My sweatpants are muddy and my face is all cry-snotty when we get back to the house. Even after all that rain, I’m still not clean.
It doesn’t help that Marco is here, drinking a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and reading a newspaper at the kitchen table as if it’s just another morning.
“You two all right?” he asks. Hearing his voice makes last night’s fight come rushing back to me all at once. “It’s really coming down hard out there.”
“We’re fine,” Mom lies.
“Just a little wet.” I motion toward the bathroom door. “I’m gonna go take a shower.”
“And get more wet?” Marco jokes.
I force the fakest closed-lipped smile in the history of fake closed-lipped smiles and excuse myself to the bathroom. I wanna be scalded.
My hand cranks the faucet all the way to the hot side. I wait until the air outside the curtain is clouded with steam before stepping in. The fiberglass surface of the tub transports me back to the scene at Richard’s house on Monday night. Why did his stupid-ass bathtub have to melt the second it was exposed to a little bit of fire? Why couldn’t he have just had a combination shower-tub like everyone else in the world? If there had been a showerhead to turn on, Mom and I could have easily drowned the flames out with cold water like we did at Leo’s. Richard would have come home to find the ashes of a few dress shirts and the charred underwire of Big Tits McGhee’s bra — nothing a trip to the mall couldn’t fix. But no. He just had to have a five-piece master bathroom — and now Mom and I have warrants out for our arrest because of it.
By the time I step back out onto the damp bath rug, I instinctively reach for a towel so I can dry my hands and check my ph — oh. Right. This is probably gonna happen a lot today.
I try not to think about all the texts and calls — many of which probably contain clues of our fate — that are just floating around in the ether right now without a destination. Where do those even go? What happens after a phone drowns and a new one isn’t activated in its place?
I miss Nonna. I wanted to call her from Marco’s landline phone to at least let her know we’re alive, but Mom shot the idea down during our death march back up to the house. The cops could have bugged her phone by now. They do stuff like that, right? Still. I want to assure her we’re okay. Even if it’s a lie. She’s already been through so much just raising Mom and then me for the past thirty-four years. The last thing she needs is to be seeing our picture on the news and fielding questions from the cops about why she lent her car to two outlaws. She deserves a quiet, peaceful life filled with espresso and sfogliatelle! Not this trainwreck.
I throw on some jeans and a wrinkled graphic tee from my bag and step out into the living room. The weather took a complete turn — the big window now displays an idyllic sunny day on the water. If the porch and leaves and grass didn’t all have a thick sheen of moisture on them, you might not even know it rained.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask him.
“Shower.” He looks up and gestures toward the master bedroom. “What the heck were you two doing out there?”
“You know.” I scratch the almost-bald back of my head. “Admiring nature.” I chuckle awkwardly and lean against the kitchen sink. “We wanted to know what fresh lake rain feels like.”
“Right.” He furrows his bushy eyebrows at me. “Your mother said it was because you were looking for a pair of sandals she left down by the dock.”
If you already had the answer, why’d you ask? I want to say but of course don’t.
“Oh, yeah.” I nod. Mom’s excuse was so much better than mine. “That, too.”
Marco squints skeptically but moves on.
“Late night yesterday? I didn’t hear you get in. Guess I don’t have to ask whether you and the kids hit it off.”
“I guess we did.” My chest sinks thinking about how I ended things with Will. “Maybe I’ll go back over there today.”
“I’m glad they could take your mind off the breakup.” Marco flashes his pure, innocent, friendly smile. I try to remind myself that he said horrible things to Mom last night and I should be mad at him, but I also feel bad. How could she cheat on him? Of all people. He’s the last guy who deserves that. Is this why she’s since been cursed with an endless supply of Richards and Leos? Did she totally ruin her man-karma? “Sounds like this trip has been a success.”
I almost forgot how much of a gap there is between why Marco thinks we’re here and why we’re actually here. Now I feel even worse for him. I hope he doesn’t get in trouble for harboring us. Between him and Nonna, I’m starting to wonder if we ultimately hit the wrong targets on our revenge streak. The only people who should be feeling like shit right now are Luke and Richard. Not Mom and me and the two people who care about us the most.
“It’s amazing.” Marco grins. “It still feels like yesterday you were an awkward fourth-grader who couldn’t even look at the other kids at school. Let alone make friends with any of them.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” I interrupt. “It’s kind of hard to make friends when you’re being terrorized by —”
“Brooks.” Marco shakes his head. “I remember.”
“It only got a million times worse in middle school,” I share. “In case you were wondering.”
“Damn, really?” His face falls. “I wanted to kill that kid and his stupid little cronies. I went to school with guys just like that. Punks.” He forces a quiet laugh. “Lucky your mom was there to put him in his place, right?”
“Lucky?” I recall that Marco and Mom used to fight about how she needed to be more mature when dealing with my bullying situation. Two wrongs don’t make a right, he used to say. (Clearly the wisdom didn’t stick.) “You hated when she yelled at my bullies.”
“She could have been a little more… composed. Sometimes your mother doesn’t think before she —” he stops himself as if he isn’t sure where the sentence is going. “In retrospect, I’m glad she stood up for you. Someone had to put that little jerk in his place.”
