Page 82 of A Lot Like Adiós
Oh yeah. He is.
Chapter 19
The next morning, Michelle gave Gabe the keys to her Fiat so he could visit his sister in Yonkers, then she met up with her parents in the lobby to ride back to the Bronx in their van. It was less than ideal, since her mother spent most of the drive talking about howthrilledshe was Michelle and Gabe had finally gotten together.
“I always knew,” Valentina kept saying in a smug voice.
“Well, I didn’t,” Michelle finally grumbled from the middle-row bucket seat, and her father took that opportunity to turn the music up.
Michelle tried to numb out to Bon Jovi’s greatest hits, but she couldn’t stop replaying the things she and Gabe had said to each other the night before.
I missed you. Every day.
Why does this feel so right?
Let it be real.
When they drove up to the house, Michelle spotted a blue Prius parked out front, and Ava’s white Toyota across the street. She groaned.
“Why did we ever give Ava a set of keys?”
“For emergencies,” her mother replied. After all this time, Valentina thought nothing of coming home and finding the Primas of Power in her house.
Michelle’s father had a different reaction. “I’ll be in the basement. You can all go yell at each other upstairs.”
After an extended period of time with the Rodriguezes, Dominic Amato usually needed some alone time. And he often complained Michelle and her cousins were “too loud” when they got together. But then, he said the same thing about his wife and her siblings.
“As if your Italian family is any quieter,” Michelle retorted. Her dad sighed and pulled into the driveway.
Inside the house, Michelle found her cousins sipping coffee at the dining table. “Upstairs,” she said. As they trooped past her parents, Ava and Jasmine leaned in to give their tía and tío kisses on the cheek, then followed Michelle upstairs.
“Oh hey, coffee,” Dominic said from behind them.
“That’s for you, Tío,” Ava called.
“Grazie, Ava!”
Michelle ushered them into the craft room, which she’d cleaned up before driving upstate the day before. It had occurred to her at the last minute that her parents would expect her to be sleeping in the same room as Gabe. She wasn’t thrilled about it—sleeping in separate beds had been the last remaining wall she’d kept up against him—but she hadn’t seen a way around it.
The hotel room had been different. She wouldn’t be returning there, and it had been like a getaway, time out of time. Sharing her brother’s old room with Gabe was going to be weird.
As soon as the primas were all seated in the craft room with the door closed—Michelle and Jasmine on the bed, Ava in Valentina’s ergonomic crafting chair—Jasmine started in.
“I can’t believe you kept this from me, especially when Ava already knew.”
“Ava wasn’t supposed to know either,” Michelle grumbled. “Nobody was.”
“That’s not the point.I’mnot allowed to have any secrets about my relationships.”
“No, you’re just terrible at keeping secrets, so it’s easier to pull them out of you all at once instead of waiting for you to spill them drop by drop.” Michelle didn’t comment on Jasmine’s breakup the previous year, which had been splashed all over the celebrity gossip rags. That would’ve been a low blow, and it wasn’t Jasmine’s fault.
Ava, ever the peacemaker, intervened. “Michelle, we’re just worried.”
“And we want to know what’s going on.” Jasmine leaned forward, cupping her mug with both hands. “You’veneverbrought someone to meet the family. You don’t even talk about dating. And then you show up withGabe, of all people?”
“You told me the other day he was here to work on a project,” Ava prompted.
“If he’s here to work on a project, why parade him around the party like that?” Jasmine asked, bewildered. Michelle couldn’t blame her for being confused.
