5. Why Nonna Should Stay

FIVE

#14 Becuz I need to eat!

In the end, guilt and duty got me good.

Two hours later, I stood outside the security lines at LaGuardia International Airport along with four of my five siblings, each of us taking turns kissing our grandmother on both cheeks. I'd met my family outside of the ticketing area after taking two trains and a bus all the way to the airport, still wearing the same wrinkled red shirt and black jeans. Nonna had just checked the three coffin-sized suitcases she was taking to Italy, and everyone was getting ready to say our final goodbyes. I got exactly four pairs of stink eyes that translated to, "where the hell have you been, Joni?" as I ran up, out of breath and knee throbbing.

Honestly, would JFK have killed her? At least I only had to take the E train from midtown.

"You take care of your family," Nonna told Matthew before muttering some things in Italian that the rest of us couldn't really decipher.

As the oldest, my brother had grown up hearing the dialects our grandparents spoke to each other, and after doing a tour in Sicily while he was in the Marines, he'd gotten nearly fluent. The rest of us, however, knew just Nonna's endearments and exclamations when we screwed up; I was pretty much only good for the swear words.

"Nina's sorry she couldn't be here," Matthew told her as he pressed a kiss to each of Nonna's lined cheeks. "She's not supposed to travel. Or get out of bed until the baby's born."

"Dai, of course," Nonna said. "She needs her rest before you don't get any more sleep, my beautiful boy." Then she turned to Lea. "And you, take care of our Michael and the babies, yeah? Like always, my good girl."

I rolled my eyes. I never understood why Lea was the favorite, Nonna's "good girl" when she had the sharpest tongue out of all of us.

Lea's eyes closed, almost as if in pain, while she squeezed Nonna tightly. "I don't know what I'm gonna do without you. But I hope you have the most amazing time. We'll visit soon."

Even I wasn't immune to the pain in Lea's voice. We all knew the likelihood of her and Mike schlepping four kids across the ocean for an Italian vacation was about as likely as the Central Park Fountain erupting with rainbow sprinkles. They'd only just barely made it work for Matthew's wedding last fall, and that was only because he and Nina had paid everyone's way.

For the first time, I really felt bad for my oldest sister. She was probably the smartest of all of us and was stuck in that crappy little house in Belmont with her mechanic husband and four kids. She swore up and down that she chose that life and loved it. Loved doing the books at Nonno's old auto shop while Mike fixed the cars. Loved chasing her kids around the park and carting them back and forth to school with her one-year-old on her hip. Loved cooking and cleaning and nagging and pinching pennies.

In some ways, it was true. I saw the way she looked at Mike when she thought no one was watching, and I saw the way he followed her around every room she was in, even after being together for close to twenty years. I knew she would never admit to wanting more for her life than what Mike was able to give her.

But she could have gotten it. It was hard not to imagine it for her sometimes too.

Well, when she wasn't pissing me off.

Nonna told Frankie to be careful in London and to see her after the baby was born, then hugged Kate and made her promise to visit her in Rome.

"You can count on it," Kate told her. "Hopefully in the spring. I want to hit up some sample sales and see what I can thrift for the shop, Italian style."

Nonna finally turned to me and reached out for my hands. She didn't say anything for a long while as her thumbs stroked my wrists, looking me over like she was searching for something to say. Something good. And finding nothing.

She tugged me close, and I had to lean down to hear her speak. Whatever she had to say, it wasn't for anyone else's ears.

"My baby Joni," she whispered fiercely. "You find yourself, okay? You find yourself, and you don't let go."

"Nonna," I started, but she cut me off with a fierce shake of her head that made her thick gold hoops sway from side to side.

"I know it's hard, civetta," she said. "But you have so much more than you think. I know, Joni. You just have to know it too. If you're willing to try."

My instinct was to avoid her stern gaze, those dark eyes that had always seemed to see everything I did, even if she didn't always say it.

She'd just always been there, from the time I was a baby when my actual mother went away and my father, her son, died.

Nonna was more my mother than a grandmother. And now she was leaving me too.

"You can do it, tesoro," she said. "I know you can."

Before I could help it, a tear slipped down my cheek. "I—okay. Thanks, Nonna."

I didn't want to say I would. I didn't want to make promises I couldn't keep. Doubt screamed through every cell in me, but I didn't want to voice that either.

