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But I shook my head. “No, I didn’t know.”
She sat up and pulled her feet out of my lap, wrapping her arms around me and tugging me close. “I’m sorry, Nana,” she mumbled into my hair. I held onto her, the grief distant, like I didn’t want to feel it.
Not again, at least.
“I was hoping to visit him,” I said, my voice watery.
Vitoria pulled away and frowned. “When we went to his funeral,” she explained, her thumbs rubbing over the backs of my hands, “they read out one of his last letters that he wrote, and he sent his love to us.”
“You’re making it worse.” I hiccupped, my chest so tight I could barely breathe.
But Vitoria smiled again. “He’d be upset if he saw you crying for him,” she pointed out, and I sniffled unhappily.
“Yeah, well,” I mumbled. “Sue me. I should have been here for the funeral, at least.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” she scolded. “I’m sure you were neck deep in work anyway, and you would have felt even worse because you wouldn’t have been able to come back.”
“I know that.” I sighed. She was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better. “Stop getting all adult-y on me and go back to your kiddies’ game.”
“Stardew Valley isnota kiddies’ game,” she grumbled, but went back to it anyway.
We sat in silence for a little while, Vitoria going back to her game to give me time to process. I went back to painting her nails, losing myself in the mundane movement of each small stroke, my mind a mess of emotions.
Inevitably, my mind drifted back to Reid, and the grief that weighed in my heart after our conversation that morning. I hadn’t expected her to look so devastated when she walked out of the bathroom, and I’d panicked, believing she regretted everything. Maybe I’d been a little naive, but a part of me hoped that things would change.
Certainly for the better, because if there had been one thing I’d discovered last night, it was that whatever I felt for Reid wasnotsuperficial. But evidently that was a one way street.
Vitoria’s foot tapped my thigh. “Hey, you zoned out.”
I glanced up at her, blinking the slight haze from my mind. “Sorry,” I murmured. “Just thinking.”
Vitoria shut her Nintendo off and set it on her chest. “Are you and Reid okay?”
My eyes went wide and I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. “Why do you ask?”
“You just jumped halfway off the sofa at the mention of her name, so…”
“Ugh, I’m just stressed, I guess,” I replied, shoving the guilt back as far as it would go. “I feel like being here is keeping me from getting work done.”
Not exactly a lie, but not the entire truth either.
It was all I could give her.
A few hours later I wandered around my old neighborhood, floating from one glowing street lamp to the next. I yearned for that old, familiar sense of security that these streets once gave me.
Mom’s new house wasn’t too far from the neighborhood where we grew up, just far enough that the houses were built from brick and separated by small, well-tended gardens. Nothing extravagant, nothing compared to what I wished I could give them, but enough until I could.
Walking a few streets down from Mom’s new home, I found myself at the foothills of the favelas in this part of town. It had been six years since I’d stepped foot in the overcrowded streets. Looking up into the twisting, winding dirt paths, I knew I wouldn’t set foot in them again.
I turned on my heel, determined to leave that part of our family history behind me for good, ofmyhistory behind me.
I found myself back on the lamp-lit streets of the residential area, watching as mothers stood on their doorsteps and yelled for their kids to come inside. With a smile, I watched as groups of young children protested in one chorus, the miniature game of soccer paused in defiance.
Vitoria and I were once like that. Care-free, full of energy, determined to play outside with our friends until the moon hung the stars in the sky above our heads. I missed those days so much. When I’d thought about coming home, coming back to the place I grew up in, I hadn’t expected for it all to be pulled out from underneath my feet, for all the children I’d once helped look after to be adults, just a few years younger than my little sister. For their parents to be old enough that their dark hair had turned gray, their skin soft with age.
For the people I’d cared for so deeply to just be… gone.
I pointedly ignored Paulo’s closed store. The community hadn’t bothered to do much with the store, and it looked as if no one had been interested in buying it since Paulo’s passing.
