by Cara Bastone
“John, these are my friends Serafine St. Romain and Via DeRosa. This is John Modesto-Whitford.” She strode back over to the counter and could feel John hesitate before he followed her.
“You can call me Fin.” Fin waved her hand, but Via, having hefted herself off the floor at the arrival of the tacos, leaned over and gave him a handshake.
“Nice to meet you two. Hi, Ma,” John said, leaning down and pecking his mother on the cheek.
There really was something charming about a grown man kissing his mother, despite the fact she’d just cajoled him into delivering tacos.
Mary studied John as Estrella and Via fell into conversation. He really did look exhausted. He was still shaved and trimmed fairly immaculately, but his black hair had started to tumble forward out of its neat side part and onto his forehead. There were dark circles under his eyes. He wore his usual uniform of a white button-down, black slacks and wingtips, but the sleeves were rolled to the elbow and his midnight tie was loosened at the neck.
“Didn’t mean to turn you into a delivery boy,” Mary said in a low voice to John, hoping he could read the apology in her eyes.
He shrugged. “I often pick up food for my mother.”
“Did you really used to be a taco delivery boy?”
“Chinese food. And yes. Paid for a lot of my undergrad that way, actually.”
He practically swayed on his feet.
“Long week?” she asked, setting the tacos aside and leaning against the counter.
John’s blue eyes, which had been flitting around the shop, taking in Fin and Via from their heads to their toes, finally landed on Mary, full force. “The longest. And it ended on a real low point.”
She grimaced, absently reaching up to smooth her wavy hair over one shoulder. “Sorry about that. I really didn’t think that your mother’s taco connection was her grown son with a full-time job and better things to do on a Friday night.”
To her surprise, he chuckled. Well, it was more like a forced exhalation of air, but she figured that that was about as close to a chuckle as John Modesto-Whitford ever really got. “I didn’t mean that the tacos were the low point, Mary. I lost a case today. And lost a key witness on another.” He pressed a heavy hand to his forehead and Mary was certain that he had a headache. “And both clients are people I care about.”
“Oh.” Mary blinked at him. In that moment, in her mind, his job stretched and grew wings and became more than his button-down shirt and fancy shoes and the messenger bag at his hip. Her imagination charged forward and his job had an office, coffee in chipped mugs, John standing in the middle of a courtroom and pointing one of his blunt fingers at the real perpetrator. She knew that very little of a lawyer’s life was actually spent gesticulating in a courtroom, but still, it was fun to picture him that way. And more than that, John’s job suddenly had people’s lives in the balance, resting on those tired, wide shoulders of his. His scowl made a bit more sense to her. There were years of people’s lives in that scowl. Their freedom. And not just random people. People John cared about.
“I’m so sorry,” Mary whispered. She wasn’t exactly sure what else to say, but she really did feel sorry.
“Thanks,” John said back in that hoarse voice, his blue eyes looking almost kind in his complete exhaustion. She figured he didn’t have the energy to look quite as off-putting as he normally did.
“Estrella,” Mary admonished, “tell me you at least ordered some tacos for your beleaguered son.”
“I’m not a monster,” Estrella sniffed and made all the women laugh. John, however, just looked more irritated.
“Oh, you did, Ma?” He immediately reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin, ancient wallet. “Who paid?”
Mary waved her hand through the air. “I did, but no worries. I’m happy to buy you dinner.”
Now John looked more than irritated. He looked downright angry. His eyebrows were pulling down into that V, his lips were thin, his wide shoulders, even in their fatigue, were pulling back. He opened up his wallet and fished through for bills.
“Seriously, John, you did all the work of picking them up. Let me at least buy you—Ow!”
Mary winced when Fin landed a swift kick to her ankle. She looked over at her clairvoyant friend and received some very meaningful eye contact. Mary frowned. She couldn’t directly interpret Fin’s wide eyes, high eyebrows, pursed lips, but she had the distinct impression that she wasn’t supposed to be refusing the bills that John stuffed into her hand.
“Will you stay and eat with us, John?” Via asked. “Mary’s gonna close down the shop in a bit and then we can eat.”
“Oh. Ah...” John looked to Mary.
Flustered, John’s money in her hand and at least a half an hour before she normally closed the shop, Mary smoothed her hair again. “Let’s just eat now. You should definitely stay, John. I’ll close the store down early tonight.”
She felt her friends’ eyes on her back as she hurried over to the door, flipped the sign and the lock and dimmed the front lights. Mary ignored their eyes as she pulled out her phone and sent a quick Tweet on the store’s Twitter feed saying that she was closing up a bit early. And by the time she got back to the counter, with everyone leaning over their tacos, her friends were too busy eating to point out that she hadn’t closed the shop early for them, but she had for John.
* * *
IT WAS A week later when John finally realized what was happening. He was in the middle of a date with a very nice woman named Tilli, who seemed just as confused about why his mother had set them up as he did.
John got a text from Mary, but he waited until pretty, brown-haired Tilli was in the bathroom to open it.
