear to God. Marco better have at least three more bottles of wine in his kitchen. And then another three if he and Mom want to have any for themselves.
As I turn around to make my way back up the hill, I catch sight of the neighbor’s house. It has a giant lake-view window just like Marco’s, and I can see right through it. A blur of bodies wades through the living room with red Solo cups in their hands. I wonder which one of them belongs to Kayak Guy.
I’m feeling expertly capable of improvised deception after that phone call, so I consider going over there and crashing the party. How hard would it be to just slip in and introduce myself to him? “Hi! We waved at each other earlier! Is this beer? I love beer.” And then he’ll whisk me away to a bedroom and make all my problems go away.
But then I remember that I look like shit and Mom and Marco are waiting for me.
When I get back onto the porch, I peer through the window and see them sitting very closely next to each other on the couch. They’re talking and laughing between sips of wine. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen her like this with a guy.
“There you are!” Marco says as I slip through the screen door and slide it shut behind me. “I was starting to worry you’d fallen into the lake.”
“So?” Mom asks. “Nonna?”
“All good!” I decide not to ruin her mood by telling her how the conversation really went. I’d rather just obliterate it from my memory entirely. I zip over to the counter where I left my wineglass and fill it all the way up. “Nonna’s just peachy.”
“Easy, tiger.” Marco chuckles at my heavy pour. “You gotta give it room to breathe!”
“Right.” I take an extreme guzzle until the glass is only half-full. “There we go.”
“You sure you’re okay?” Mom asks.
I ignore the question and turn toward Marco. “So are your neighbors having a party or something?”
“Oh, yeah. They let their kids have the house to themselves for the week. I actually promised I’d keep an eye on things.” He laughs to himself. “I’m clearly not doing a great job.”
“They expected you to babysit all week?” I ask. “Do they think you don’t have a life of your own?”
“No, no, it’s fine,” he says. “They’re good kids. The daughter especially — Shayla. Straight-A student. Going to NYU in the fall. They’re probably just playing board games.” He sits up straighter. “Why? What did you see out there? Did it look like a wild rager?”
“Uh…” I consider telling him about how they are most definitely not playing board games, but then I remind myself that a normal eighteen-year-old probably wouldn’t just feed an adult that kind of information. It would be like “ratting them out” or whatever. So for the sake of my relationship with Kayak Guy, I keep my mouth shut. “Yeah, no. It totally looked like a Scrabble situation.”
“You should go over there,” he says. “You were always great at that game.”
Was I? I remember the vibe of our Scrabble nights back at the town house — sitting around the ottoman, laughing at Marco’s dumb jokes, him putting his arm around Mom (before she started to recoil at the gesture) — but I don’t remember actually playing. I was probably too busy dreading going back to school on Monday and facing my bullies.
“We’ve had a long day,” Mom explains on my behalf. “I don’t know if Joey is up for crashing a party full of people he doesn’t know.”
“Sure he is.” Marco is clearly trying to work this as an angle to get Mom all to himself for the rest of the night. He’s giving off a very distinct I-live-in-total-seclusion-and-haven’t-gotten-laid-in-months energy. “I know Shayla. Joey, you’re gonna love her. And I’m sure her friends are great.”
“I’ll totally go,” I respond — much to my own astonishment. “Why not?”
“Really?” Mom asks.
“Sure.” I take a breath and start brainstorming ways to make Kayak Guy fall in love with me. “After another glass of wine.” I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the big lake window. “And a shower.”