to normal just from happily holding them. I’m back in the car in a heartbeat. Hazards flashing. And doling out sandwiches. I pass the mozzarella and prosciutto one into the backseat, while I start wolfing my mortadella. Michele asks if I got anything to drink and I’m chagrined; I feel like an ass. I didn’t even think about something to drink.
“Should I go?” he asks.
I say, “Whatever, a water or something,” as he hoists himself out of the backseat, climbs over the car seat with Leone sleeping in it—how did he manage that?—and stumbles out the car door. He spills out onto the sidewalk and disappears into a corner store for a few minutes. I don’t even pay attention. I am shoving meat sandwich into my face and giving scraps to Marco as fast as I can.
Michele returns. He climbs, awkwardly, back into his spot in the backseat between the two car seats. The B63 bus pulls up alongside us, forced away from the curb and the bus stop by my double-parking. The bus spits out its hydraulic steam, lowers, and the passengers walk around the back of the Volvo and make it onto the bus. Michele presses into my hand an ice-cold beer in a can. And we sit there for a full leisurely, inappropriate twenty-five minutes, hazards blinking, forcing the bus and its patrons to accommodate us, while we eat meat sandwiches and drink beers at four o’clock in the afternoon. While the elderly and infirm struggle to get on the bus, I’ve never been happier. Leone is asleep, his fatigue finally trumping his fear of death, Marco is buried quietly in his own bits of sandwich, and Michele and I, with no silverware and only our open paper wrappers on our laps, sit double-parked with the hazards blinking in a public bus stop, grinning while eating Italian sandwiches and drinking beer, and I would swear to all that I’ve never met a better guy than this one that I’ve been cursing and loathing for the past bloody hour, and the past five years.
20
WE WERE IN THE CAR SERVICE MINIVAN, MICHELE AND I AND our two kids, and I was sitting in the broken seat, trying to balance without tipping back as we headed to the airport. Somehow we had survived another winter and were headed out for our one shared pleasure, the annual vacation in Italy. The driver had the radio on blaring mariachi as well as his dispatch radio making loud, static, ocean storm noises. He hung a Honduran flag from his rearview mirror along with a “strawberry” pine tree air freshener that poisoned the fresh July afternoon air blowing in the open windows.
In my handbag, I had our expensive tickets to Italy. Five thousand dollars’ worth of tickets now that each kid is too big to fly free and requires his own seat.
We were riding to the airport in happy isolation; a kid in each lap, the Honduran driver going too fast for me. I was feeling close to Michele. The bags all packed with fresh and clean clothes neatly folded. Full bottles of toiletries neatly arranged in Ziploc bags. Swimsuits bundled in with sweatshirts and cotton T-shirts. Three weeks of vacation now ours! Our driver blew through Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville, then East New York. People sat on their stoops, hung heavily from windows of tenement buildings, cooked little makeshift barbeques on their fire escapes. I thought of how far from this we would soon be, stomping through the olive tree orchard with the naked kids in nothing but sandals, and eating Michele’s mother’s delicious boiled zucchini, her buttery olive oil, her harsh but addictive homemade vinegar.
Michele and I can and do spend the entire year isolated from and unknown to each other, but as soon as we get in that car on the way to the airport, we smile at each other with a kind of bond, and we are unified—however briefly—by a nostalgia for the moment about to come. July in Italy.
“Happy?” I ask. He smiles as if guilty of something but only says, “Heh,” a kind of grunt with raised eyebrows, which I now know means “abbastanza,” good enough, the highest degree of happiness he can allow himself to experience. Italians are suspicious of American exuberance.
We ride a bit more in silence. The kids are babbling some crap between them, Leone particularly excited about all the trees as we pass the Jackie Robinson Parkway. “Tseees! Tsees! Tsees!” he points and yells. The