“That she did.” I laugh as I remember this one time she made a whole scene in the parking lot by telling Brooks that his sideburns looked like “a pair of fucking merkins.” I was in sixth grade and learned something new that day: a merkin is a pubic wig. It’s a shame Marco wasn’t around for that one. It was some of her best work.
“I’m rooting for you, Joey.” His tone veers into earnestness. He randomly taps the counter. “Always have been.”
Something about this statement nearly triggers a breakdown. It floods me with a longing for the adolescence I might have had if he and Mom had never broken up. We would have had such a normal life. We would have moved to a new house in a new town where I might have been able to make friends. I would have ended up with a boyfriend ten times better than Luke. I would have had this father figure rooting for me the entire time.
“I heard you guys fighting last night,” I mumble. “I was up in the loft the whole time.”
Marco’s typically relaxed face tenses up and he rubs his forehead, presumably trying to remember all the details, insults, and bombshells flung between them in battle. The air between us is uncomfortably stale. All I can hear is the muffled sound of water rushing through the shower pipes to the master bathroom.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks. “How did we not hear you?”
“You guys were kinda loud.”
“I’m sorry —”
“Did she really cheat on you?” I ask. “She never told me.”
“Joey —”
“You said she’s a bad mother. Do you really believe that?”
“That’s enough.” He stands up. We exchange depressing looks for a few beats of silence until he finally breaks. “Of course I don’t. You know how she gets. She likes to pick fights when she drinks.”
“You didn’t answer my first question. Did she cheat?” I need to hear him say it. Even if they made it painfully clear last night, there’s a sick part of me that wants all the twisted details. I need to know if it was just a drunken mistake that she confessed to immediately. Or if she was living a full-on double life just like all the men we’ve ever hated. “Did she? How many times? How did you find out?”
“Jesus, Joey. Don’t you realize how fucked up this conversation is?”
I don’t respond.
Once again all we can hear is the sound of the pipes. I make a mental note to keep paying attention to it so I know when to end this conversation. Lest we risk her getting out of the shower and hearing us.
“This is exactly what I was trying to say to her last night,” Marco continues. “You shouldn’t care about these things! You’ve always been so invested in her relationships. That’s not healthy. How she and I broke up is more complicated and adult than you —”
“Spare me the maturity lecture, please.” My cheeks flush with anger. It’s not surprising to hear him claim that their breakup was too “adult” for me to understand, but what kills me is that Mom has apparently felt the same way all along. She kept this from me like I was just a kid — all while pretending we were equals. “I am an adult.”
“You were ten when I left.” He’s already contradicting the version of events I’ve heard my entire life. It was supposed to be Mom who left. She no longer felt the spark. “For what it’s worth, I am surprised she didn’t tell you.” He pauses and then scoffs. “But of course she wouldn’t tell the one story that doesn’t end with poor Gia, helpless victim.”
“I deserve to know what really happened,” I assert. “I don’t know why you think that just because I was ten, I shouldn’t have known what was going on in my own mom’s life.”
“Because I know what it was like to have an actual childhood!” he says. “And it always killed me to think you couldn’t.”
“Well that ship has fucking sailed, hasn’t it? So you might as well just give me the courtesy of the truth.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” he says. “What kind of kid talks like this? You sound exactly like her.”
Now I’m the one who’s scoffing.
“Maybe because I’m not a kid!”
“You wanna know?” He throws his hands up. “Fine. I was gonna ask her to marry me. She didn’t tell you that? I had a ring. Your nonna gave me her blessing. I left work early to go surprise Gia at the salon — and I get there and they tell me it’s her day off. She told me she was working a double.” Now he’s tearing up. “So I go home and the first thing I see is some guy’s SUV in the driveway.” He wipes off the two and a half teardrops he just let himself cry and composes himself. “And I just knew.”
My heart races as the blanks fill themselves in. Leo drove an SUV. Mom started dating him shortly after breaking up with Marco. A year later, she caught him cheating. I remember it all so vividly — how we trashed his condo and burned his jerseys. How the glow of the flames was no match for the aura of Mom’s pain.
I had no idea that Marco was in just as much — if not more — pain of his own. How did she feel entitled to any semblance of rage after what she did to him?
“You couldn’t just know,” I attempt. “It could have been anybody’s truck. It could have been —”
“I went inside,” he solemnly finishes. “I saw them.”
So much for that theory. Not that I believed it or anything.
“I don’t get it. Why have you been telling her you miss her all this time? Why are you even letting us stay here right now?”
“I don’t know, Joey. Because I love her.” He lowers his head in shame. “I never stopped loving her.”
“You said last night that love is wasted on her.”
“I didn’t mean that.” He sighs. “I really think she’s a good person. She’s just been through a lot. Our relationship is complicated.”
Jesus. He sounds like… her. All those times she’s held on for too long while whatever dirtbag she’d been seeing repeatedly fucked her over. Making excuses for inexcusable behavior while we drown ourselves in tears and wine on the couch. It occurs to me that Nonna was absolutely right the other day. Men are weak. They’re just better at not admitting it.
“Cheating is still cheating,” I mutter. The shower pipes come to an abrupt stop, whooshing the room into total silence. “And you deserve better.”