In their typical way, the text said two words and two words only. A name. Only, this time, it was a name that made John nearly choke on the very life in his throat.
Maddox Whitford.
Another text from her sat below that fateful name. Any relation?
“Yes, there’s a fucking relation,” John muttered angrily to his phone, slouching over it. His mother had set up Mary with Maddox? With his train-wreck half brother, who was just as likely to wind up hungover on a train to Niagara Falls as he was to actually make it into work on any given day? It had been just two months ago that Estrella herself had shaken her head at the Page Six article about his father’s other son, outlining the fall of the drunken, high-society rich kid. And now she was magically deciding that Mary should date this guy?
“What the hell, Ma?”
John knew what Maddox did with women on dates. He used his trust fund to wine and dine them, promptly fell in mad, out-of-control love with them, got bored and either dumped them or sent himself spiraling on a bender of the first degree.
It was one of the many reasons that John was actually glad he hadn’t grown up in Maddox and his father’s world. He might not be the smoothest when it came to women, but at least he wasn’t reenacting The Wolf of Wall Street whenever he found one he liked.
“Everything all right?” a nervous-voiced Tilli asked as she slid back into her seat, shaking her napkin out primly.
John looked up, his eyes focusing on his dinner companion. It all went painfully clear. Like HDTV on a sportscaster’s rosacea type of clear.
Tilli was a nice woman his mother had met at the Crown Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. She was slight and shy and had laughed nervously at almost everything that John had said tonight. They had less than zero in common with one another, besides the fact that John had grown up in Crown Heights and Tilli currently lived there. This date had all the explosive chemistry of milk stirred into flour. There was not a chance in hell that his mother had actually thought this would go well for John.
All the while she was setting Mary up with Maddox.
Sammy at the block party. Elijah Crawford. Michael Fallon. Maddox Whitford. The freaking tac
os. He finally understood the game. And was beyond frustrated that it had taken him damn near two weeks to catch on to the sly scheme of his mother’s.
“Ah. Yes. I just sort of realized that my mother was up to something.” He put his phone away and directed his attention back to Tilli.
She seemed to immediately wither under his gaze. “Is it very important?” she asked timidly. “Because I don’t mind if you have to go deal with it. That’s okay. It’s getting a little late anyhow.”
It was roughly eight fifteen on a Friday night, and another thing became painfully clear to John. Tilli didn’t want to be here any more than he did. “Um, right,” he tried to say gracefully. He lifted up and pulled out his wallet, leaving cash on the table for the burritos they’d both eaten. His mother really needed to stop figuring out ways to get him to waste cash on food he could barely afford. “I’ll walk you to the train.”
Looking like she had absolutely no idea how to say no to that, Tilli nodded meekly. The two of them walked quietly to the train, John’s mind traveling inexorably back to his devious mother.
He shook Tilli’s hand at the top of the train entrance and tried not to take her look of utter relief personally when it became clear that he wasn’t going underground with her. He knew he had a mean mug, but timid Tilli made him feel like he was the Grinch who stole Friday night.
He strode away and immediately pulled out his phone. His brother answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?” Maddox said fuzzily.
John frowned. It was a Friday, so it was equally plausible that Maddox would either be shit-faced or already sleeping it off in some woman’s bed. “It’s John.”
“Hey. Hold on.”
John heard some hushed mumbling and then the sound of a door closing. “What’s up?”
He wondered where his brother was. John knew better than to ask at this point. There was only a ten percent chance he’d get the truth anyhow. Maddox and John were only eleven months apart in age, but there’d been times in the last decade since they’d gotten to know one another that John had felt more like Maddox’s father than he did his slightly older brother.
John and Maddox were night and day. Both in demeanor and physicality. Maddox took after their father, light complexion and dark eyes. John’s swarthier skin and shockingly blue eyes didn’t fit into Maddox’s family one bit. Maddox was lanky and loose, always laying his head on someone’s shoulder or falling asleep on the train. John was stocky and wide-shouldered and self-contained. He kept to himself, while his brother kept to everyone but himself.
“Have you talked to my mother lately?” John asked.
“Not since her New Year’s party. Shoot. I should probably give her a call, huh?”
“Do me a favor and check your texts and emails right now. See if she’s reached out in the last week or so.”
There was a weighted silence on the other end of the line. “I’ve checked my email in the last week, John. I would know if she’s reached out to me.”
Now John was the one who was silent. Did he appease his brother’s pride and agree with him? Or did he trust his own experiences with Maddox and assume that his brother could easily have let a correspondence or five slip through the cracks? “Will you just check for me?”
His request was met with stony silence, and honestly, John couldn’t blame him. He considered himself to be a good influence on his little brother. Hell, he was the only reliable family member the guy had, but that didn’t preclude him from also being a dick.
“Oh,” Maddox said sarcastically. “Would you look at that? Absolutely no emails or texts from your mother. Just like I told you.”
“All right. Didn’t mean to doubt,” John said briskly. “Look, if she reaches out to you in the next few weeks, about anything, just let me know, all right?”
“Is everything all right?”
