AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He slowly shut the door, letting her have the last word, not even watching her drive off, which he’d done in the past, when wanting to see her for every available second brought him joy.
On his way back to the bedroom, he got a beer and baby bottle out of the fridge, preparing for the long night ahead.
After that night, the shift in their relationship was obvious, but it wasn’t discussed, a pink elephant in the room. The problem for Leon was that he’d lived with that elephant all his life: his mother’s alcoholism. If Ava had an issue that had divided them after their declaration of love, she wasn’t sharing it, and he no longer cared enough about resolving it to bring it up.
But Roberta wasn’t tolerating the avoidance. She wanted to know if they were coming to Thanksgiving, and she wanted to know now.
“Yes! I’m coming with Violet. If Ava is in town, I’m sure she’ll come, but she mentioned going to her family’s house back East for the weekend.”
“Oh, that will never work with me. I want all my kids and their families under one roof for the holidays. If you and Violet come, I’m good with that. If Avadoesn’t want to come to Thanksgiving dinner, to hell with her.”
“Ma, give it up, will you? She’s not intentionally trying to hurt you.”
So Thanksgiving was the usual food-laden festival at the Saint household, with all the old great-aunts and great-uncles and the more recent ones, and the air was thick with them speaking Italian, even brother Joey’s wife, Candy, was learning Italian and understood what they were saying. They helped her with the pronunciation of words, and she in turn refused to answer Big Mike and his brothers when they tried to speak to her in English. “Italiano, Italiano,” she demanded.
All of the women took turns playing with Violet, leaving Leon to huddle with the men.
“Why didn’t your woman come? She doesn’t care for the family?” Uncle John asked.
“She went back East.”
“Where back East?”
“I can’t believe it, but I didn’t ask. Anything east of Las Vegas is foreign land as far as I’m concerned.”
“You sound like a country bumpkin when you talk that way,capisce?”
“Hey, I am what I am.”
“He’s a good ole boy firefighter from Escondido. We don’t put on airs here,” Joey said, crooking his little finger of the hand that held a can of beer.
Roaring laughter filled the room. “She’s really not like that. You know Ava, Uncle Charlie.”
“Not really, I knew Alex, her husband.”
That got their rapt attention. “You did?” Leon asked. “How?”
“He was a pilot. He flew small private planes out of Carlsbad. He was the pilot in the plane when he died.”
“I didn’t know that,” Leon said, shaken. “I knew he was killed in a crash, but I didn’t know he was flying the plane. How’d you know him?”
“He had an old Austin-Healey that he brought to our Sunday Cars and Coffee Club.”
“Gotcha.”
Leon felt awful. He’d been unintentionally flippant about the loss of her husband. Not that flying the plane to his death made a difference, but the conversation had definitely exposed something deeper. At the start of their friendship, she’d told him she didn’t want to talk about Alex’s death, so it wasn’t really his fault that he’d sort of blown off the importance of it.
The others continued chatting, and Leon went off to his old bedroom, now a guest room with new furniture. He sat on the end of the bed and keyed in Ava’s number.
“Hey, I was just thinking about you,” she said. “We’re about to sit down to dinner. I wondered if you were at your mom’s yet.”
“Call me after you eat. I forgot all about the time difference.”
“How’s Violet?”
“She’s great,” he answered. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”
“Don’t hang up. It’s great to hear your voice.”
