His face seems to soften with our agreement, as if making this promise out loud to me somehow eases my dad’s pain. Maybe it does.
When his attention is completely given back to the roadway, I flip my phone in my palm and swipe open the message from Nico. It’s nothing more than a picture of a heart. I send the same thing back, and then I hold it tightly in my hands, and I believe that my father will do what he says.
20
“Mom, really…your dress is fine,” I say as my mom fusses with the tie belt around her waist, hiding behind my dad’s car in Nico’s driveway.
Valerie invited us over for Saturday lunch with her family. She insisted, and my father couldn’t refuse. For the last fifteen hours, my mom has been panicking about making a good impression, and my father has been pouting over giving up his first free Saturday in years. Mostly, my dad doesn’t like to be social. The parties were always my mom’s thing, while dad had the built-in excuse to leave and go talk football in the backyard with the other coaches or with my brother. He avoided. But when she asked him to come today while he stood at her doorstep last night with her son, he couldn’t refuse.
“I’m not sure why we have all of this food,” my dad says, popping his trunk and pulling out a box with a crockpot and two trays of cookies, brownies, and whatever other baked good my mom could buy at the deli counter on her mad dash to the market this morning.
“What’s in the pot?” I ask, taking it from my dad. I look down and see something boiling through the lid.
“I made pozole,” my mom says through a beaming smile.
“Like…from scratch?” I ask, my brow pulled tight.
“She poured it in from a mix. I watched her,” my brother says over my shoulder as he awkwardly climbs from the car with his crutches that were stretched across our laps for the ride here.
“Thank God,” I say to him.
“I know, right?” he chuckles.
“Hush, both of you. I could cook if I wanted to,” she says.
Our father lets her walk on to the door, but turns to face us with the trays of cookies in his hands and shakes his head to show how little he agrees with that statement.
Alyssa has the door held open by the time my mom reaches the porch, and she already has her eyes on the trays of cookies. The laughter spills out of the house, and I can tell from here that several people are inside. I see my family straighten their posture, my dad pausing, probably considering running back to the car. I step in front of them and press my hand on Alyssa’s head, scrunching her hair with my fingers.
“Hi, princess,” I say.
“Hi, Reagan,” she says, a small lisp slipping out through the new hole in her top line of teeth.
“Hey, you lost another one!” I say.
“I did!” she says, stuffing her hand deep into the pocket of her jeans and pulling out a crumpled dollar. “Toof-fairy!”
“Awesome!” I say.
I step inside, urging my family to follow. Nico steps up from a seat at the kitchen table and rushes over to me.
“I didn’t know you were here, sorry. I would have helped,” he says, leaning in and kissing my cheek chastely, moving quickly to shake my father’s hand.
“Here,” he says, taking the heavy pot from me. He carries it to the kitchen where his mom clears a place for it, and she pulls the lid off and smells the aroma.
“Oh, it needs to be stirred,” she says, pulling a large spoon from a door and stirring the soup a few times while my mother walks up next to her.
“It’s pozole,” my mom says proudly, as if she spent hours slaving over it.
“Yes, I recognize it. Thank you…you didn’t have to bring anything,” Valerie smiles.
My mom acts bashful, waving her hand as if what she did was nothing at all, which…it really wasn’t. I notice a pot on her stove and I step close enough to look inside, where homemade soup is brewing. Valerie’s eyes catch mine, and she winks. I smile. She’s going to keep this secret, and it makes me like her even more to see her spare my mom’s feelings.