All I could do was look into her eyes and try to absorb some of that hope she still had in me for some strange reason. And try to forget that starting tomorrow, I wouldn't be able to get it anymore.

Nonna stepped back to find that all of my siblings were fighting their own tears. After all, she hadn't just been a rock for me. She'd been the rock of our whole family. When things had gone to shit—which they had, too many times, in the Zola household—she'd been there, filling our house with love and lessons and a soft spot to land.

"I don't know why you're all crying," Nonna finally burst out, even as she wiped a few stray tears from her eyes too. "I'm just a few hours on a plane, not going to the moon!"

And just like that, we were all sobbing, huddled together in the kind of big family hug I hadn't experienced since I was small, since Matthew still lived at home and none of my siblings were married, and it was just us, the Zola kids and their grandparents, an unbreakable unit in a world that seemed to break everyone.

I buried my face in my sisters' arms, inhaled Nonna's gardenia perfume that I'd stolen when she thought I was cleaning, and relished the moment when no one was fighting or bickering.

I knew that love was at the heart of what it meant to be a Zola.

I only wished we could feel it a bit more.

"Ciao, babies!" Nonna called as she walked toward the gate.

We watched until she had gone all the way through security, until she gave us a little wave and vanished into the crowds.

An hour later, we all emerged from Lea's minivan and piled into the tiny blue house she shared with her husband and their kids. There was barely room enough for the five of us in the living room, so I could understand why Lea hadn't allowed me to crash here. Her home was a shoebox.

"I could probably make a ziti if you're hungry," Lea said as she hung her keys on a rack next to the front door. That was followed by her coat and scarf on an already loaded row of hooks. "One last family dinner."

"No, I gotta get back to the shop tonight," Kate said. "I have a client coming in the morning, and I still haven't steamed all the things he wants to try."

"Xavi is going to be here in ten to pick me up too," Frankie said as she checked her watch. "The jet leaves Teterboro at seven."

"I'm driving back up to Boston tonight too," Matthew echoed. "I don't want Nina alone."

They all looked at me expectantly, expecting the final chorus.

Even Sunday dinners were finished, I thought bitterly. The Zola kids were splintering like kindling.

"Oh, don't worry about me," I said. "I have a busy schedule of staring at the ceiling in the shop's breakroom."

My siblings all shared meaningful looks. Then Frankie reached into her pocket and held out an envelope.

I took it. "What's this?"

"I told you I'd give you first and last," she said.

"I added a few extra too," Matthew said. "Nina and I wanted you to have enough to get some furniture or whatever you need."

"I popped a couple of twenties in there too," Kate said. "We were hoping you would have found a place today."

"Mike and I will help you move in," Lea added.

I swallowed as I took the envelope full of my siblings' charity and stared at the plain white exterior. "Overnight? Asking a bit much, don't you think?"

"Then use it tomorrow," Lea said, only a little too sharply. "Come over after the kids are at school, and I'll help you look. We can go into restaurants too, see if there's a hostess position open."

"With a toddler and a baby in tow? I'm sure that will really impress the landlords."

"Joni, come on."

"For your information, I do have a lead on a new job," I said. "Rochelle's waiting tables, and she invited me to join her."

It was sort of the truth. By way of omission. They didn't need to know what kinds of tables Rochelle was waiting, or the fact that I didn't really want to do it.

Because I felt bad about snapping at them all again, I waved the envelope at them. "Thank you for this, though. I will use it. And…I am grateful for the breakroom, Lea. It's better than the street."

Kate sighed. "We'd never let it come to that, you know."

Did I? I wasn't so sure.

I accepted kisses from Kate and Frankie as they left, but Matthew lingered behind with Lea. Clearly, the two oldest had been planning something without the others.

"Spit it out," I said as I flopped onto Lea's saggy gray couch. I'd stay for a shower. God knew I needed one.

"Listen," Matthew said as he sat in Mike's ratty old armchair next to me while Lea hovered near the door. "I talked to Nina last night, and she's all right if you want to live with us in Boston for a while. Get a change of pace, and maybe get back on your feet. We can just throw your stuff in the back of my car and drive up tonight if you want."

I stared at him. "You want me to move to Boston?"

Matthew nodded. "It's not as bad as you might think. The pizza's garbage, and I'll cheer for the Red Sox when I'm dead in the ground, but I'm actually pretty happy up there."

