Mario moved around the island, coming to stand near us. Up close, you could see his sleeves were rolled to the elbow—not so much for show as for practicality—and the faint scent of rain still clung to him like a memory. “I can reach the high shelves,” he offered quietly.
“I KNOW!” Olivia practically vibrated with excitement. “You’re very tall! And you fix things! And you don’t seem allergic to anything except shellfish!”
“How do you know about?—”
“Mom looked it up before you came for dinner last week. She has a whole list of your dietary restrictions on her phone.”
“I wanted to be prepared!” I protested, mortified. The list was ridiculous—lasagna crossed off and then circled back on, because Grandma’s lasagna was always the great diplomatic meal. Tonight I’d promised to make it if Mario ever brought his appetite to our table.
“She also has a list of your favorite foods. Lasagna’s at the top, which is lucky because Grandma makes excellent?—”
“OKAY.” I clamped my floury hand over her mouth. “That’s enough sharing for tonight.”
Olivia licked my palm—actually licked it—and I yanked my hand back with a shriek.
“Gross!”
“Effective,” she countered, then turned back to Mario. “Anyway, my dad’s name was Daniel, and he was very handsome but very useless. Like a decorative throw pillow.”
“Where do you get these analogies?” I asked, wiping my palm on my apron.
“Grandma. She has opinions.” Olivia picked up a cookie cutter, examining it critically. “He came to see me twice. Once when I was three, but I don’t remember. And once last year, but he spent the whole time on his phone, so that doesn’t really count.”
The casual way she dismissed him—her own father—made my chest ache.
“I wasn’t married to him,” I found myself telling Mario, needing him to understand the whole picture. “My mother still considers this her greatest failure as a Catholic parent. She has a whole novena she does about it.”
“Nine days of prayer for your immortal soul?”
“Nine days of prayer that I’ll find a nice Catholic husband to make an honest woman of me.” I shaped another cookie with perhaps more force than necessary. “Daniel and I dated for three years. He was charming, funny, everything he was supposed to be. When I got pregnant...”
I paused, remembering those early days. The joy, the fear, the desperate hope that we could make it work.
“He proposed,” I continued. “Bought a ring and everything. Said we’d be a family. Then the reality set in. Morning sickness. Doctor’s appointments. The actual responsibility of it all.”
“He started disappearing,” Olivia chimed in, now creating what appeared to be a cookie crime scene with red frosting. “Like a magic trick, but sad.”
“First, he missed the appointment where we heard the heartbeat. He had a work thing. Then he missed the ultrasound where we found out we were having a girl. Car trouble.”
“His car was fine,” Olivia added. “He just didn’t want to come.”
“By the time she was born, he was already half gone. Showed up two hours late to the delivery room with a latte. A LATTE. I’d been in labor for sixteen hours, and he needed caffeine to ‘deal with the stress.’”
Mario’s jaw clenched. “Please tell me you threw it at him.”
“She threw ice chips!” Olivia announced proudly. “The nurses gave her a standing ovation. Well, she was lying down, but they clapped a lot.”
“It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“It was totally your finest moment,” Olivia disagreed. “You were growing a human and still had good aim. That’s multitasking.”
I pulled her in for a one-armed hug, this remarkable child who’d somehow emerged from such a mess with her spirit intact.
“He hung around for six months,” I continued, needing to finish the story now that I’d started. “Each visit shorter than the last. Then one morning, I woke up to a text. Just a text. ‘I’m not cut out for this. I’m sorry. Take care.’”
“Fifty-three characters,” Olivia said solemnly. “Mom counted.”
“You counted?” Mario’s voice was soft.
