grip for an instant, then pulls his hand away. “Should I get ice?”
“No, I’m fine.” Not really. I’m imagining the deepening shades of red I’m cycling through, trying to recall their names from art class sophomore year: scarlet, crimson, vermilion, burgundy. “Let’s just keep going.”
Mom coils up the vacuum cleaner cord, looping it hand to elbow, hand to elbow, carefully not looking over at us, as though we have, in fact, started going at it on the kitchen table.
Now the kitchen door slams. “Mommy!” Em soars across the room to her. He’s followed by a sweaty-looking Nic. Who smells particularly ripe.
“Nico! You stink like old gym socks!” Mom says. “Take your shirt off, outside, please, and get into that shower.”
Nic, however, has spotted Cass. His expression hardens into one of unnatural grimness. “I was running up the Ocean hill carrying Em,” he says. “Seemed like good training. Now I’m going to lift, though, so the shower will have to wait.”
The combined odors of Cass’s subtle aftershave and the dis-gusting reek of Nic are overpowering. I wonder if Cass will keel over and I’ll have to perform CPR. This speculation should not feel so much like a fantasy.
Cass is biting his full lower lip now, looking down at Tess.
I can’t tell from his downturned face whether he’s amused or completely horrified by the three-ring circus that is my family.
“Hi!” Emory’s face lights up completely. “Superman. Hi!”
He points triumphantly at Cass, like ta-da!
“Hey there, Superboy,” Cass says easily. My brother immedi-250
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ately comes over and throws his arms around Cass’s neck. And kisses him. On the neck.
Cass pats Em’s back. “Hey buddy.” His voice is muffled by Emory’s hair.
“Superman,” Emory repeats.
Cass adjusts so that Emory has room to sit on his chair, but Em’s having none of that and climbs into his lap, occupying it firmly, like Fabio in his “here I stay” mode on my bed.
Time to intervene.
“Em, you need to give Superman some room. He has to—”
“It’s fine, Gwen.” Cass cuts me off. “Want to keep going?
You were about to explain why Angel Clare wasn’t a di—uh— jerk. I’m all ears.”
“Well, of course he’s a jerk! I mean, come on. She tells him she was basically raped and he can’t forgive her because she’s ‘not the woman he thought she was’ even though I’m sure he’d been around. That’s without even mentioning the scene where he sleepwalks afterward, carries her to the cemetery and puts her in a coffin.”
“This is why I read romance novels,” Mom says, abandon-ing all pretense of not eavesdropping. “None of that nonsense there.”
Cass rubs his nose. “Seriously? I didn’t get to that one. Must not’ve been in SparkNotes.”
I wave my hand, exasperated. “It’s supposed to symbolize that the person he loved is really dead to him now, and—”
“But it’s just basically twisted—” Cass interrupts. The door to Nic’s room slams open. He’s wearing a wife-beater, takes a 251
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few menacing steps into the room, then lifts the forty-pound weight and starts doing bicep curls with a belligerent expression. Very Stanley Kowalski. Hullo, Nic was the one who begged me to take on this tutoring thing.
Cass lifts an eyebrow at Nic. “Cruz, hey.”
“Bro,” Nic returns, practically snarling. He swings the weight to the other arm. More curling. More glowering. Cass’s eyebrow remains in an elevated position. How does he do that?
“Shiny.” Emory smoothes Cass’s hair, pushing it behind one ear. I notice now that it’s longer than usual, and has a little wave to it. It is shiny. I practically have to sit on my hand to avoid reaching over and brushing back the other side.
I need to do something to break the tension. “Sure you don’t want a snack?” I ask, forgetting how lame that offer seemed when Mom made it.
“Nah. I’m fine. Thanks, though.” His eyes meet mine and linger a few moments before returning to the paperback edi-tion of Tess. Who I’m starting to hate even more than before.
Look back at me. What was that you were thinking?
Mom has settled herself on the couch with a book that, naturally, has one of the more aggressively sexual covers. Most of hers are not quite so bad, but this one has a guy with his shirt off, one thumb hooked into his overly tight white, practically painted-on pants, crooking his index finger out at the viewer.
Come and get me, baby.
Nic’s set down the first weight with a thunk; picked up an even larger one. Em’s now resting his head on Cass’s shoulder. His lashes float down, snap up, drift down again. He’s falling asleep.
