Page 23

If You Love Someone, Say It Right Then, Out Loud

Though it feels delicate to do so, I hang back until it’s just me and Ricky.

“He just—he loses his patience sometimes,” Ricky says before I can say anything.

I’m surprised you deal with that.

He side-eyes me, and my cheeks heat.

“My lack of filter keeps getting me in trouble,” I say.

“Some things never change,” he says, and I wince. “Not that that’s a bad thing; I always liked that, you know.” He smiles, but it’s strained. “Easy to know how you felt.”

“Is that hard with Cam?” Oof , this is weird . Sweat snakes down my back, sending rippling waves of shivers down my body. I don’t want to know these details about their relationship.

“He has a hard time expressing himself. He’s not like us, coming from loud Italian families that pry into our business and want to know every detail of our lives, whether we wanna talk about them or not.

He grew up as one of seven kids, with parents who didn’t care if he ever came home.

So he’s quick to react when he feels left out.

It’s a trigger for him,” Ricky says. “I feel bad. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to act around people.

Doesn’t trust a lot, you know? I wish he didn’t leave, or act like that.

It’s family. You ,” he stresses, “know how important family is to me. I can’t just ditch. ”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, it’s not your fault,” he says, and I shrink down until I’m two inches tall. It is my fault. I’m the one who threw away Cam’s ticket.

It’s not lost on me how Ricky, always the quiet rock, the one who shies away from vulnerability unless pushed toward it, is opening up to me, especially after how tense everything has been between us since the PJ. Hell, since I got that postcard.

“Thanks for listening,” he says.

“You don’t have to thank me,” I say.

He takes in a big breath.

“Least I can do,” I say. “Maybe I won’t be the monster in your head.”

That slipped out, unplanned.

I look away because to see any confirmation in his eyes would break me.

But he intentionally steps back into my line of sight. “What?” His face has softened, his eyes swollen with concern. “I—”

“It’s okay, I get it.” Lie. If anything, he should be my monster; instead, I’ve been pining for him and weaving my entire world around him, even in his absence.

If he knew that, he’d think I’m pathetic.

I know I do. For all the work I’ve done to make it seem like I could be a better version of myself without Ricky, admitting it was all for him to him destroys the integrity of my entire plan. “Have you?” I whisper.

“Do you really want the answer?”

I shrug, then nod. “Rip the Band-Aid off.”

“Quanto basta,” he whispers and my breath catches.

A couple Januaries ago, I was out window-shopping at the bougie Westchester mall with Zia Gab, Zia Rosa, and Matty—one of our favorite pastimes, perusing stores we could never afford and pretending we would buy handfuls of items only to put them away decrying “practicality”—when Ricky called.

The second I saw his name flash on my screen, I was flooded with unexpected dread.

Intuition prickled my skin. He never called me when I was out with family—he knew it was sacred time.

When I picked up, he didn’t say anything.

“Ricky? What’s wrong? What happened?”

He was breathing heavy, and I knew instantly he’d been crying.

I ran through every scenario in my head. Fear wrapped my heart when Ricky hoarsely whispered one word: “Nonno.”

I looked up at my zias and Matty, who had huddled around me in the middle of the busy mall, confusion brewing like a cauldron.

“I’ll be right there.” I knew he couldn’t talk about it over the phone.

“Please.”

“I’ll stay on the phone.”

He said nothing, but I heard his breathing steady as I told the Coven we had to go.

I kept the phone pressed to my ear, listening for him the entire excruciatingly long drive from the mall to Blossom Avenue in slushy snow.

I didn’t even wait for Zia Rosa to put the car in park in Nonna’s driveway before I flung open the door and sprinted toward the DeLucas’ house.

Ma and Nonna were already at the kitchen table, Ma draping her arms around Ricky’s mom, forehead to forehead.

Ricky’s father stared out the kitchen window, eyes red and blotchy, arms folded. He didn’t turn when I opened the door.

Sienna had just gotten home from her apartment in New York City, her bags still in the kitchen, and she flung her arms around me. “I’m so happy you’re here. He won’t come out of his room.”

“I’m so—I loved your nonno so much.” I tripped over my words, remembering all the hollow condolences from strangers when Dad passed. None of them meant a thing to me, just served as a cold reminder of what I lost and left a bitterness in feeling obligated to respond.

