How to Love an American Man (19 page)

Give him some time to explain himself
. Her words keep playing in my head, reminding me how months after a breakup, even after the worst of your wounds have healed and there's really no part of you that aches missing the other person anymore . . . there's still that one tiny, unjaded, optimistic little ounce of your heart that would welcome hearing from him. It's the solitary—however improbable—hope that just maybe you could forget all the conflict and find excitement in each other again. Good friends have massaged it into my brain that I'm a treasure rich as gold, and though I genuinely get that now, my chest still feels hollow sometimes.

Blast him, I know there's still a part of me that would make room for him. If he were to call again, I'd still have to formulate how I'd answer the phone: act bubbly or aloof? Fill him in on everything that's new, or hold a quiet grudge? I'm not ready to count on him again, but I still care about him . . . and I'm afraid that if this prize can't learn to compromise, then I may be sitting alone on the shelf for a very long time.

Although as long as this prize loves herself, then maybe being alone is better than being with the wrong person.

Chapter 9
Recognize an Open Door

I
N LATE
M
ARCH
it's as though a magic bellman has opened the door into a secret world so sunny that it blasts away the last smudge of winter's grayness—both barometric and emotional. My new year, new leaf approach successfully holds Zen like a scene out of
Wayne's World
—“Live in the
now
, man!”—and a new energy cracks bravely out of its shell inside me. In fact, I think I'm ready to make my next move. I begin pricing apartments in Brooklyn, and out of the blue Isabella, the mom from the family I nannied for in Italy, e-mails to ask me to return because little Francesca misses me. I miss them too and the kindness is difficult to decline, as is the salary both Western Union and I loved . . . but no, I decide. I still need to be close to home.

One afternoon in early April, I'm sitting at the beach across the road from my house when Emma calls. “I have some news,” she says. “Are you ready?” I tell her to wait while I sit down on a rock: she must be pregnant. She tells me calmly that she's expecting a daughter in the fall, and the image of her caressing the cheek of a baby on her breast triggers me into a giddy laugh-cry on the phone. Emma tells me she's heard the baby's heartbeat and seen her fingers and toes in an ultrasound.

“She's you and Sean, together,” I tell her. “I would have cried if I would have heard her heart.”

“I didn't cry, but seriously Krissy . . . it was so cool.”

For two and a half decades Emma and I have shared every-thing—we're talking celebrity crushes, family secrets, and vital science fair projects that consisted of mixing two perfumes—Exclamation and Malibu Musk, Benetton Colors and Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth—to see if they'd cause an allergic reaction (rest assured, they did not). When she got married four years ago, my mom and I hosted the bridal shower and made favors for the reception. Then I held her bouquet on the altar as she pledged her life to the guy she'd been mad for since high school (he's now a sought-after chef whom I credit with teaching me the recipe for authentic salsa).

Selfishly, I'd hoped she'd wait at least until I got married before she got pregnant. This baby is the first development in her life that she'll experience ahead of me—
without
me, really—and the six-hour car ride that stands between us could make her little girl and me mere acquaintances at best. When we hang up after her announcement, I remember that on vacation the summer before eighth grade we'd pinky-sworn that our kids would call each other Aunt Krissy and Aunt Emma. When I leave the beach and arrive home, I send out my résumé for an editorial job at a marketing firm outside Albany, close to where Emma and Sean live. A week later the firm gives the job to somebody else, noting my geographical transfer as a financial and moral risk. “If it doesn't work out, then both you and we are stuck with the mistake.”

I assure them that I understand their decision, but inside, anxiety strikes. Not only am I growing ready to leave my family and get back to real life, there's also no viable source of income anywhere in my crystal ball. So when Chris calls on the first Friday in May to ask whether I can man the Saturday reception desk at his office, I quickly accept.

When he blasts through the office front door, he shocks me: his hair is short and slicked back. In fitted charcoal slacks and shiny shoes, he approaches the reception desk and takes my hand in both of his. It's been a while, he says. I count five months and eight days, to be exact, to the last moment I saw him when he was smiling in my driveway, committing to bringing a dessert to Thanksgiving. But standing here facing him, I lose the will to hold onto my anger, surrendering to the fact that under any circumstance, I could never hold the substantial gap in meetings against him. He's my dear friend. Regardless of whether he's ever let me down, the sincerity in his eyes proves that he's worth remaining present for. “Your hair's short,” I observe gently.

