Page 41 of Boss of the Year

“That’s reality,” Lea corrected glumly as she started on the eggplant.

“Is there anything I can do to help? Things might get better here now that I’m back. Joni and I will take care of you. It’s our turn.”

Lea’s eyes filled with tears unexpectedly. My tough-as-nails sister. The one who never cried. “It’s not, but I appreciate it anyway.”

We might have hugged, but she turned right back to the eggplant to finish slicing in silence. I was about to start on another tomato when I noticed a letter pinned to the fridge by a magnet. A cream-colored envelope bearing rough, awkward script I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, sent from the Albion Correctional Facility.

“Mami wrote you?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh. Um, yeah. After I contacted her probation officer to let her know about Mike.” Lea shrugged, like talking to our estranged mother meant nothing. “I guess she doesn’t have a phone right now.”

I hadn’t seen our mother, Guadalupe Ortiz Zola, since I was barely two, and Joni was just fourteen months. That was when she’d gone to prison for her third DWI, which caused death of our father. The judge had thrown the book at her, which was why she’d gotten out just a few years ago. Lea and Frankie were the only ones who had given her the time of day, connections that were short-lived after Mami tried to blackmail Frankie and her husband, Xavier, for money.

She continued with the occasional outreach, but Lea was the only one who tried to maintain at least some relationship withher. As far as I knew, our mother—if you could even give that title to a woman who had effectively abandoned her children for liquor—had lived in transitional housing near Hunts Point before moving to an apartment in the same neighborhood, where she worked as a bodega clerk.

Part of me felt sorry for her. Her life had amounted to very little, and she had almost nothing to call her own, especially when only one of her six kids spoke to her. The other part of me, a part I didn’t like to acknowledge, hated the woman. Pain gnawed at the memory of being one of the only kids in my class who didn’t have a mother or a father. Seeing the crumpled gray letters arrive occasionally on holidays and birthdays, but which grew less frequent the older we got. Realizing that it wasn’t just prison that kept our mother from us—it was her own choice to not have relationships with her children.

She was everything I didn’t want to be. Someone who chose substance over her family. Drinks over everything else.

Drinks like you had last night.

Guilt clawed. How many drinks had I indulged in? Three? Four? I’d lost count.

Maybe it was the alcohol that made Lucas’s kiss so powerful and raw.

Maybe nothing last night was really as it seemed.

“She wants to see us.” Lea set the eggplant into a strainer and started tossing it with salt. “All of us.”

I snorted. “Good luck with that. Mattie and Frankie won’t be paying her a lick of attention, and I’ll be honest, I’m not really interested either.”

“Everyone deserves to know their family, Marie.”

“I don’t know if she even deserves that term.” I couldn’t quite keep the edge out of my voice as I went back to slicing another Roma. “What does she want anyway?”

“The usual: Forgiveness. Understanding.”

“She can get that from a priest. She tried to screw Frankie over. You want to be next?”

“That was more than a year ago.” Lea shrugged. “She said she’s different now. Said she’s learned.”

“Like she was different every time she promised she’d remember our birthdays the next year?” I still remembered the single cards we used to get every June. One birthday card for six of us because she couldn’t be bothered to remember her own kids individually.

Mine fell in October.

“Marie. She’s trying.”

“No,you’retrying.” I pointed to where her kids were cheerfully using Nathan as a jungle gym in the living room to Joni’s delight. “Everyone has it hard, you more than most over the last few months. But you’re getting by without throwing yourself down a bottle. She’s just trying to find caretakers twenty years too late.”

Lea didn’t argue. She’d been thirteen when the accident happened, already half-raised by that time anyway, along with Matthew. She’d borne the brunt of the abandonment, first through our parents’ addiction issues, and then to their outright absence, which had forced her to become more mother than sister overnight.

“I haven’t decided if I’m going to say yes.” She paused. “But if there’s anything Mike’s death has taught me, it’s that you just don’t know how much time you have left. And I don’t want to hold on to this anger anymore. I’m just…I’m angry all the time, Marie.Soangry. I need to find a way to forgive someone, at least. It might as well be her.”

Two hours later,we were all stuffed with ratatouille. The kids were conked out in the living room while Lea, Joni, and Nathan all sipped meditatively on the last of the wine Nathan had brought. I stayed with seltzer.

Mike’s chair sat at the head of the table. No one sat there. I had a feeling no one ever would. again.

As we chatted, I was struck by how different love could look. Joni and Nathan’s passionate balance. Lea and Mike’s twenty-year partnership, now severed by death. And our parents’ toxic, destructive romance that had left us all scarred.