They drove away. Ellis and I stood on the sidewalk in Carroll Gardens, watching taillights disappear.
“My dad spoke.” He sounded dazed. “He actually volunteered words.”
“He said I make you feel like you don’t have to perform. Did you tell him that?”
“I might have mentioned it. Once. Or several times.”
I kissed him under a streetlight. He tasted like tiramisu and relief.
“Your mom invited me to Sunday dinner.”
“She did?”
“On Long Island. The whole thing. Should I be scared?”
“Terrified.” He grinned. “But I’ll be there.”
“That’s all I need.”
We took the subway home. Ellis fell asleep on my shoulder between stops, his hand loose in mine, his breathing easy and even. Nothing to perform, nothing to hide. A man who’d introduced his boyfriend to his parents and survived, leaning into the person who made him feel safe enough to close his eyes on a crowded subway.
I didn’t move until our stop. Wouldn’t have moved for anything.
Chapter forty
Ellis brought it up on a Sunday morning. We were in bed, his apartment that time, surrounded by his frankly absurd number of houseplants. The fiddle-leaf fig by the window towered over me. The pothos on the bookshelf had begun a hostile takeover of the entire wall. His place resembled a botanical garden’s one-night stand with an IKEA showroom.
“I want to meet your mom.” Just like that. No preamble, no careful lead-in. Between one sip of coffee and the next, like he was saying he wanted pancakes.
My stomach flipped.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Ellis, she hasn’t spoken to me in months. She hung up when I told her about you. Her exact words were, ‘That white boy’s messing around.’ She’s not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.”
“I know.” He set his coffee down. “And I know that hurts you. I can see it every time your phone rings and it’s not her. Every time we pass a Dominican restaurant and you get that look.”
“What look?”
“You’re homesick for somewhere you’re not allowed to go back to.”
I didn’t have a joke. He’d described something I hadn’t been able to name, and it sat there between us in the morning light, heavy and precise.
“She won’t come here.”
“Then we go to her.”
“Ellis.”
“I’m serious. We take the subway to Sunset Park. Knock on her door. We show up.”
“And if she slams it?”
“Then we leave. And we know we tried.”
He made it sound simple. It wasn’t. Nothing about my mother was simple. A Dominican woman who raised her son alone in Brooklyn, who cleaned office buildings at night so I could have school supplies in the morning, who hugged me when I came out at sixteen and said, “I already knew, mijo,” then spent the next eight years pretending the men I dated were just friends because knowing and accepting were two different countries with a border between them.
