Page 58 of Made in Love and Blood

Staten Island, New York

Frankie, Gallo Estate

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“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, wake up so I can love you, happy birthday to you.”

“I’m already up,” Frankie said, laughing. Popping out of the closet to see Sissy spin around while holding a tray, she grinned even wider. “Didn’t think I could be awake before nine on a Sunday, huh?”

“Only if soccer is involved.”

“But that’s done now, so.” Frankie shimmed into a sundress covered in a motif of handstitched lilacs and then pointed at Sissy’s tray. “What’s all this?”

“Birthday breakfast, one of your favorites, and a little something from me.”

She didn’t usually eat breakfast, but she was trying to do better and...

“It’s French Toast,” Sissy added.

“That’s all I need to know.”

She promptly sat down at the two-person dinette that doubled as a place for her to read or study next to the massive windows overlooking the rear property. As she’d grown older, her father put a lot of effort into changing her bedroom to suit her age, needs, and wants. Now, it felt like something mixed between a young woman’s haven and the space of a girl still afraid to let go.

A lot of pink. White, fluffy rugs everywhere. The big princess bed, too, pink and white, complete with sheer curtains hanging from four posts. She needed steps to get into it. A few of her photography, shots blown up and framed from their various trips, decorated the walls. Her trophies and medals for cross country and soccer took up their own corner of shelves. A pile of dirty laundry in the corner despite the basket, always to Sissy’s chagrin.

As she took her first bite of French Toast, smothered in syrup, Frankie stared around her two-room suite, connected to her own bathroom, and tried to settle how she felt. And the fact that she would be leaving it soon.

“Big day,” Sissy said, taking the seat across from Frankie’s.

“Officially a legal adult. Huge day.”

“So why were you just looking lost for a second there?”

“I figured out this morning, because I know what Daddy’s getting ready for me, that growing up also means letting go. I’m not sure that I’ve been very good at that, and it makes me think a lot about...whatever’s next.”

“I don’t know why you’re surprised that letting go scares you.”

Frankie frowned, stilling instead of taking her next bite. “Huh, why?”

Sissy made it a point to give the room and the things within it a look. “Contrary to how it may look or seem, you went without quite a lot, too. Important things. Things that, at a young age, you deeply understood that you were missing.”

Sissy didn’t specify what those things meant or were. She didn’t have to, either.

“And what ended up filling in those missing things for you, in one way or another, became engrained in a lot of who you are, sweetheart. It won’t be letting it all go to allow yourself space to learn what it means to be an adult, a woman, you, but you will say goodbye to parts of it. You have to, to get what you want when you figure out what that finally is. Everyone does. It just looks a little different from person to person.”

“He still hasn’t asked me, you know,” she pointed out.

Sissy’s gaze jumped between something outside and Frankie. “Asked what—who?”

“Daddy. About what comes after the gap year, if I want to take an offer somewhere to continue soccer while I do it. Anything about it. He hasn’t asked.”

“Maybe he’s scared of letting go, too.”

“You think?”

“What’s crazy is you thinking letting go stops becoming a thing once you get over it the first time. Life will teach you differently soon enough. People don’t grow through joy and happiness. We change and learn from pain and suffering. Sacrifice. We become better, stronger, and grateful. Imagine all the letting go that will entail. And we do it until we die, sweet girl. Call it loving, if you want. Call it being alive. Those two are usually a large cause of it.”

The realities of her father’s life, and the loss it contained quieted Frankie as her thoughts became consumed by the large list. Her mother, his wife. Grandparents on both sides. Parents she had never met, like the two uncles he rarely spoke about.