Chapter_20_The_Petter

Bed. Check.

Breakfast. Check.

After promising the kind Millie and Dennis to send them a picture of the baby, we’re back on I-90, heading for my family’s house.

The downpour, which seemed like it was never going to end last night, is finally gone.

Top down, dry highway, blue skies.

Rounding Lake Michigan past Gary, Indiana, I’ve firmly forgotten about our Saugatuck plans. At this point, it’s easier to spend time with my family than hope Wyatt will want to let loose in another resort town.

“What do we have planned with the Petterellis?” Wyatt asks, smelling like a faint whiff of the citrus, eucalyptus soap Millie and Dennis had provided back at the BB.

Not only were they a lovely couple but they had quality bath products.

“Um. Nothing? You know my family. They’re not planners like your mom and you,” I remind him. “We’ll hang, see all the kids, eat good food and drink great wine. I’ve been texting with my mom and sisters. They’re all so excited.”

Unlike Wyatt’s mom, who couldn’t reimagine his bedroom fast enough after he left for college, my parents kept each kid’s bedroom a shrine to our childhood. They even added onto the house, creating bedrooms for the grandkids. When I go home, the whole family sleeps over, forever holding on to the past while making room for the new generations.

When we finally cross the border into Illinois, heading toward Arlington Heights, my hometown about forty minutes northwest of Chicago, I send a message to my sisters and they all immediately reply with enthusiasm.

Heart emojis!

An old photo of all of us as kids wearing goofy pajamas!

A funny GIF of Chris Farley wildly dancing!

Slight anxiety fills me as we near my house. My sisters, all old pros when it comes to parenting, are bound to make me feel inferior and unprepared for fatherhood.

It’s nothing that they’ll do intentionally, of course. Just my own insecurity creeping in again. They’re all just so good at being moms. How will I ever measure up?

“At the next light, turn right,” the GPS lady informs us.

I forgot to tell Wyatt to turn it off.

“In one mile, good luck being a dad, Biz,” she continues.

“Please kill GPS lady,” I say to Wyatt. I reach for his phone and shut her down.

“Are those... welcome home balloons?” Wyatt asks as we arrive at my nice but modest two-story Tudor-style childhood home. My family hung a beautiful sculpture of balloons in various sizes and shades of gold cascading around the frame of the front doors.

“They sure are,” I say, not surprised my family has already gone to great lengths to make us feel at home. “My sisters have probably already made six hundred trips to Party City.”

When we pull into the driveway, packed with cars, we see more than a dozen people waving at us, bursting with anticipation.

“Looks like the gang’s all here,” Wyatt says with an overwhelmed face.

“That’s actually not everyone,” I realize, studying the crowd and noticing a couple teenage nieces and nephews are not present.

“Wait—how is that not everyone?” Wyatt asks.

“Are you forgetting not all families are small like yours?”

“I’m not used to this many people congregating in one spot, let alone a single family,” Wyatt says.

I slurp the last of my caramel macchiato Frappuccino we’d picked up along the way, knowing I need to be on for my large family.

Wyatt finishes his Americano and grabs my drink for an extra hit of caffeine.

My parents, sisters, their husbands and kids, aunts, uncles and a few cousins all stand there, waving, greeting us. Some of them jump up and down like game show contestants. Two sisters hold boxes filled with cupcakes and cookies that read, “Baby-to-Be!”

We peel ourselves out of Virginia Woolf and step into the party. Matilda jumps free from the back seat and immediately joins the fold of several dogs like she’s reuniting with old friends.

“Welcome hoooooome!” sings one sister.

“You made it!” calls another.

“I can’t believe you weren’t going to include us on your babymoon trip!” Zia shouts.

“We’re here, aren’t we?” I say, falling into a sea of hugs.

None of my sisters strayed outside of their birthplace of suburban Chicago so it’s easy enough for them to plan a welcoming committee for their little brother.

When he directs a commercial, Wyatt has a handy cheat sheet of every actor’s name. I suggested he do the same with my cast of characters when we first started dating.

My parents, Giovanni (Gio) and Sylvia, and my sisters, Antonia, Marisa, Daniella, Nicole and Zia.