“I'm representing my country now.” He takes one of the whole wheat chocolate chip cookies I've baked for his staff, and the whole gang follows him into the exam room to preview the day's cases. “Your hair's short too,” he calls from down the hall, turning the corner into full doctor mode.

I touch the hair at the nape of my neck. The morning I was leaving Italy for good last June, Celeste hugged me goodbye and asked me to swear I'd never cut my hair until I'm a mom. “It's your best feature,” she'd said. I broke the promise after my “you're the prize” discussion with Grandma. A woman's beauty, I'd concluded, is often not about her best physical features. Toward the opening of spring I felt the lightest and most independent that I had since returning home almost a year ago, and I'd read once that when a person cuts his or her hair very short, it can be an act of emotional liberation, like the shedding of an old skin. I wanted a change, and I wanted a fresh look that showed how I felt.

At noon Chris emerges with a credit card and asks me to run out and get lunch for the six of us who are working. I take charge of the task and order very liberally, emerging from Ruby's curb-side pickup with a backseat full of turkey burgers, broccoli soup, and salad. When I return to the office, I set up the spread in the lunchroom and go back to him with his card and receipt. “Let's allow the others to eat first,” he says. “Then you and I will go together.” When the last of his four assistants returns from the break room, Chris asks her to watch the front desk and gives me a quick wiggle of his hand, inviting me to follow him.

The lunch menu I've selected is perfect, he says, using two plastic forks to transfer salad from the to-go container onto his plate. He pulls out a chair from underneath the table and sits in the one opposite. “It's good to see you, Kris,” he says.

I nod assuredly. “I'm happy to see you too.”

He looks down at the floor. “You know this is my last Saturday in this office.”

“You mean forever?”

He nods, and looks out the window over the gardened courtyard. “Forever.” I'm relieved when he then searches the table for a soup spoon, because I can't pick up the expression on my face. I must look like a lone lover on an old train platform. I reach for my hair again, wondering whether I'd feel less vulnerable right now if I hadn't cut it. When he looks at me, I regain focus. “I have the grand opening of the practice in Asia in a month,” he says. “For the next few weeks I'll be seeing patients an hour away in the office of a friend of mine.”

We both sit quietly, then I look at him. “I'm sad that you're leaving.”

This appears to energize him. He jumps up to grab another turkey burger off the counter. “How's your family doing?”

I tell him Grandma was having a couple good months but she's fallen back into a slump. “She's finally started going to a widows' support group every week. But my mom's mom is pretty under the weather too. She's been having terrible trouble with her eyes and she can't cook or work in the garden anymore. My parents are away on business this weekend, so I'm taking her to church tonight.”

Chris's eyes light up.
“Hey,”
he says, “you know what . . . I think I know something that could cheer them up.” He says his grandparents are in town for the next month for a surgery his grandma's having on her hip. “They came in from near Indianapolis, and I've set her up with some good doctors here.”

“How nice of you.”
Where is he going with this?
“What do you say we organize a grandparents' brunch?”

Is he serious? “Yeah, ha, a grandparents' brunch.” I try to chuckle the idea away, thinking how strange it can be to have both my punctilious grandma and my
I Love Lucy
-esque nana together in the same room—let alone in front of someone like Chris, whose impression I like to manage as meticulously as possible.

“Yes, that's it, a grandparents' brunch! When you see your grandmother tonight, invite her to get together tomorrow. Then call the other one. I'll call you in the morning and we'll make reservations somewhere nice.”

The awareness is creeping over me that this is a disaster waiting to happen. I imagine Chris's grandmother as being even more proper than Grandma, staring down her nose at how we small-town folk behave and picking at her food with a fork, saying she prefers her Hollandaise on the thicker side. Plus, I know that because Chris is both male and swamped, the arrangements will fall on me. If the whole meal turns out to be a bust, the blame will be mine.

I cannot let this grandparents' brunch take place.

But when I mention it to Nana, she
loves
the idea. She hasn't been to brunch in a decade, she says, and while I know that she's notorious for her exaggerations, I figure that statistic isn't too far off the mark. I hold her hand up the stairs of her ancient duplex house to her bedroom, where she opens the closet for me. “Pick out my outfit, baby,” she says. “I'll even wear high heels to meet your friend.”

