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“Did she tell Phil’s family you had a mafioso brother?”
A shoulder shrugged. “Honey, we all do. There’s always that one bad apple. Phil’s second cousin believes the world is flat. Give me a made man over a moron any day of the week. Anyway, like I said, it was quick for me. Within three months she’d given me three different men to date, and after I went on one date I knew he was the guy for me and I didn’t have to meet anyone else. But Phil had been waiting almost three years.”
“Why so long?” That sounded like a long time.
“She said she hadn’t found the right woman for him. She told him he had to be patient. So he waited.”
“I told everyone who tried to set me up that I was a taken man. I just didn’t know by who yet,” a deep voice says. I turn and Phil Brambilla is standing in the doorway. He’s short and bald. The only hair on his head is a moustache. He has kind eyes that beam when he looks at his wife. “I would have waited another three years for you. Now come in here. Mrs. Marino’s grandson needs something called a sound check.”
I follow her back in the two-bedroom apartment. This, I’ve been told, is their retirement place. They raised their three kids in Little Italy and moved out here when they retired. The wall in their living room is covered with pictures, snapshots of a family history. A girl on a bike, her hair in pigtails, surrounded by two boys wearing Yankees T-shirts. A big family around the table, all smiling for the camera. Three of the pictures are of the kids grown and in their caps and gowns. And there were so many grandkids.
I don’t have these things where I live. Time stopped when my father died. My mother didn’t take many pictures, and she didn’t have siblings to back her up. All our pictures end shortly after the millennium. The ones we do have are on our phones now or stashed away in slowly disintegrating albums. I tried to look through one of them a few years back, an old one, and the glue was so sticky I couldn’t get the pages to move.
“Hey, you okay?”
Heath startles me but I manage to quash the weird emotion running through me and the questions.
If his grandmother really did have some skill, what would it feel like to know she’d helped create more than a couple? She’d created a family.
“I’m fine. So do you have questions you start with?” I ask, hoping the emotions don’t show on my face.
“Yes, and the first one is for you. Do you need a hug?”
I roll my eyes.
He shrugs. “Hey, I’ve been told I’m an excellent hugger. I’m not one of those zero percent body fatters who feel like a rock. I’m squishy in all the right places.”
He’s ridiculous, and it’s exactly what I need to get out of that terrible headspace. I laugh because he’s not squishy anywhere but in his head. “I’m fine. No hugs needed. Now answer me.”
He seems like he doesn’t quite believe me, but he moves on. “We’re going to sit and ask them about their lives.”
“Should we ask about how they’re compatible?”
“Most of that is in the data my grandmother compiled,” Heath points out. “You looked through it, right?”
I’d sifted. It had been lots of questions about normal things a couple should know. Do you want children? What religion do you follow? How important is it your children are raised in your faith?
And then there were weird ones like what’s your favorite color.
“Yeah. I didn’t read the essays though.”
He grimaces. “Then you missed the best parts. She asks everyone to write an essay on what they want their marriage to look like in five years. Those are the best. For Anna and Phil, they both saw Anna staying home to raise the kids while he took care of them all financially. And there was a bunch of stuff about dogs and picket fences and moving to the suburbs.”
I’m confused because I did know enough to know some of their basic history. “But she worked the whole time. And they didn’t leave the city.”
“Yeah, but they both wanted the same things,” he points out. “It doesn’t mean they got them. It simply means they were willing to work toward a goal. When that goal had to change, so did they. My grandmother always tells me the only way to have a successful relationship is to be willing to grow together. Change will always come. It’s how a couple handles the change that makes or breaks them. Anna and Phil didn’t get the house they wanted, but I think they would say they got the family they wanted.”
And I’m back to emotional. I shove that aside in favor of something I do understand. Business. “And how is this going to teach the AI?”