"But there's no…there's like two dance companies there," I said. "What would I even do?"

"What are you doing here?" he posed back at me.

I couldn't answer that. And my brother knew it.

Instead, I made a face. "Isn't Nina about to give birth literally any day now?"

"Two months. But yeah, we're getting close."

Matthew looked unbearably proud. If I wasn't already so grossed out by my big brother making googly eyes at his socialite wife, I'd have been happy for him. He deserved a little happiness after taking care of the rest of us. But that didn't mean I needed to be the accessory to his life.

"I don't need to go to Boston just to be useless up there too and get in the way of your marital bliss," I said. "I'm doing just fine with that down here."

Not even a little bit true.

Matthew and Lea shared a long look as Lea moved to sit beside me on the couch.

"I'm worried about you," he said finally.

"Yeah, join the club," I cut back. "We just had this conversation last night."

"Which I hear went straight to shit after you stormed out," Matthew said. "But this isn't really about that. You want to live in the breakroom, live in the breakroom. You want to bartend and keep trying to dance, do that. But something happened this last year. You used to walk into a room and be the life of the party. Now you're just kind of…"

"A bitch?" I suggested.

My brother sighed. "I was going to say bitter, but if you want to roll that way, sure."

He pulled on the brim of the fedora he'd worn since Nonno had died. It was almost like a crown, if a crown could be an unbearably old-fashioned gray hat worn by pretty much every other grandpa in Belmont.

He was a good-looking guy. All my friends always had crushes on him when we were growing up. But to me, he would always be my big brother. The one who had basically been the next best thing to a father to me since I was a baby.

"You gotta get some decent threads, Mattie," I told him, with no other reason than simply to bug him. Because that's what baby sisters did. "You go home looking like this, and Nina is going to think she married a geriatric."

Matthew just cast me a long look with the green eyes all us Zola kids shared, and for the first time, I noticed the lines starting to form at the corners and the bits of silver appearing just over his ears. My brother wasn't a young man anymore. He had been carrying adult responsibilities most of his life.

"You'd get bitter too if the one thing you were put on earth to do became impossible," I said.

But Matthew shook his head. "It practically killed me to stop being a D.A., kid. Since college, I knew I was supposed to go after the bad guys. But now I'm working at a cushy firm, barbecuing on the weekends, and kissing my wife every chance I get. Sometimes, things change for a reason. I don't think it's just the knee that's bothering you. It's something else."

"After you left, someone named Shawn came by the house looking for you," Lea put in.

Goose bumps rose all over my arms. I was glad my jacket covered them.

"The change," Matthew said. "Does that guy have something to do with it?"

I stared at my hands, unable to look at either of them. I wasn't a bad liar, but my siblings knew every tell. It was imperative, however, that no one in my family ever know the mistake and former addiction that was Shawn Vamos. One that had started long before I'd ever thought I could dance on Broadway.

"Who is he?" Matthew pressed. "What did he want?"

Yeah, right. I wasn't about to tell my overprotective, former prosecutor brother about that. No way, no how. That shit was going with me to the grave.

I shrugged. "I don't know. Some guy."

On my other side, Lea snorted. "Probably another boyfriend of the hour. Is that where you went last night? To meet up with him?"

She looked over the clothes I still had on from last night. Judgment was practically oozing out of every pore she had. Again.

"For your information, that was a brand-new one-night stand, Lea. Don't worry. I don't remember the guy's name, but we definitely used protection. I'm not always as dumb as you think I am."

Lea and Matthew traded identically exasperated looks. Matthew stood up, clearly having had enough of this conversation. Or maybe he just didn't want to hear about his baby sister getting her fair share of tail too.

"I'm gonna go," he told Lea more than me.

She stood and crossed the room, then delivered a kiss to both of his cheeks, just like Nonna would. "Drive safe."

"Always do." He pulled up the collar of his wool overcoat and then turned to me. "The offer stands, Jo. Anytime you want a new place to land, let me know. I'll get you on the train before you know it."

The door closed behind him, leaving me in the room with only Lea while the sounds of crying children burst out from upstairs. She only shook her head.

"Sometimes," she said. "You don't have more sense than an empty piggy bank."

"MAMMMAAAAAAA!" cried a child I identified as Baby Lupe.

Lea sighed. "Come help me with dinner. If you're going to hang around, at least make yourself useful."