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Michael glanced at him. “No.”
“Then why are you looking around like a scared rabbit?”
He turned back to me with an irritated expression. “I’m not. It’s—never mind.”
I shrugged, fighting the urge to push him to tell me whatever he was worried about. “Whatever. Not my problem anymore.”
“Was it ever?”
I huffed. “I think you wanted to apologize. That’s why you were throwing rocks at my freakin’ window like a hooligan, right?”
He had the decency to look contrite. “I—yeah. I figured…”
“You figured what?” I pressed. “Spit it out.”
“Then let me talk, eh?” Michael exhaled heavily.
I didn’t speak, just crossed my arms and waited expectantly.
Michael chewed on his bottom lip for a moment or two, then finally continued. “Listen, last night, I didn’t act right. I was an asshole, and what I did was wrong. I’m sorry. I really am.”
It wasn’t what I was expecting, even though he said he wanted to apologize. The truth was, I hadn’t heard many of those in my life. Not good ones. My siblings only did it when forced, and my grandparents were two stubborn peas in a pod. People in my family tended to do nice things for each other when they felt bad. Fold an extra load of laundry, maybe. Take over someone’s dishes for the night. If you were Nonno, bring home a bouquet of cheap roses or your wife’s favorite nougat.
But somehow, this meant more.
Here was Michael, a guy who claimed to be bad all the way through, showing a rare sort of humility I couldn’t help but appreciate.
“Thanks,” I said, suddenly realizing I didn’t actually know how to accept an apology like this one. “I… appreciate that.”
One shy dimple appeared on Michael’s face. “Good. I’m glad.”
“But if you ever act like that again, we’re done,” I told him quickly before I lost my nerve. “No talking about my clothes or forbidding me from going places. No yelling at me in front of my friends. No dragging around like I’m a child. You treat me with respect, or you won’t see me again. I’m serious, Michael.”
His half-smile disappeared with every word out of my mouth. When I finished, he reached out to squeeze my hand.
“I know you’re serious,” he said solemnly. “And so am I. You’re…you’re kind of my only friend these days, Lea. I won’t do anything else to fuck that up. I promise.”
We blinked at each other for a few more minutes, like we both expected the other to say something more. Address the elephant in the room (or on the street, as it were). I wondered if he noticed that I had not forbidden him from kissing him again.
I certainly had. And wondered what he thought.
“Come on,” I said. “I wasn’t kidding about those errands.”
We walked on, and when we stopped on Hoffman to wait for a break in the cars so we could cross, I caught Michael looking around and muttering under his breath.
“What’s wrong now?” I asked as we started to cross. I thought we had made up.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing, it’s…I mean, I’m gone two years, and it feels like a different neighborhood. There’s an Albanian flag over there next to Gino’s. A tamale shop in front of the market. Half the neighborhood moved to Morris Park, the other half’s in Westchester, Jersey, Yonkers. Wherever.”
I followed his gaze to the flag hanging in the storefront next to the famous pasticceria. He wasn’t wrong. “That can’t be that surprising. Belmont’s been changing since before we were born. It hasn’t been mostly Italian for a while now.”
This was another version of the same conversation I’d been hearing at the dinner table for as long as I could remember. Nonno constantly bemoaned the fact that the Belmont where he and Nonna lived for the first thirty years of their marriage was gone. The insular Italian community they remembered wasn’t the one I grew up in, even if Belmont’s Italian roots were still evident almost everywhere in its ten or so square blocks. I understood they missed it, but it wasn’t a loss I had ever really felt.
To me, Belmont had always been a place where you were more likely to hear Spanish than Italian unless you walked into certain shops. Albanian was almost as common. And why should I have a problem with any of it? All six of the Zola kids were a product of this melting pot—thanks to our mom, we were all half-Puerto Rican. We never thought anything of it. It simply was.
“Yeah. I know.” Michael shrugged. “It’s just weird thinking about how things change so quickly.”
I didn’t think he was talking about the neighborhood anymore.
