I sit. She pours the tea. She sets the cup in front of me and then she sits too, across the corner of the big table, close enough that our knees touch, and she folds her floury hands and waits. I open my mouth to lead with something manageable, something with a joke stitched to the front of it, the way I lead with everything.
What comes out is, "Ma, I think I'm pregnant."
The kitchen clock ticks. Somewhere above us a floorboard creaks, the house going about its business, oblivious.
My mother doesn’t gasp or put her hand to her chest. She looks at me with those soft knowing eyes and she says, quietly, "I know, darling."
"You... how could you possibly."
"You've poured four cups of coffee down my sink this fortnight thinking no one saw. You sleep like the dead and eat like a bird and your mind has been elsewhere…but not there." She is referring to Sicily, and she would be right. I’ve barely thought about that since realizing I might actually be pregnant. All I’vedone is cry about Yakob walking away when I thought I was enough to make him stay.
“Was it one of the men?” she asks as gently as she knows how while holding herself together with every ounce of strength she has.
“No!” I blurt. “No, nothing like that.”
She reaches over and closes both hands around mine on the teacup.
I haven’t cried in front of my mother since I was fifteen years old. I have cried near her. I have had shining eyes at weddings and let a few tears go at the homecoming, holding Éirinn, surrounded, safe, performing even my relief. But I have not once, in over a decade, sat in front of any member of my family and come apart.
I buckle.
It comes up from somewhere below the floor, and there's no dignity in it, no single beautiful tear. I cry the way I did on the floor of the tiny farm house on Lipari, without any attempt at management, my face in my hands and my shoulders going, and Ma is out of her chair and around the table before the first sob finishes and she gathers me in the way she gathers her grandbabies, my face against her apron, her hand in my hair, and she doesn't say hush. She has never once in her life said hush. She says, "There it is. There it is, my love. Let it come."
And it comes. All of it.
"He left," I hear myself saying, into flour and cotton, and my voice sounds nothing like my voice. "Ma, he left, he stood in that doorway and I asked him not to and he left anyway, and I don't, I can't..." The words keep breaking off at the edges. "I don't even know his last name. Isn't that... I'm having a baby with a man and I don't know his last name, I don't know whatcountry he's in, I don't know if he's alive, and everyone thinks I'm grieving Sicily, and I let them think it, because how do I say it? That the worst thing that ever happened to me is that the man you all hired did his job perfectly and then disappeared. Because disappearing is what he does, it's the whole point of him, and I knew that, I knew it the entire time, and I went and, and—"
"And you fell in love with him anyway," Ma says.
"I fell in love him anyway." It's out before I can soften it into something survivable. "I check every room I walk into, and he's in none of them, Ma. He's in none of the rooms, and I'm so tired of looking and hoping."
She holds me and rocks me, this small ferocious woman, and over my head I hear her exhale slowly, the way she does before she decides something.
"He'll have his reasons," she says at last, carefully, like she's picking her way across stones. "Men like that always think leaving is a kindness. They're always wrong, but they don’t know." Something old moves under her voice, something I'm too wrecked to chase. "But we're not going to build the next chapter on that. We're going to build it on you."
I don't hear the door. I never hear the door anymore unless I'm listening for it, and I feel Grace before I see her, her arms coming around me from the other side, no questions, folding into the hug like she was always part of it. When I lift my head her face tells me she's heard enough. She doesn't say congratulations and she doesn't say oh no. She just kisses my temple and stays there with her arms around me.
Katya arrives four minutes later, allegedly for a bottle warmer, takes one look at the arrangement of us, and abandons the task. She wedges herself onto the bench on my other side and grips my hand hard enough that her rings leave grooves in my skin, again. But that’s how Katya says everything important."Whoever needs killing," she says against my hair, "we won't even tell the guys. We'll do it ourselves."
"Nobody needs killing," I manage, wet.
"Disappointing,” she grumbles. “The offer stands."
Tanya comes in with paint swatches she no longer needs and leaves them on the counter where she drops them. Even though she is nine months pregnant, she gets down on her knees in front of me, takes my face in both hands, and studies me with those sharp eyes. I see her figure it out. Her whole face changes. "Oh," she says. "Oh, Iris."
Anya slips in without Éirinn, which means Connor has the kids and Anya came running, and she doesn't try to reach me through the wall of women, she just puts her hand flat on my back between Grace and Ma and leaves it there, a small steady weight, and says something soft in Russian that I don't understand and understand completely.
Nadia comes last. Nadia always comes last and always at the right moment, and she doesn't say a word. She works her way into the circle the way water finds a level, and she presses her forehead to my temple, exactly the way I once did for her two years ago, and the circle closes.
Seven women around one kitchen chair. My mother's hand in my hair, Grace's arms, Katya's grip, Tanya on her knees, Anya's palm, Nadia's forehead. Somewhere in this house five large men are stomping around entirely unaware that the true government of the family is currently in session, and I sit in the middle of it, red-eyed and blotchy and emptied out.
I cry a while longer because it turns out there's more, and they let me. Nobody tells me to stop, and nobody makes it smaller than it is, and nobody, God bless every one of them, sayseverything happens for a reason.
Eventually I surface.
"Right," I say. My voice is a ruin. I use it anyway. "Thank you. All of you. I mean it, I don't have the words for what I mean, which you know is serious, because I always have the words." A ragged laugh goes around the circle. "But I need you to hear the next part just as well as you heard everything else."
They wait. Even Katya waits, and waiting is not her wheelhouse.