Grandma takes a little longer to climb on board, saying she doesn't know if she's up to meeting new people. “Call me in the morning,” she says. “I'll let you know my decision before you make your reservation.” But ten minutes later she calls me back, saying what the hey, she's sorry for being a stick in the mud and she'll join us.

So help me if you back out of these plans, Christopher. I will take my grandmothers to this brunch whether you show up or not.

I'm still in bed when my cell phone rings. “It's a go, Kris,” he says in my ear. “Want to plan on one o'clock?”

One works, I tell him, and I'll make the reservation at the country club in town. I dig through my closet to find something to wear, tucking a white camisole into a fitted skirt from Tuscany that's embroidered with flowers that are each a color in the spectrum. I start to panic looking for a jacket of some kind—I can't be late picking up Nana or I'll throw the plan off schedule. Just as I'm about to change skirts for something easier to match, a plum-colored cardigan jumps out at me. I step into tan heels that are the same color as my skirt.
Whew!

Grandma is waiting in her car when Nana and I pull into the country club parking lot. The three of us walk in together, and when we enter the grand ballroom, not a soul is present at any of the tables. Near the buffet, there's a table with a card on it that reads
GASBARRE
. A hostess in a bow tie peeks around from the bar area. “You're expecting three more, correct?”

“Yes,” the three of us answer in unison.

“You're not closed, are you?” I ask her. “I called.”

“No, we're open. But brunch ends at two o'clock, and if the rest of your party runs much later, I'm afraid we'll have to tear down on you.”

“I understand, but see, my friend is a surgeon and his grandparents are in from out of town, and . . .” I explain how he's always late and can never seem to help it, you know doctors, and the hostess folds her arms.

I knew this was going to be a nightmare.

“What can I get you three to drink?” Grandma and Nana light up.

“Nana, what will you have?”

“It's been five years since I've had a glass of Chianti,” she says.

“Grandma?”

“Just a cranberry juice, if you please.”

“And I'll have a mimosa, please.”

Grandma pipes back in. “Actually, change mine to a mimosa too.”

Through the window opposite the golf course outside I see the door to a large pickup truck slam. From the carpeted front lobby three shadows slowly approach the dining room, and after a few seconds Chris is the first of them to turn the corner. When I see him, I have to catch my breath. He's dressed in a sharp light gray suit and wearing edgy black-framed glasses, and I'm so flustered that I have to paste on an easy smile, which must certainly appear forced. He beams as wide as the doorway when he sees me, and I recover my senses and rise from my chair. Behind him his grandma is a head taller than both of my grandmothers, and her skin radiates without a touch of makeup. She's wearing a sweater with bluebirds embroidered that reminds me of something Grandma owns. His grandpa, meanwhile, follows close behind with a cane and pulls out his wife's chair.

Chris comes to me and kisses me on both cheeks. When we separate, there's satisfaction in his smile. “Ah,” he catches himself. “I brought this for you.” He hands me a check for yesterday's work, and I'm impressed that he made a priority out of paying me right away, right here at breakfast. I float around the table to introduce myself to his grandparents while he introduces himself to mine. The chef winks at me from behind the omelet bar. After everyone has their drinks, the six of us mill around the buffet. Chris and his grandparents go for salad and soup, while Nana, Grandma, and I flock to the buffet's opposite end, using tongs to select breakfast sweets like French toast and pancakes and doughnuts. “Honey girl, come here,” Nana says, and from across the room I can feel Chris's eyes on my bare calves as I help Nana pour syrup.

When we return to the table, Chris suggests we say grace, and he's looking at me. My grandmas and I make the sign of the cross, and I pray the Catholic mealtime prayer:

Then I add: “And thank you for the family and the new friends that join us around this table.” Over my folded hands I watch Chris open his eyes and give me a slow blink:
Well done.

His grandparents talk about their most recent fishing trip, and Chris says he has a jar of his grandpa's freshwater salmon to let me try. Nana acts as though she may dominate the conversation, telling the crowd around the table what an amazing singer I am. “She had a chance to go to Broadway!” she insists.