My nieces and nephews playfully tumble around us, shouting out all the games they want to play with us while we’re home: UNO! Clue! Pictionary! Several video games we’ve never heard of!

All of the chaos from outside eventually moves inside where we’re hit by an inviting whiff of simmering pasta sauce with plenty of garlic.

“Mom’s been prepping since she heard you were coming,” Daniella says.

Sprawled out on the kitchen table are dozens of freshly made ricotta-filled ravioli that my mom made, recruiting some of the husbands to help roll them, per usual.

Quickly, everywhere we look—literally everywhere—each room fills up, buzzing with family. Each group is louder than the next: teenagers on the sofa watch a movie, kids on the living room floor play with toys, my dad and brothers-in-law in the kitchen drink red wine, dipping garlic bread into my mom’s gravy, my sisters surround us, wanting to know every last detail of our trip and, especially, the current baby status.

Almost immediately, my sisters fall into the older sibling role, mildly bullying me for answers.

“Tell us where you’ve been.”

“Tell us where you’re going next.”

“Tell us the baby’s name.”

Tell us, tell us, tell us!

As the voices project and the laughter escalates, I remember when I was a kid, I sometimes longed for a quieter life. These people are LOUD.

Wyatt, having grown up with one brother and one mom, always remarked that this is the kind of large, boisterous family he used to want.

Maybe we’ll meet somewhere in the middle with our own.

Later, after having to repeat herself a few times so the whole gang can hear her, my mom emphatically declares, “Dinner! Is! Ready!”

More balloons that read “Hello, Baby!” float above one long dining table filled with candles and vases of baby’s breath on the deck outside, which overlooks Mom and Dad’s sizable backyard. The newly renovated swimming pool, firepit, and gazebo with a huge TV to watch movies outside look incredible as always.

My mom instructs everyone to sit anywhere they want with my nieces and nephews off to the side at their own kiddie section.

“I can never get over how long this table is,” Wyatt says quietly to me, always comparing my family’s large dinner table to his three-person dinners he grew up with in Boston. “Feels more like a town hall meeting than a dinner.”

“Accurate,” I say.

“We’ve got homemade ravioli, there’s fried calamari, prosciutto, salami, four kinds of bruschetta and rigatoni with meat sauce in case the ravioli isn’t enough,” my mom informs us.

“And copious vino!” my dad adds.

“We! Love! Caaaaaarbs!” I say in my best Oprah voice. Everyone laughs.

As we eat and drink, with each sister clamoring to get the scoop on us, some family members start speaking Italian and I know they’ve lost Wyatt, making him feel monolingual.

I always see slight shock register on Wyatt’s face that there’s this whole other language that I speak fluently.

After the first time Wyatt met my family, he told me he felt othered in a way he’d never felt before and wondered if we kept slipping into Italian in order to talk about him.

Of course we did.

Wyatt always reminds me that my facial expressions and body language change when I speak Italian and that I start to eerily resemble my sisters with their wildly animated hand gestures, raised passionate voices, physical touching and ferocious laughter.

Tonight’s dinner conversation is as lively as ever. But it’s been a minute since I’ve been home and half the time I don’t even know who the hell my family is talking about.

“Have you talked to Loretta?”

“Not since Benji’s christening.”

“She and Sonny asked me if they should invite Leo and Marissa to Carter and Dom’s wedding, but I told Mallory she better clear it with Jay before Laurie finds out from Teddy.”

“Do you know all these people?” Wyatt leans over to ask me.

“No clue,” I say out of the side of my mouth.

Another rare moment during this trip when we feel like we’re on each other’s team.

Wyatt and I both crunch down on grilled bruschetta dripping with creamy gorgonzola, figs and honey. “Oh my god,” Wyatt says with his mouth full of deliciousness. “I live here now.”

My mom laughs and kisses Wyatt on the cheek. She senses my sisters fusing at the hip and feels the need to intervene. “Okay, girls. Biz and Wyatt didn’t drive sixteen hours with a puking dog to listen to stories about Sharon and Tom and Dick and Harry and whoever the hell else you’re talking about,” Mom says.

