“Oh, I’m sure it’s more than that. I’ve seen your work with your partner. It’s beautiful.”
“Char?” he asked. “Yeah, well, it all started with her. I mean with him. I’m always slipping on the pronouns.”
“That must be hard to keep straight,” Milly said, “after knowing someone for so long.”
“Just the pronoun thing, mostly,” he said. “Char was basically always a man, from the day I met her. Him.”
More silence. Ardit sure seemed to be taking his time sweeping the sidewalk today, Milly thought. It was a very funny thing to live in a doorman building. They didn’t need to see much to put things together.
“How about you?” Mateo finally asked. “You doing okay?”
Milly sighed. “The last few years haven’t been the best. Bubbe died.”
“Yeah, I know,” he muttered. He was ashamed, Milly could tell, because he hadn’t gotten in touch when it happened.
“That was an awful, drawn-out thing,” Milly continued. “And Zayde’s going senile now. He takes up a lot of time.”
He glanced at her, shook his head.
“So no, I can’t lie to you. The past few years haven’t been great. Past many years, actually. Life’s just kind of. . emptied out.” Milly didn’t mean to make him feel overly bad, but she didn’t feel like putting a fake smiley face on things, either.
Suddenly Mateo pivoted toward her, his eyes glassy. “Can you accept an apology from me?”
That came so suddenly to Milly! She caught her breath, then sighed and looked down. If only he realized it was about so much more than an apology, she thought. It was about everything; it was about all those years together and why the void that followed walloped her.
“You want me to just shut up and go?” he asked.
“No, no,” she said. “It’s just — I have been hurting for so long, Mateo. Really, really hurting.”
“I know, I know,” he said, all in a rush. “I know, and I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just — I never knew. I never really understood why you adopted me, why you wanted me, and why you kept taking me back. I fucked up so many times, it got to the point I couldn’t look you in the face. I didn’t know what to do but to be alone. Every time you looked at me, all I can remember is I saw disappointment, I saw pity.”
“Pity?” Milly interjected. “You saw pity? Is that why you think we adopted you?”
“Why else would you adopt a fucking AIDS orphan when you could have your own kid? Bubbe brought you to the boys’ home in Brooklyn one day and you saw me and you ended up taking me home out of pity.”
“I fell in love with you, Mateo,” Milly snapped back, quite peeved to have had her intentions mistaken. “I fell in love with a little boy with a big bushel of hair and a bunch of Crayolas and craft paper in front of him. And I didn’t want to give birth to a kid because I didn’t want to watch my kid go through what I went through and what my mother went through with mental illness. So you’re where I put that love instead, okay?” Milly took a breath, winded from the sheer volume of her revelation.
Mateo was silent, tracing finger patterns on his tablet. “So why’d you never tell me that?”
“I thought it was obvious. I thought it was obvious every single day I held your hand and walked you through this park. Mateo, those first years with you were the happiest years of my life.”
He looked up. “They were?”
“Yes, they were. But then you hit a certain age and I think suddenly you started asking yourself all these questions—”
“I did! I did!” he said, worked up. “That’s when it started, when I was fourteen or fifteen.”
“Yes,” Milly continued, “and you know? You know what? We should have sensed it; we should have gone to therapy with you instead of sending you yourself and putting it all on you. We should have talked this all out then. But—” Milly was smudging away tears now; she felt rather overwhelmed from suddenly putting words to something she hadn’t fully understood at the time. “I guess I was just scared of you and I stepped back. It was wrong, it was wrong. Then the drugs started, and then I was really scared.”
Mateo looked at Milly, eyes wide. “Those years are, like, such a blur to me,” he said. “Just, like, years lost.”
“And then suddenly you were in the sober house in California and you said you weren’t coming back. And when a boy grows up and says he wants to be set free, what can a mother do?”
Mateo snapped his mouth shut, considered. “You really thought of yourself as my mother?”
“You are absolutely thickheaded!” she exclaimed.
Mateo laughed. “Well, I don’t know if Jared saw it that way.”
Oh God, thought Milly. Now he’d gone and said the dreaded J-word. “Well, I’m not speaking for him,” she said firmly. “I’m speaking for me. Millimom. The bleeding heart.”
Mateo looked at her sidelong. “You do have a bleeding heart, you know. It used to drive me fucking crazy.”
“Well, it drove—” Milly caught herself before saying the J-name herself. “It drove him crazy, too. He used to mock me for it and tell me I was a pushover.”
“Do you talk to him?”
“No,” she said. “Well, through lawyers.”
“Can I go back to my original question?”
“What was that? I can’t even remember at this point. My head is swimming.”
“Can you forgive me for being a fuckup and wrecking ten years of your life?”
She looked at him again. I can’t believe I raised this man is all she kept thinking. This is the boy who elaborately matched his frites to his condiments? Who kicked his feet against his butt while he drew? My God, she thought, with a catch of fear in her throat. Life is zooming by, slipping out of my fingers like salt, more than halfway gone.
“I’m just glad it’s over,” she said. “It’s really over?”
“It’s really over. I mean—”
“I know, I know,” Milly stopped him. “One day at a time, that’s how it goes. Drew’s told me that a million times. Just for today.” She said it in kind of a singsong, and he laughed. “But it’s still really over, right?” she asked again.
“Yes.” He shrugged. “It’s over.”
“Well,” she began, “then I forgive you.” She paused. “I can’t believe you thought all those years we took you in out of pity. If that’s what you were really thinking, then it explains a lot.”
He looked at her keenly. “There wasn’t just a little bit of pity in there?”
She opened her mouth, about to protest. Then she considered. She held her open hands aloft. “Mateo, what can I say? I am a middle-class, old-school-liberal Jewish New York woman. A dying breed. Look at my mother!” she pleaded.
“That’s exactly what I mean!” he said.
“I know what you mean. But I don’t think pity is quite the word I’d agree with. I visited you with Bubbe and I saw a little boy without a home, who’d lost his mother, with a lot of talent. And it just so happened that I needed you and I didn’t know it yet. And the more I came back, the more I fell in love with you.”
Finally, Mateo managed to look at her with a yielding softness in his face. He made a fist and held it toward her.
“What’s that?” Milly asked.
He frowned. “It’s a fist bump. Remember the Obamas and the fist bump?”
“No one’s ever offered me a fist bump before.”
“Well, here you go.”
Milly made a fist and bumped it against Mateo’s.
He smiled. “Not bad. That’s a start.”
“Not a bad start?” Milly asked.
“Not a bad start.”