For a moment, Maddox sounded just like John himself, that hoarse voice that had apparently originally belonged to their grandfather, though John hadn’t met him before he’d died.
“Yes. She’s just being a pain and trying to manipulate me into something. Using you.”
“Okay...” Maddox laughed and there was a current of pain injected into the sound. “At least your mother cares about you enough to manipulate you.”
It was true that Maddox’s mother, Melody, was less than attentive.
“True,” John agreed carefully. He and Maddox had muddled their way through the last decade, never quite sure how to talk about the many dissonances in their family, their separate childhoods, the awkwardness of their age difference. But they did all right.
“Dinner next week?” John asked.
“Can’t. I’m out of town.”
John heard muttering again, a woman’s voice. He sighed and didn’t ask any questions.
“All right. Call me when you’re back in town.”
“You got it.”
John hung up the call and tapped his cell phone on his thigh. It was a nice night. The sky was still streaked a reckless pink from the sunset and the air was heavy with the potential of a thunderstorm.
Maybe he should take the train to Cobble Hill and explain to Mary in person about all of this. He knew that at least last Friday she’d been working this late. He thought of how her shop had glittered like a lantern once the sun went down. Warmth and light spilled from the window onto the sidewalk, banishing the bad moods of any who dared enter there.
He felt pulled toward her shop and her neighborhood. But he’d walked half a block toward the F train when he registered just how much his shirt was sticking to him. He’d come from work and his dress shoes were pinching his feet after a long day. He was a week past needing a haircut and he probably had guac breath.
He’d once watched The Little Mermaid and the image of the poor unfortunate souls trapped in Ursula’s lair popped up into John’s head. He pictured himself walking, disheveled and sweaty, into Mary’s glowing, lovely shop and just sort of shrinking down into a big-eyed worm creature, blinking in the light of her goodness.
Yeah. It would be better just to give her a call once he got home.
John turned on his heel and instead caught the G train. He didn’t interrogate himself too closely as to why he brushed his teeth and showered before he sat down at his kitchen table and called Mary. Maybe he was tired of feeling like a grouchy schlub where she was concerned.
Ruth, John’s cat, jumped up onto the table and roughly pushed her forehead into the palm of his hand. He knew that plenty of cats had reps for being flirty and aloof, but Ruth was not one of them. She was a straight-up floozy, giving it up for free every day of the week. And she was the only cat John had ever met who had bad balance. She regularly miscalculated and tumbled off the back of the couch in a yowling, furry heap. He scratched under her chin and listened to his phone ring.
“Hello?” Mary answered, a thread of surprise in her voice. She probably had never expected to see his name on her caller ID.
“Mary, it’s John.”
“Hi.”
He liked the way she said that one simple word. Her voice so bright it reminded him of the first delicious spoonful of lemon gelato on a hot day.
“Hi,” he said back to her and grimaced, feeling like a doofus. He hadn’t managed to inject the same magic into the greeting. He stood when he felt a bead of sweat travel down his spine and pinched the phone between his chin and shoulder, muscling open his kitchen window and hoping for a breeze. It was hot enough in his apartment that he was wearing only his boxers and an undershirt. He sat back against the windowsill and stretched his legs out in front of him. Ruth stared him down from the tabletop, her tail flicking back and forth.
“There is a relation,” he said without preamble, but he’d accidentally talked over something Mary had said. “Sorry, what?”
“Nothing. I was just asking if everything was all right. What did you say
?”
She wasn’t actually asking if everything was all right, he knew. She was just trying to find a polite way to ask him why the hell he was calling her.
“I said that there is a relation between me and Maddox. He’s my little brother.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that Estrella had two sons. She’d never mentioned him before.”
“He’s not related to Estrella. We’re half brothers. Through our father.” John plummeted on because he knew how awkward some people could get when confronted with information like that. “Listen, Mary, is there any chance that you told my mother that I offered to screen her candidates for you?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yes. At the block party she apologized for your behavior on our date again, and I told her it was bygones. I explained that you were even trying to make it up to me by making sure that I was getting the cream of the crop in terms of blind dates.”
“And what was her reaction?”
“Oh, you’re worried that she was offended? No, the opposite, actually. She seemed thrilled that you’d do something so nice for me.”
“I’ll just bet she was thrilled,” John said darkly. “Mary, we’re getting played by Estrella.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean that once my mother found out that I was screening your dates, she chose the three people that would probably set me off the most. My elementary school bully, a known drug dealer in our neighborhood and my problematic little brother. And then to prove a point, she set me up on a date with the human version of a cup of weak tea.”
“Ouch. You had a date tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“Mary, it’s nine fifteen on a Friday night and I’m calling you to talk about my mother.”
She laughed and it sparkled. An unexpected gem on a dark beach. “Point taken.” Mary was quiet for a second. “But why is she torturing us like this?”
“Because she’s still trying to get us together.”
“Oh. Ohhhhh. She thought you’d come riding in to my rescue once you realized who I was going to be spending my time with. That’s kind of sweet. Your mother is a romantic, John.”
