Hanging by a Thread

Great. If I plead the Fifth, he’ll take that as a confirmation of his suspicions. If I reassure him Tina never said anything about their marriage being on the rocks, either he’ll think I’m lying or he’ll start wondering what she did want to talk to me about. Talk about your no-win situation. While all this is rumbling around in my head, however, Luke says, “I just wish I knew what was going on, if she’s afraid to talk to me because of what she went through as a kid, if she can’t stand the thought of the marriage failing…”

He yanks out a chair and drops into it, apparently out of steam. But I can tell, it’s not Tina who’s afraid of the marriage failing. I get a flash of their wedding day, both of them grinning like idiots, Tina as pretty as I’ve ever seen her in a dress I knocked off from a picture of some six-thousand-dollar number in Modern Bride. With the exception of two or three brief separations, they’d been going together for nearly nine years by that point. They were so comfortable together, finishing each other’s sentences like an old married couple. Like Luke, I don’t get it.

“Hey,” I say lamely. “Everybody goes through rough patches.”

His expression breaks my heart, because he knows this is more than a rough patch. Then he suddenly glances over my shoulder, the worry etched in his brow evaporating in an instant. “Hey, Twink! Your mom said you were asleep.”

My daughter’s already in his lap, her skinny arms wrapped around his neck. Next to Leo and me, Luke’s her favorite person in the world. And I think I often slip to second place. Maybe third. Not that she doesn’t have positive male role models coming out of her ears—my grandfather, the legion of Scardinare males. Even Mickey Gomez, one of the tenants, who’s been teaching her Spanish. But her relationship with Luke has always been special, a relationship that’s worked both ways. Oh, yeah, Luke’s taken his “uncle” duties very seriously, even from before Starr was born.

I let her have her éclair, which I cut into bite-size pieces so most of the chocolate and custard lands in her mouth instead of on her face, thinking saccharine thoughts about not being able to imagine my life without her. Trust me, I don’t always feel this way, so I’m going with the moment because it makes me feel good about myself. Like I deserve her.

Luke listens carefully as she prattles on about her day, her yawns getting bigger and bigger as her eyelids droop lower and lower. Finally, chuckling, he stands, Starr clinging to him like a little sedated monkey, and carries her upstairs to put her back to bed. I don’t follow, because I know seeing him with her is only going to get my thoughts churning again about his being denied the one thing he really wants.

But you know, nobody forced him to marry Tina. And she’s right: he did know going in she didn’t want kids.

His decision, I tell myself. His consequences to deal with.

“Man, she’s getting so big,” he says when he comes back downstairs.

“Yep. Give ’em food and water and damned if they don’t grow.”

He smiles, a sad tilt of his lips. “It’s late,” he says, lifting his jacket from the back of the chair. “I should go.”

This time, I don’t stop him. We walk out to the front door; Leo’s gone up to his room, so no eagle ears are listening (I assume) as we stand in the foyer.

“I saw your mother earlier,” I say. “Pete and Heather are finally getting married, huh?”

Another smile, this time a weary one. “Yeah. At least there’s some good news, right?”

I grab his arms, my impetuousness clearly surprising him. Not to mention me. I get another whiff of his scent, and something inside me goes, Huh?

“You and Tina need to talk. Tonight,” I add, ignoring both his scent and the Huh?-ing. “You gotta get all this out in the open, tell her exactly what you’ve told me.” It’s a long shot, but maybe if Luke opens up, Tina will too, absolving me of a responsibility I realize I do not want. “I’m not a marriage counselor, a shrink or a priest, and I’m tired of getting caught in the middle.”

He gives me a hard look and says softly, “Then maybe you shouldn’t’ve put yourself there,” and walks out the door.

What the hell…?

My cell rings, faintly. It takes me five rings to locate it, still in my purse on the kitchen counter.

“Hi,” Tina says in a voice I haven’t heard her use since she was about six.

“Uh…hi?”

I hear a whoosh of cigarette smoke. “Luke’s there, isn’t he?”

“Not anymore. And no, I didn’t say anything.”

“What? Oh…I didn’t think you would.” Surprise peers out from between her words, as though it never crossed her mind that I might. I can’t decide if I’m touched or ticked.

“Teen—you two have got to hash this out. By yourselves.” I give her a second or two to absorb this. “And I think you know that.”

When she next speaks, I can barely hear her. “God, Ellie…I’m so scared.”

“I know you are, sweetie,” I say, as gently as I know how. “Which is why you have to talk to Luke. Trust him, okay? You know he loves you.”

I do not like the silence that greets this observation. So I prod her for the answer I want. “Right?”

“Yeah,” she says at last. “I guess.”

“Tina?”

“What?”

“Promise me you won’t do anything until you’ve talked to him?”

There’s another long pause, during which I can hear smoke being spewed.

“Promise?” I prompt.

“Okay, okay, fine.”

“I mean, I know it’s your body and all that, but—”

“Jesus, I get it, already!” I expect her to hang up, but instead I hear, “Luke’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, you know? The thought of letting him down…it makes me sick.”

I don’t know what to say to this. Then she says:

“You really think I’d make an okay mother?”

Like I know what kind of mother she’d make. But I inject a bright note into my voice and say, “Hey. If I can do this, anybody can—”

“Crap, I hear Luke’s key in the door, I gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow, ’kay?”

I click off my phone and toss it back in my purse, thinking, man, I am so glad I’m not in her shoes right now.

Especially since I’m not sure I’m doing such a hot job staying balanced in my own.

“So what’s up with Luke and Tina?”

Frances’s low, furtive voice ploughs into me when I emerge from her downstairs bathroom the following Sunday. Thank God I already peed. But I look Luke’s mother straight in the eye and say with remarkable aplomb, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Like that works. Knowing nobody will hear my screams for mercy over the din of Scardinares yakking away in the dining room—half the Italians left in Richmond Hill are in this house right now—Frances drags me into her home office and shuts the door, leaning against it for good measure. Underneath artfully tousled hair, bittersweet chocolate eyes bore into mine. A look I know is responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of impassioned promises over the years to never do again whatever it was that provoked the look to begin with.

“I know Tina,” she says with the exasperated affection of a woman who loves more than understands her daughter-in-law. And who, like everybody else, wanted nothing more than to see Tina finally get a fair shake, to really be happy. She’s hugging herself over a velour tunic free of any signs of having even been in a kitchen today. That would be because Jimmy Sr., not Frances, does all the major cooking. He says it relaxes him. Frankly, I think it was that or starve to death. “Since when does she miss the first viewing of an engagement ring?”

I tell myself that since I’m not her child, I am impervious to The Look. “Maybe one of them’s not feeling well?”

“So they’d call.” Her eyes narrow; my resistance dissolves like an ice cube in a frying pan. “You know something, I can tell you do. Luke’s always talked to you more than anybody else, ever since you were kids.”