“You two have put me through hell this week,” Nonna moans from the driver’s seat of her car. I knew she was being too quiet at that lunch. “God only knows what would be happening right now if you didn’t —”
“I’m sorry,” Mom cuts her off from the passenger seat. “You have no idea how sorry I am. I messed up big-time. Huge.” She pauses in thought for a moment. “And I didn’t mean to say what I said about Dad before. That wasn’t right. I’m sorry about that, too.”
Nonna catches, holds, and releases her breath.
“Your father wasn’t a bad man,” she finally tells Mom. “I know you always thought he was some kind of monster just because he was… direct. But he loved you. He just didn’t know how to raise a girl.”
“Direct?” Mom asks. “The man was a fucking dictator —”
“Gianna.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom repeats. Her new slogan. “I just thought you should have at least stood up for yourself more. That’s all. But what do I know?”
“Nothing,” Nonna says. Her expression in the rearview mirror has a wistful quality to it. I think she might actually agree with Mom a little bit. She’s just too proud to admit it. “You know nothing.”
Their mini-spat lingers in the air for a few minutes before Nonna sages it clean with the radio. Dean Martin’s smooth voice calms us all down. I gaze out at the side of the highway. It looks different today. The blur of trees and smokestacks out the window captures my attention for a moment. There’s a sense of tranquility to the motion.
I look down at my refurbished replacement phone as the number of unread texts balloons into the double digits. It was activated at the Sprint store five minutes ago and has only just now finished loading.
Most of these are from Luke and Will. It’s like I’ve been at the center of a melodramatic love triangle this whole time and had no idea. Luke’s texts come in three distinct varieties, apparently depending on the time and/or his mood over the past few days.
The first one is concerned:
LUKE: I just wanna know you’re ok
LUKE: this is scaring me
LUKE: Did you turn off your number or something?
The second one is incensed:
LUKE: I can’t help you if you keep IGNORING me
LUKE: WHAT THE HELL?
LUKE: YOU AND YOUR MOM ARE BOTH FUCKING PSYCHO
LUKE: I fucked up
LUKE: you don’t have to forgive me
LUKE: but I really am sorry
Seeing all of these come in at once makes him seem… honestly? Crazy.
The irony is so delicious it makes the cheesecake I ate earlier seem like cardboard. He’s so desperate for the last word. For my attention. I spent ten months making him the center of it — and now that I’ve withheld it for five days, he’s completely lost his mind. Who knew I had so much power this whole time? I decide to throw him one final bone in the name of closure.
ME: sorry about your car
ME: bye luke
Will’s texts are of an entirely different breed:
WILL: I feel bad about how we ended things
WILL: Can we talk?
WILL: Coming back to NY tomorrow
WILL: would love to start over with you in “real life” lol
WILL: Laugh Loft in the West Village on Saturday???
WILL: Ok I’ll stop harassing you now
I get butterflies at the thought of seeing him again. Memories from the lake gently crash into me like waves. I consider texting him back with a long-winded apology and an enthusiastic yes to the comedy club invitation, but then I remember we can’t leave the state of New Jersey. Fuck. How do I even begin to explain that to him?
Before I can think of any ideas, Nonna turns the radio back down like she has an announcement to make.
“I threw a chicken at him once.” She takes her eyes off the road for just a second to look at Mom. Probably checking her face for signs of life. “Your father.”
“You did what?” Mom asks.
I echo her reaction from my post in the backseat.
“I think you were at cheerleading camp,” Nonna says. “Or maybe sleeping over with that blond girl in Montclair.”
“Brittany,” Mom says. “Okay…”
“You know how your father loved my chicken cacciatore?” Nonna says. “I made it for him at least once a week. But there was this one day! I was just tired. So I figured, ‘What the hell? It’s only the two of us.’ I ordered a small pie from Da Vinci’s. I wasn’t even hungry myself.” She clenches her teeth. “Well. He gets home from work and the first thing out of his mouth is, ‘Where’s my chicken?’ I told him, ‘We’re havin’ pizza instead.’ Madon’ — you’d think I had just kicked him in the coglioni.”
Her delivery of that last line makes me laugh.
“So he starts hollering at me,” Nonna continues. “How dare I don’t make him a homemade meal like his mother always used to do, right? So he goes in the fridge and pulls out the chicken I bought that week. He slams it on the counter and unwraps it. A whole chicken.”
She stops herself for a moment, like maybe she doesn’t want to keep going.
But she does. “Normally I would have just made it to shut him up. But I don’t know what got into me. I turned around and screamed right back at him. I said, ‘You want your chicken? Here it is!’ And I picked it up — this raw chicken. And I threw it as hard as I could.” She laughs to herself. “Right at his face.”
Mom whips her head around and shoots me a look of disbelief.
And then we both crack up like a pair of hyenas.
“You threw a raw chicken at his face?” I ask. “Was he okay?”
“Poor bastard got salmonella poisoning.” She does the sign of the cross with her non-wheel hand, I assume to apologize to Jesus for calling her dead husband a bastard. “Otherwise he was fine.”
“I can’t breathe.” I keep seeing this mental image of Nonna — even-keeled, level-headed Nonna! — winding up her arm like a softball pitcher and hurling a whole-ass chicken at Nonno’s face. Or maybe it was more of a two-handed granny throw? I suppose she is a grandmother. “I’m gonna need more details on the mechanics of the throw.”
“It wasn’t a big chicken,” Nonna says. As if that should tell me everything I need to know. “Probably a two-pounder.”
“You are a crazy bitch!” Mom is still laughing and wheezing. “And you’ve been over here scolding us all day for what we did.”
“I threw a chicken!” Nonna protests. “I didn’t burn down a house.” She straightens her posture and raises her chin in pride. “There’s a difference.”
“Touché, Ma.” Mom’s wheeze slopes down into a sigh. “Tou-fuckin’-ché.”