Page 26 of She Used to Be Nice
She put her hand back in her lap, the smile lingering. “Is that your next question?”
Pete draped his arm over the back of the couch. “Okay, here’s a real question. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Really? Aren’t we already grown up?”
“I mean, yes, technically. But I’m still trying to eat more vegetables and submit my tax forms on time. I’m a bad grown-up.”
Avery nodded in agreement. She’d only recently learned what a 401(k) was. “True. I guess when I grow up I want to be a writer.” She squirmed in her seat, regretting the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. Too much. She’d revealed too much. She worked with so many writers but was too nervous to enter a pitch meeting for reasons she was nowhere near ready to tell Pete. She never should’ve brought this up.
“A writer, huh?” Pete eyed her curiously, intrigued. “What do you want to write about?”
“I don’t know. Anything.” Avery ran her palm over the silky couch, watching the fabric darken, before pivoting the attention away from her. “What about you?”
“I want to work in music. Maybe producing or marketing. But I feel the corporate world sinking its teeth into me, like it’s done to my dad.” Pete sighed wistfully. “He’s never home and always complains that he wished he had more free time to spend with family or to golf. But he doesn’t know how to get out. I’m not sure how I’ll get out either. I’m only an analyst, so I’m pretty low on the ladder, but already I’m so overwhelmed all the time.”
Pete gazed at Avery with his hands wrapped around his beer bottle. Avery could tell by the softness in his voice that that wasn’t something he told a lot of people. The weight of that responsibility sat heavily on her shoulders. This was getting way too intimate.
“Yeah,” was all she could say.
Pete fiddled with the sticker on his beer bottle. “My coworkers and I talk about quitting and, like, moving to Brazil or something all the time. You ever think that? Just leaving everything behind and starting over?”
More than anything,Avery thought, but she took a long sip of beer to put off saying that out loud. That conversation would be dangerous, would risk Pete learning more about her than she was comfortable with him knowing. She was already grateful he didn’t remember her from college and they could start fresh. She didn’t need to allude to that part of her life now, or ever.
Luckily she was saved from responding by the sound of a garage door rumbling in the distance. Avery heard a key jimmy into a lock, then a few doors slam shut. “Pete?” an older woman’s voice called out. “You home?”
“Who’s that?” Avery asked. Pete hadn’t mentioned any visitors.
Pete whirled his head around, then took a deep breath. “One second.” He set his drink down on the coffee table and sprintedaway. The sound of muffled voices drifted into the living room, growing louder until a middle-aged man and woman stood in the door frame. Next to them, Pete’s face was splotchy and red.
“So, Avery …” He scratched his head. “These are my parents.”
Avery’s lower jaw practically unhinged from its socket. She shot a glance at the front door, ready to make a run for it. “Oh,” she said. She racked her brain for a more cohesive thought, but the next most intelligent thing she could think of was, “Hello.”
Pete lived with hisparents. How had she not noticed that? Did she honestly think a guy’s apartment would be this clean and orderly? The apartments of most guys she’d met in the city were usually in disarray, with beige L-shaped couches covered in mysterious stains, video game consoles overflowing from beneath television stands, containers of Muscle Milk taking up all the counter space in the kitchen. She should’ve known.
“You guys want some cantaloupe?” Pete’s mom asked in her thick Staten Island accent as Pete’s dad gave Avery a quick hello before heading upstairs to do some work. Avery watched Pete watch his father disappear, a forlorn look on his face.
Then he shrugged in Avery’s direction. “Well, do you?” he asked.
Avery studied Pete’s mom as she shuffled around the kitchen, which was decorated in that Tuscan style of sand-colored furnishings and grapes everywhere—another clue that this apartment did not belong to a twenty-something man. With her long French-manicured nails and highlighted hair, Pete’s mom looked exactly like the women back home in New Jersey, who’d wear heels and a full face of makeup just to go to the grocery store. Pete’s mom caught Avery’s eye as she set the container of cantaloupe on the wooden kitchen table. Avery found herself smiling, comforted by this woman’s presence. Staten Island and New Jersey, certain parts at least, were similar in a lot of ways, most notably their strong populations of loud, fussy Italian-Americans. Pete’s family seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Avery’s, and right now his motherreminded her of home, of her life before college. A life she didn’t need to spend forgetting. A life she was excited about, even, when she dreamed about finding someone with whom she could share the kind of special romantic bond her parents had. Whether it was fate or a coincidence that Pete’s family culture mirrored hers, she wasn’t sure, but she allowed herself to feel a small thrill about the similarities.
Avery joined Pete and his mother at the table. The bowl of bright orange cantaloupe sat in the middle beside a stack of plates and a row of forks.
Avery gestured toward the utensils. “Can you please pass me a plate, Mrs.… uh …”
“DeFranco,” Pete said with a pointed grin.
“Yes, of course,” Pete’s mom said. “And you can call me Gina, honey.”
Avery helped herself to some cantaloupe and took a bite. It was delicious. “Gina. Got it.”
“So, where you coming from, Avery? You live in Manhattan?”
Avery nodded.
“Your parents from New York, too?” Gina asked. “Any siblings?”
“I have a younger brother, Hunter,” Avery said. “And I grew up in New Jersey. But my parents did the whole Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey trek, so we still have family here.”