It all just keeps getting better and better.
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I start to say something, though I’m not sure what it could possibly be, and in comes the missing piece in the whole situ-ation, Grandpa Ben, carrying a large plastic bag in which there is an enormous dead fish, judging by the size of the tail fins sticking stiffly out the top. He’s got another bag full of kale greens and root vegetables and is grinning from ear to ear, prominent front teeth accounted for.
“Look what Marco caught—right off the pier at Sandy Claw.
He got three even bigger than this monster.” His voice drops.
“Above the legal limit, but who’s counting? Can you believe it?
We eat well tonight!” He stops, noticing Cass. “Ah, the young yard boy. Como vai, meu filho?” His delighted smile spreads even farther across his face as he looks back and forth between me and Cass. “Você tem uma namorada? ”
Cass said he didn’t know Portuguese. Please God, let that be true.
My grandfather did not just ask him if he had a girlfriend. If Cass got that, I’m going to go over and knock myself out with one of Nic’s weights. The fifty-pound one should do nicely.
But his blue eyes are simply questioning, searching me for translation.
“He wants to know how you are, and if you like, um, fish.”
“I do,” Cass tells him, “thank you. And I’m fine.”
Emory’s now definitely asleep. Drooling on Cass’s last clean shirt.
“You will stay to dinner!” Grandpa Ben orders, one finger extended, a Portuguese tyrant. “Você vai jantar conosco!” He pulls a sprig of lavender out of the vegetable bag, tucks it into the vase beneath Vovó’s picture. Blows it a kiss. Then marches majestically to the kitchen counter, calling, “Yes? Yes?” over his shoulder.
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“I’d love to,” Cass calls after him. “I’m starving!”
This time there is no mistaking the laughter in his eyes, or the way his glance lowers quickly to my lips, then returns, innocently, to meet my eyes.
I give up, bury my face in my hands.
“I’m having a great time,” Cass says, very softly, so quietly perhaps my big-eared mother and nosy cousin can’t hear. “All good.”
Is it? All I know is that I can’t seem to stop—this—or slow it down. Or remember exactly why that’s what I want.
Here’s what happens before dinner. Nic finally gives it up and goes to shower, shouldering past Cass’s chair, unnecessarily close, waist wrapped in a towel, muscles bulging. Implica-tion: Mine are bigger than yours, minor-league swimmer boy, and I can mess you up if necessary. Cass does not look intimidated.
Mom asks Cass to carry Emory to the couch. Em wakes up halfway, perhaps because Cass has him awkwardly slung over his back, head hanging. He starts to melt down until Cass agrees to read his current favorite book, which involves a “dear wee little fairy who lived under a petunia leaf.” Seven times, until Mom takes pity on either Cass or me and shuffles Emory off to take a bubble bath.
Grandpa Ben, in some sort of Old World display of machismo, reincarnating himself as a knife salesman (did he really ever do that? I haven’t heard one single story about it up till now), decides he needs to whack the head off the fish with 254
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one blow, and chop up all the vegetables with some sort of enormous butcher knife. Cass and I try to slog through more Tess but keep getting interrupted by loud thwacks and Portuguese curses from the kitchen counter.
Nic comes back in and he and Cass have another manly conversation in which they both use monosyllables and say basically nothing.
“Hey, man.”
“Dude.”
As the fish is cooking, Grandpa Ben comes over to the table and sits down across from us, grinning broadly once again. I shut my eyes, waiting for him to interrogate Cass about his suitability as a husband, but instead, he gives a startled, con-cerned exclamation.
“Coitadinho! Olhe para os seus dedos! Olhe a sua m?o!” And I open my eyes to find him pulling the note-taking pencil out of Cass’s fingers, calling for my mother. “Look at this, Lucia!”
Mom folds her hand on her mouth. “Oh my.”
“What is it?” I ask, a little frantically. Cass’s ears turn red, the flush rapidly spreading across his cheekbones.
“Your poor hands, honey. How long have they looked like this?”
“It’s nothing,” he says in a muffled voice, trying to pull his arm back from Ben. “They were much worse before.”
“What are you cleaning these with?” Grandpa demands.
Cass has curled both hands into fists and buried them under the table.
“Uh. Hydrogen peroxide. Please. It’s nothing.”
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