Page 34 of For Pleasure Or Worse

“Call me old school, but I think this is your calling.”

“You think so until you taste my cooking, and then you’ll be begging me to leave dinner to the professionals.”

“You’re a natural,” I assured her. “How hard can it be? Three ingredients: meat, sauce, pasta.”

“That’s easy to say when your mother never made you cook a day in your life.”

“I have cooked the most delicious MREs anyone has ever eaten.”

She deadpanned, “You microwaved dehydrated cat food?”

“It counts.”

Tally shuffled out of my arms and stacked a few blue boxes of pasta on top of one another on the counter, then took our largest pot over to the sink and started filling it with water. My mom appeared in the archway to the kitchen as soon as she heard the burner click on and a flame spark to life on the stove, like a cat reacting to the jingle of a bell.

“Need any help cooking, honey?”

Tally shook her head. “Absolutely not. You just sit back and relax.”

Mom didn’t look at me. Instead, she pulled a stool out from underneath the breakfast bar and watched disparagingly as Tally moved around the room from fridge to counter and back again, shaking with the need to stick her fingers in a can of Tuttorosso.

The sliding glass door opened from the backyard and my father stepped into the house in nothing but a pair of board shorts and a fanny pack barely visible below his beer gut. In the couple weeks since my parents had arrived his skin had gone from cream to leather after spending hours outside. He crossed the living room, whistling to himself, and started pressing buttons on the wall thermostat.

“Jesus Christ, Dad, you want to put some fucking clothes on?”

He ignored me as he squinted at the small display screen and turned the air conditioning down several notches.

We were used to the temperature being set at a comfortable seventy-two degrees, but lately waking up in the mornings the wood floors were too cold to walk around on with bare feet and I’d had to take my robe out of retirement in the closet. I checked the thermostat when my father refocused his attention on finding a bottle of cabernet from the wine rack nearby, and noticed he’d reset the system to keep the house at a cool sixty-seven.

Little changes like that had started piling up around the house in seemingly inconsequential ways and making our perfectly controlled living situation more aggravatingly intolerable. Like the furniture being moved so that the recliner sat more to the left, easier for my father to see the television while he watched baseball. The mugs in the cabinet had all been shifted down a shelf to accommodate Mom’s five-foot frame. The hallway bathroom now had plastic storage draped over the back of the door full of pill bottles and toiletries that rattled whenever you opened it. Small, innocuous, bemoaning things I had to give up so I didn’t look insane.

I made a show of punching the keypad back to a livable number and my dad’s jaw twitched as he ground his teeth together.

“Mateo, grab another glass for your mom, please.” Tally flung open a drawer in the kitchen and quickly tossed a bottle opener to me as the water in the pot on the stove started bubbling. I stuck a tongue in my cheek and carried a pair of tall wine glasses to the table, stabbing a cork into the burgundy wine and twisting it open reluctantly, only for my mother to swivel in the opposite direction, right in time to see Natalia crack the long pasta in half over the pot and let it fall in.

A sound of agony tumbled out of my mother and her hand settled over her chest like a knife had just gone through it. I didn’t know anything about cooking, but I knew snapping raw spaghetti like the spine of a book was sacrilegious.

My mother meandered off the barstool and migrated next to Natalia, so I shuffled closer too, leaning on the countertop beside her, feeling protective and equally on guard. I was stressing myself out waiting for a problem to arise. External conflict, I could do. Emotional disputes made my skin prickle with something between a sweat and an itch, and my familybrought it on in spades. Natalia’s shoulders tensed to her ears and she quickly covered the boiling pasta.

“Ma, you’re smothering her,” I said harshly. My mother’s light eyes cut to mine and a swallow lodged in my throat.

“I'm fine. Just taking it one step at a time.” Tally let out a nervous laugh, but her neck was blooming in red patches beneath her sweater. “I've actually never cooked for a crowd before, if you couldn’t tell." She hip-checked me out of her way then and began rooting around in the low cabinet I had been standing in front of, pulling a large frying pan out and swatting off some residual dust with her sleeve.

I clapped my cold hand over the back of her neck to give her some relief and support. "You're doing great." My control was slipping, though. I could try to mitigate calmly, but there was nothing that could get my mother to sit the fuck down and let Tally cook besides physically removing her from the kitchen. She was overwhelming to govern on a normal day, but on top of that was the egregious silent treatment.

What did they want me to do? Apologize for Angelo? Get on my knees and beg for a second chance at being a perfect son? Demote Pike back to a groomsman? Unfortunately I knew the answer, and it was all of the above.

Natalia pulled a tray of pre-rolled, store-bought meatballs from the fridge and Mom croaked. A literal frog-worthy bellow. All because they weren’t made from scratch with the tears of a thousand ancestral Italian women and a recipe handwritten on a piece of decaying paper shoved into the back of a junk drawer somewhere.

“You okay, Ma?” I dared her to say something. “They look just like yours.”

A retort was on the tip of her tongue, but instead she bit it so hard she probably drew blood. She turned away from me and satback down at the end of the table farthest from the stove with a sulk twisting her face that set me off.

“Angelo isn’t ignoring me. I don’t know why you still are,” I said, shrugging. “He’s totally fine with not being the best man, and that should be enough for you, too. Nobody’s even going to notice, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”

Natalia started slowly placing the meatballs evenly apart from each other on the sizzling pan, and the television clicked on in the living room with a playoff football game screaming. A dull thud started spreading across my temples, different than a normal headache, though. I could pick apart every sound in the room. The arms on my watch ticking, Tally's slippers shuffling across the tile, my mother gnawing on the inside of her cheek to spite me, the pattering of my quickened pulse. Everything hit me at once.

Mom pulled her pocketbook across the counter toward her and started rummaging through it, adding to the noise, until she found what she was looking for. She unfurled a piece of paper the length of a drugstore receipt.

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