Today's Reading
"I got a text from Jude," Gemma says, and Mateo straightens, looking surprised.
It's not as if she hasn't spoken to her siblings at all in the three years since their fight. But if anyone ever reached out, it was usually Gemma, whose job it had always been to keep them together. In spite of everything, she sent birthday cards and texts on holidays and congratulatory emails when she read something interesting about any of the other three in the news, which had been happening with increasing regularity. Sometimes she got something in return: a thanks! or a you too or simply a hollow-feeling xo. But usually she didn't.
"Wow," Mateo says, raising his eyebrows. "What did she say?"
"You wouldn't believe it."
"I'd believe just about anything when it comes to your sister," he says, his accent like music, her all-time favorite song. He walks over to give her a kiss, lingering for a moment in case she needs more. But she feels too fragile right now. Behind her, the sun is beginning to stream through the window above the sink, and the old man in the townhouse next door is playing the same tuneless rendition of "Heart and Soul" he does every morning. For years, Gemma had thought about complaining, but then she ran into him in the courtyard one day and he told her how his late wife used to play the other half, the two of them side by side at their old piano, and she's since grown to love it. Even if it's badly off key.
Mateo grabs his favorite mug, the one with the Brazilian football logo on it, and starts to make coffee with an apologetic look. But Gemma's mind is elsewhere.
"She wants me to meet her in North Dakota," she tells him. He laughs, then realizes she's serious. "Oh."
"This weekend."
"Oh," he says again, setting down the mug, clearly searching for the right thing to say. "Have you ever been?"
"To North Dakota?" Gemma says with a frown. "No."
"I thought you went everywhere as kids."
"Not everywhere," she says, thinking about their childhood map, the thirty-two states they'd marked off with pushpins before everything had fallen apart so abruptly the night of the fire in Texas. It's been a while since she's bothered to tally up her official number, to count all the states she's seen in the years since those breathless road trips with their mother, on travels with friends and adventures with Mateo, summer vacations and business trips to marketing conferences in random cities. If she had to guess, she'd say that maybe she's been to forty or so by now. But mostly she's lost track. They all have. Or at least that's what she thought.
"Maybe she's filming something," Mateo says, and then—trying and failing to sound casual—he adds, "Do you think you'll go?"
His eyes flick to her stomach, and the look on his face is so hopeful it could break her heart if she let it. She shakes her head.
"No," she says. "Don't worry."
"I'm not worried," he says with a too-quick smile, but she knows that's not true, and she feels a stab of guilt because it's her fault they're here. From the moment they met, Mateo was ready to be a dad. Everything about him fits the part, from his periodic table sweatshirt to his corny jokes to the way his sixth-grade science students adore him. This had always been their plan eventually, to have kids, but it was Gemma who insisted on waiting, hoping something would tip her into feeling ready too; at first it was just a couple years, and then more, until nearly a decade had slipped by, and the question mark she'd been carrying around inside her all that time stopped mattering as much as the unforgiving fact of her biology.
Sometimes she can't help feeling jealous of Mateo's certainty. But it's easier for him. He grew up in a wealthy suburb of São Paulo, in a house with two loving parents and a protective older brother, an abundance of riches as far as Gemma is concerned. Her childhood was something different altogether. Until she was twelve, she and her younger siblings had a mom like any other. Frankie Endicott was maybe a little more scattered than most, a little less reliable, but she still managed to brush their hair and pack their lunches and give them baths before bed most nights. Then one day, she sent the four of them off to school with hugs and kisses, and when they came home that afternoon, they found a tuna casserole in the fridge with a note explaining that she would be gone for a while.
That was May. She didn't return again until August—and then, only long enough to whisk them off on the first of those summer road trips. But already, she didn't seem like their mom anymore. Already, she seemed more like a stranger.
Their dad, Paul, worked long and unusual hours as a feeder driver for UPS, and so it was Gemma who became responsible for making grilled cheese and forging permission slips and walking the twins to school, for making sure Connor didn't stay up too late reading and finding Roddy's inhaler before soccer practice and keeping tabs on Jude. It wasn't until years later, when their dad met Liz—a pediatric nurse whose best and worst quality was that she was not their mother—that their home finally regained a semblance of order. But by then, Gemma was nearly out of the house herself. Which meant she'd never really been a kid. Not when her mom was around. Not when she wasn't. Not even when she came back at the end of each summer to take them on those freewheeling adventures, crisscrossing the country in great lurching strides before depositing them back at their dad's.
Especially not then.
Across the kitchen counter, Mateo is still watching her with an anxious expression. "I know we're talking about Jude here," he says very gently. "So if you feel like you need to—"
...
