Watching her from afar — her arms folded, rocking ever so slightly on her heels — Mateo can’t get over how small she seems. How old is she now? Almost forty-five? What is she thinking about? Her own art? For the first time, it seems, he wonders if, or how, his whole mess of the past few years has affected her own art-making. Did it set her back? There’s yet another thought, in what seems to be an ever-increasing pile of thoughts related to the repercussions of his life, that he just can’t deal with.
They all end up eating panini in the Design Center café. After Drew’s last bite, she asks if Milly and Mateo mind if she goes and checks out a few of the interior-design showrooms in the building; there’s a room in her house she wants to do over and she wants to get some ideas. Mateo can feel his heart quickening; he feared this moment was coming. But of course what can he and Millimom say? Drew picks up her bag and darts away, saying she’ll be back in twenty, twenty-five minutes. Mateo and Millimom watch her go.
“She has such a beautiful home here, doesn’t she?” Millimom finally says.
“She does.”
“It’s so crazy how people have actual homes here, isn’t it? You can have a front yard and a porch and a backyard. For the price of a studio in New York! I’ve always wondered how Drew could stand it out here all these years after living in New York. I mean, most people I know eventually move back to New York. But, hey, what can I say, when I woke up this morning and smelled the bougainvillea outside my window, it kind of got me thinking, you know?”
“Yeah,” he says, “there are some good smells out here, it’s true.” He can sense she’s prattling because she’s nervous. It’s such an old, familiar sound track, Millimom’s self-soothing ramblings, her little debates with herself.
She sighs, picks up the crust of her sandwich, puts it down. She smiles at Mateo, looks around the whole café, then smiles at him again. He half smiles at her, too, then looks down at his crotch, picking at a loose thread in his jeans.
“Dad’s sorry he couldn’t come,” Milly finally says. “He’s been feeling super under the gun getting ready for a show.”
Mateo shrugs. He almost wishes she hadn’t mentioned him. “He’s got his own life,” he says. He feels a little sulky and passive-aggressive saying it, even though what he sort of meant to say is I didn’t expect you guys to get on a plane and fly across the country to come see me in a rehab house.
“Well, no, no, it’s not that,” she says hurriedly. “He wanted to come. He just really — he just feels like every moment that he’s not in school teaching counts until this show goes up. He told me—”
“I told you it’s okay,” Mateo slightly snaps. Instantly, he feels badly about it. But damn, doesn’t she know to leave something alone?
But it’s too late. He sees that all-too-familiar look on her face, as though he just swatted her back. She puts her index finger up to her teeth and sort of bites it.
“I just meant—” he says. Oh God, he can feel himself going down one of those bad, bad wormholes. Fuck! He needs to call his sponsor. What would his sponsor say to him right now? What is the right thing to do? He takes a breath. “I just meant it’s okay,” he says in a softer voice. “He didn’t need to come out. I’m really, really doing okay. I feel really good, like I’m on a good track.”
But it’s really too late now. She’s crying. Quietly, but he can see the tears. Then she grimaces in self-disgust as she smudges them away with the knuckle of her index finger.
“Mateo,” she says, “I tried to do the right thing. I — when I started visiting you, I–I guess I just came to love you over time and I–I mean we — we wanted you to have a better chance. I don’t know where I went wrong, honest, I don’t. We just sort of — we were winging it. We did the best we could. We—” She stops, then says, more quietly, “I just, visiting you in the boys’ home, I just really fell in love with that five-year-old face.”
Oh God, he realizes. She’s going all the way back to that? Holy shit. Oh, shit. He knows he must look absolutely like a deer in the headlights right now. He prays to say the right thing.
“I don’t think you did anything wrong,” he finally says. “I’m grateful for what you did for me. I don’t think you had anything to do with the whole drug thing. But I gotta tell you something.” And now — oh, holy shit, he can feel tears coming on, too, but he swallows them back because he doesn’t want to lose his ground on this. “I wanna be an adult now and find out who I am. I lost enough time to this drug bullshit and now I wanna be someone.”
Milly’s face lights up. “Of course,” she says. “Of course! I was hoping for that. And we don’t expect you to live with us when you come back to New York. We’ll understand if you want to get your own place in Brooklyn or live with friends or—”
“No, naw, you don’t understand,” he says. “I don’t think I wanna come back to New York. I think I wanna stay here.”
And the funny thing is he didn’t even know that’s what he wanted until he said it. But suddenly it all comes crashing down on him — New York. Those East Village and Lower East Side streets, every block crawling with drug memories. And her. Her, her, her. The 04/14/1984 photo, presumably tucked back behind his bed at the Christodora where he’d left it, but which he thinks about every few days. Where she was from and where she died. He wants to feel like he doesn’t come from anybody. That he’s not Mateo Heyman-Traum, but just Mateo, nineteen years old, artist, adult. It all clicks into place before his eyes with stunning clarity. He doesn’t want to go back to New York.
Milly sits before him, blank faced, taking it in, her mouth literally an O as she absorbs this. She looks like she’s casting about for a reply. “What about Pratt?” she finally asks.
“I don’t want to go back.” Even as Mateo says it, he realizes: it’s true. He’ll reenroll out here, or maybe he won’t go back to school at all. He’ll figure it out. But he doesn’t want to go back there. He can suddenly feel that in his gut as clear as day.
Millimom doesn’t say anything. She just licks her lips slowly and sits back in her chair and folds her arms. She looks down into her arms and then latches some hair back behind her ear. She glances up at him once — a flash of a look that he doesn’t know whether to read as shock, rage, or a challenge — and then looks back down again. He feels like he’s sinking down, down the wormhole, into sadness and betrayal. But. Well, but. There’s something else. Half of him feels like he’s coasting above those feelings, like he knows he’ll come out the other end. He feels. . very light. Untethered.
Finally, she looks up again, rather steely. “Don’t worry, Mateo, I’m leaving tomorrow,” she says.
He remembers Drew’s exhortation to treat Milly well. “It really means a lot to me that you came out,” he says.
She says nothing. The two of them just sit there over their sandwich crumbs. A part of Mateo is telling him to just bolt, just leave. But another part of him tells him to just breathe, that this will pass, that — for once, finally — he’s done nothing wrong. Soon he’ll be back in West Adams where he feels okay, with the guys, with the blue and green leaves flying off the wall just paces away. Just keep picturing the blue and green leaves, he tells himself. Keep picturing Charlice up on her ladder, you down below.
Drew finally comes back, bearing samples and brochures. “Hiii,” she says breezily, plopping down. She’s going on and on about what she saw, but it doesn’t annoy Mateo. He knows Drew is sharp enough to have sensed the nanosecond she saw him and Millimom sitting here in this posture that the best thing for her to do was swoop down and take the pressure off either of them to say anything by running on about her interior-design adventure.