Gino’s short frame toddled to the edge of the property line and I looked over as he tended to several buckets of plush red tomato plants. The man was fully dressed and put together. Beige slacks and a red button-down tucked into them. Brown belt, brown shoes, the Catholic cross hanging around his neck.
“Merry Christmas,” I returned. “Going somewhere?”
“Church.”
“Ah, right. My mom will be on her way there soon, too.”
Gino assessed me with squinted eyes. Crow’s feet stretched at the corners and wrinkles ran like crop lines across his forehead. I hadn’t gotten too good a look at myself, but if Gino’s expression were a mirror I’d say I looked fucked. Literally, physically.
I instinctually ran my fingers through my hair to tame it and crossed my arms over my bare chest.
“No church for you?” he asked, continuing to spin and pick the ripe fruit, placing them in a yellow speckled bowl.
I looked back at the house. “I have some company.”
Gino hummed. “You’re in love.”
“I wouldn’t say love.” I quipped.
“What is it then?”
The mug I was holding was scalding my palm, but that was more comfortable than trying to classify my relationship with Ophelia to the prying old man that lived next door.
I’d never had a conversation about relationships with someone outside my buddies. It was easy to talk about sex—locker room shit, the tasteless back and forth I never felt fully comfortable participating in but learned to live with, especially in the Army.
My father passed before I had my first kiss. The one time I got caught with my dick in my hand my mother cried every time she looked at me for three days. When I was fifteen I asked a girl to homecoming and the next day there was a box of Trojans on my nightstand and we never spoke about it again. The familial history I had with intimacy was thereby nonexistent.
“It’s just fun.” I shrugged complacently. “I’m figuring it out.”
“You’re too old for just fun, Francesco.”
My eyebrows inched together and I perched my arms on the top of the fence. “I’m thirty-five,” I stressed. “Why has every time I’ve talked to someone in the last few weeks felt like watching my life fall through an hourglass?”
“Because you finally found a person that makes it feel like exactly that.”
I opened my mouth to argue but my jaw snapped right back shut.
“You know.” Gino abandoned his tomatoes and pointed a finger at the center of his chest. “You know right here when it’s right, because it starts to hurt. Even when you’re happy, it hurts. Because it aches to imagine not having that happiness. You worry, you lose sleep, you act out. Anything to keep that feeling from becoming comfortable. When you can bear it, it’s lost.”
My teeth caught raw flesh on the inside of my cheek as a half-circle of sun peeked over the palm trees, cold air dissipating into a band of warmth. “She doesn’t live here,” I found myself saying.
“Home is subjective.” He waved my words out of the air. “A smell, a place, a feeling, a memory. A person.”
“Sounds great.” My smile didn’t reach my eyes. “And easy. Things for me are never that easy.”
The world around us yawned, dark blue skies bleeding into cobalt like God turned a dial. Bird song became background music, damp grass dried beneath my feet. The glass door at the back of Gino’s house slid open and a sweet face peered out at the two of us.
“I’ve been married fifty-three years.” The old man stuck his shears in a garden tote and tucked the bowl of tomatoes underneath his arm. “Not one day has been easy. But every single one has been worth it. You do good by them, be a good man, a good lover, a faithful partner, a solid wall. So what she doesn’t live here—because that would be easy, eh? Easy is comfortable.”
Gino took a few steps toward his house as his wife came out onto the stone patio and waved to me. She was too far away to hear the last notes of conversation. “Does your chest hurt, Francesco?”
I inhaled, dragging my fingers across the plane of my chest, sticking them like little daggers into the cavity, almost forcing myself to feel something.
Pain. Discomfort. A pulse.
The fact that I was begging myself to react at all told a silent secret. The person I was around Ophelia would know the answer to that question right away. He was like an open book, feeling things to extremes, without remorse, without embarrassment. She was like a master key to my psyche.
By the time I stopped trying to decipher pain from placebo, Gino was guiding his wife by the small of her back into their house. I was alone again in the backyard, my coffee was cold, and my head was spinning like a carousel.
I didn’t want to imagine a Christmas morning ever again that didn’t look like this one. Waking up next to her, soft, sensual sex, coffee on the patio. Then deep inside my mind I imagined something more than that. A big, lazy dog hanging out at the foot of our bed, a clan of kids crashing through the bedroom door in their Christmas pjs. Santa came, Dad. Santa came.
My throat dried like a fucking tumbleweed. Was that what was missing? My own family to care for the way I did best? A purpose beyond working and providing for the people around me and never myself? The only thing that would ever truly slow me the fuck down.
My perspective had shifted into a completely different realm. I used to be content being stagnant; now I wanted a life I’d thought up so badly it felt like I would never know happiness until I had it.
She was doing this to me. Everything I was learning about myself started and ended with Ophelia—I wasn’t so naive to deny it. One day I’d look back and thank the higher powers for sending her into my life, even just passing through, because it was exactly what I needed when I didn’t think I needed anything at all.
29
I’d never seen a better-looking piece of meat in my entire life. Thick, pink, and round, juices dripping out of every pore onto my careful fingers. I took an innocent look around the room, biting my lip before bringing them to my mouth for a sly taste. Salty tang exploded on my tongue.
God. I groaned as my nostrils flared. That’s fucking delicious.
I admired it a minute longer—the girth, the weight, the way it sweated under the bright lights. I pulled out my phone and took a picture. Even put that shit on portrait mode because what was in front of me was nothing less than a piece of modern art. I captioned it Ophelia’s Meat braggingly, and sent the image away in a group text.
Then, just like my mother always taught me, in a tragically Shakesperean show—I stabbed the fucker.
Then I stabbed it again with a giddy smile and wooden toothpick pierced with a round ring of pineapple and maraschino cherry.
The famous Brody family Christmas ham.
Pride blossomed in my chest at the perfectly roasted, dressed, and tended dinner I’d prepared for our little group of four. I’d never cooked for a holiday; I wasn’t even confident I could pull it off by myself with the scarce directions in the string of half-assed text messages from my mother. Autocorrect repelled her on her most focused days, never mind Christmas morning with pre-teens.
Growing up Mom had a very specific way of doing things, and you either followed directions or got swatted out of the kitchen by a wet dish towel. I learned my lesson early on that the latter wasn’t worth the former. But as an adult, spending my very first Christmas away from the familiar doily-lined tablecloth, I was testing my ability to extend all these traditions.