She nodded. The DeLucas always held their emotions close to the chest, but I saw the pain in her glassy eyes.

“What happened?”

“H-heart attack,” she choked out. She nodded toward the backyard, where Ricky’s father’s gaze was held. “In his workshop. Ricky found him.”

My legs shook, and I nearly broke. I had to get to Ricky.

Ricky’s door was open. He was at the edge of his bed, phone still in hand, resting lackadaisically at his side.

When he looked up and saw me, his chest started to heave.

He looked toward the door, then back to me, and I knew what it meant.

I closed it. Instantly, he crumbled. The resolve he’d built dissolved, tears streaming steadily down his cheeks.

I held him tight. “I got you.”

“I . . . n-never g-got to say g-goodbye.” His sobs were deep and guttural, and I’d never seen him like this before. It took all of me to keep myself together. I needed to be his rock. “T-tell him I l-loved him.”

“He knew,” I said resolutely. “Without a doubt, he knew you loved him.”

He burrowed deeper into me, and I held him tighter than ever before.

“I love you,” he whispered, over and over, and although I’d said those words to and about him so many times in my life, I never felt them as strongly as I did that day. I wanted to protect him, shield him from the pain, let him know that no matter what happened, he was loved.

“Remember the story you used to tell me about your nonno? The first time you worked with him in his main woodshop, and you asked him a million questions, and you thought you were annoying him because you were so fascinated by what he could create with his hands and some tools.” Growing up, Ricky would spend hours telling me about his nonno’s work and techniques, and though I never cared about the actual woodworking elements, I was always nothing short of captivated by Ricky because his eyes sparkled when he would tell me what he learned.

“You were so eager all you wanted was to do the work, and you asked him when, when, when, how, why, how much pressure is enough.” I laughed because Ricky used to talk so much, way more than me, and the older he got, the quieter he became, but not with me. “And he always said—”

“Quanto basta,” Ricky finished. How much is enough, is just enough. It was an expression Nonno used for everything—woodworking, cooking, life—even when it didn’t make much sense, it always made sense.

Hours passed. The sun set, and eventually his cries ebbed.

When he eventually wanted to emerge and join his family, he stood next to his father and held back his tears.

Through the wake and the funeral and the luncheon afterward, Ricky never shed another tear.

He grabbed his father’s hand and squeezed.

Even when Ricky’s father finally broke at their house after the last guests left post-funeral, allowing himself to cry, Ricky held his own inside.

I never wanted to pry or push, but Ricky spent so much time in his nonno’s workshop, working on his nonno’s final project—the oak family tree—that I wondered if perhaps he was losing himself to his grief and the guilt he felt in not saying goodbye.

I wonder if now, like then, Ricky’s working overtime to protect himself from feeling what he should be feeling. Then again, I don’t know what he should be feeling anymore, but I wish I wasn’t his monster.

“Can I change that?” I ask.

He shrugs and steps forward. “Anything’s possible.”

I take a deep breath and follow him into the Avello Family Lemon Groves under the vine-draped trellis.

The dirt pathway winds up from the road at a rather steep incline, and though I’m worried about Nonna ahead, it seems like she’s holding her own. Granted, she’s attached to Niccolò, but she’s determined to see as much of her home country as possible, and I don’t blame her.

I take out my phone and start recording new @LemonAt FirstSight content, and through the lens, it looks so much like a fairy-tale scene in a movie.

The farther we hike up and around the winding path that carves the mountain, the more the rest of Amalfi disappears, and we enter an enchanted grove of trees with branches dotted with tiny lemons and massive green leaves that stretch overhead creating a canopy, shading us from the beating sun overhead.

Sturdy, handmade wooden trellises are constructed to hold the arms of the lemon trees, and their branches wind around their knotted spindles.

Sweet citrus bursts through the air, mixing with a hazy floral scent.

Niccolò stops after a bend leading to an overhang with classic Italian antique cars, a 1959 seafoam Autobianchi Bianchina next to a 1963 blood-orange Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ, beneath black-netted treetops.

Don’t think I’m some car gay—there’s a plaque explaining each car.

It’s an oddity in the middle of a grove, but Ricky’s dad and Topher both seem keenly interested.

He brings Nonna to a small hand-carved wooden bench to rest for a few moments.

I prop my phone up on a nearby ledge of a stone wall to keep recording while I soak in everything I can.