The girls blink, not realizing—never realizing—they’re prioritizing their own bubble.

“Can we not say ‘puke’ at the dinner table?” my dad asks.

“You just did,” my mom says as we all laugh.

“Chicagoland’s greatest comic duo,” my brother-in-law says.

“What’s up with the baby?” Zia asks.

“Four and a half more weeks and we’re dads,” Wyatt slips in before I can.

In between sips of wine, my sisters eye me, wondering how this makes me feel.

Happy?

Excited?

Freaking the fuck out?

They can mind-read me like no one else.

“If you need baby clothes, I can give you all of Jake’s,” Antonia offers.

“I’m happy to unload all of Gigi’s old clothes,” Marisa says.

“Mom, you are NOT giving away my baby clothes,” Gigi, now ten and equipped with a reactive personality, chimes in from the kids’ table before abandoning half of her food to go sit under a tree in the backyard, presumably to sulk. The rest of the kids take this as their cue that dinner is over as they all flee the kids’ table to play cornhole or jump on the trampoline.

“That reminds me...” My mom disappears into the house and reappears, showering us with shopping bags full of presents. “Let the baby shower begin!”

Wyatt and I unwrap gifts to find swaddle blankets, teether toys, building blocks, booties and a calming cloud mobile that emits ambient noise.

“Thank you all so much!” Wyatt says, beaming with excitement.

“How are we going to fit all this into our car?” I ask, staring at all the foreign baby items.

“It’s okay. We’ll ship them to you in Brooklyn,” my oldest sister says, trying to calm me.

My mom gives us a half dozen onesies. Each one is a different food theme with little images of hamburgers, pizza and... sushi?

“Thanks, Sylvia! I love the sushi one,” Wyatt says, completely in his element.

“Is that sushi?” my mom asks, putting on her reading glasses for closer inspection. “Huh. I thought they were cupcakes.”

My brain does a flash forward. I’m desperately trying to pull a onesie on our screaming baby while Wyatt looks on with disappointment. I snap back into the present and I’ve started to sweat a little. I remind myself that the wine I’m gulping is not water.

Everyone is on board this fast-moving train and I’m still buying my ticket.

“You can spend all your time dressing up your little one and sending us photos now that you were laid off, Biz,” Zia says.

I freeze. The wind is knocked out of me.

I can feel my cheeks turn tomato red. I fill with guilt.

Wyatt, in the middle of freshening up his glass of red wine, forgets to stop pouring as it cascades over the rim of the glass, onto his hand and all over the table.

My family, knowing me all too well, immediately understands by the look on my contorted face that I haven’t yet told Wyatt about work.

I’d made the mistake of texting the news about my job to only one person, Zia, who also happens to be President and CEO of Family Gossip.

What was I thinking?!

Of course Zia told everyone. Maybe I subconsciously knew the news would spread so I didn’t have to humiliate myself over and over again with each family member.

And now Wyatt.

Silence falls over the table. Wyatt glances at me, trying to be nonchalant. Then he looks around the table, wondering who else knew.

“Wait, I thought you would’ve told everyone by now,” Zia says, feeling caught.

“Looks like you got some ’splaining to do!” Paul, Zia’s very animated husband, says in a Ricky Ricardo impression. Paul’s entire personality is imitating TV and movie characters from a bygone era.

No one thinks this is funny; the weight of me withholding information from Wyatt hangs in the air. Zia shoots her husband a shut up look and mouths a genuine sorry to me.

For five full minutes, the entire table erupts into chaotic Italian. Everyone yell-talks at each other, pointed words flying like bullets across the table in every direction.

Wyatt watches me alternate from defending myself to yelling at my sisters to feeling bad about the entire situation.

While the family continues talking, I mouth I’ll explain later to Wyatt.

I feel awful. I’m an idiot for not telling him sooner.

My mom tries to save dinner. “Who’s ready for some tiramisu?!”

Wyatt mops up his spilled red wine with paper napkins. My dad watches both of us sympathetically.

I can tell that underneath the neutral face that Wyatt is politely trying to maintain, he’s silently hurt and betrayed.