Her parents allowed Rosa to move back to her old bedroom, with the stipulations that she do her own cooking and cleaning and laundry, and pay them two hundred dollars a month in rent. For the duration of her pregnancy, Rosa worked the kinds of jobs you could get with a high school diploma. She waitressed, she cleaned homes and office buildings; she worked as a cashier at a drugstore. At home, she took her high school posters off the wall and put up pictures of the alphabet, and Mickey and Minnie Mouse. She replaced her vanity with a changing table and her desk with a secondhand crib. She bought a mobile that sent pink butterflies swirling to the tune of the “Blue Danube” waltz when you wound it up. She filled her dresser with miniature pink and white onesies and socks no bigger than her thumb. She found a Bugaboo stroller on Craigslist, and rented a fancy breast pump from the hospital. She was ready for her princess to come home.
Then Gabe had arrived… and Rosa, who’d been so convinced she was having a daughter that she hadn’t asked for an ultrasound, had, for the first time in her life, fallen in love. From the minute she’d held her son, tracing his full cheeks, the snub of his nose, his bowed lips, touching the dark curls covering his head, she’d felt something inside of her shift. It was what you felt, she thought later, when you gave your heart away, the click you experienced when your focus changed completely. The moment she held her son in her arms was the moment she became an adult.
Gabe was her angel, her darling, a sweet-natured, easygoing baby who was happy to be held, eager to nurse, and content when he dropped off to sleep, lying in his crib, staring at the glittery butterflies, or being pushed along the sidewalks in his pink stroller, which Rosa couldn’t afford to replace. By the end of the first month of his life, he’d thawed his grandma’s heart sufficiently that she was willing to give up two of her casino days to stay home and care for him. Rosa’s dad was similarly enchanted. At night, he’d sit on the couch in front of the TV with the baby beside him, tucked under his arm, explaining the finer points of the professional wrestling match on the screen to his grandson, who’d sit, content, gnawing at his fist and seeming to pay attention. Even Mandy was willing to give up a few hours of her busy social life to stay home with Gabe on a Saturday night.
With that patchwork of family assistance in place, Rosa navigated Gabe’s infancy and toddlerhood. She got a job at a steakhouse frequented by wealthy industry types, who’d tip lavishly when you remembered their names and their drink orders. She told herself that she hadn’t given up, that she’d start auditioning again someday, but someday never came, and Rosa was only occasionally regretful. How could she be sorry when she got to spend her days with her gorgeous, sweet, bighearted boy?
When he was three, Rosa enrolled Gabe in preschool at a local synagogue, where Gabe learned his ABCs, his shapes, and his colors, along with, to Rosa’s amusement, the Hebrew blessings for bread and wine and the prayers for Shabbat.
Gabe had started talking late, but when he spoke, it was in complete and thoughtful sentences. By four, he’d learned to read, and he read voraciously—street signs, cereal boxes, movie posters, and any book Rosa would hand him. He had a lovely, clear singing voice, and, with his huge brown eyes and glossy dark curls, he was so handsome that strangers would stop them on the street to ask if he’d ever modeled, or if he’d be interested in acting. Rosa would accept their praise and their business cards politely, then toss them as soon as she could. Having been through the scrutiny and rejection herself, the last thing she wanted to do was subject her son, her darling, to that kind of pain.
As he got older, Gabe’s essential nature never changed. If anything, with each year that passed he became more kind and empathetic, more amiable and good-natured, as lovely on the inside as he was on the outside. Mami, how was your day? he’d ask when he came home from school. He’d sit at the kitchen counter, and, wondrously, he’d actually listen when she told him, which made him unlike the majority of the boys and men she’d ever known.
By the time Gabe was in fourth grade, Rosa had enrolled in nursing school, and had saved enough money to move them into a one-bedroom apartment, an easy walk from her parents’ house. Gabe had the bedroom, where there was a little bookshelf and space for his toys, and a desk where he could do his homework. Rosa slept on a pullout couch in the living room. She didn’t mind. She hadn’t dated since her return from Los Angeles. She didn’t mind that, either. Even though she could feel men’s eyes on her, even though she’d been asked out by coworkers and bosses and Gabe’s math teacher on Parents’ Night at the school, by customers and fellow commuters and strangers on the street—she wasn’t interested; nor did she feel lonely or deprived. Gabe was all she needed. Everything was for him.