Before You Say Goodbye

31

Naturally, I had a restless night. You would too if you were invited to a Thanksgiving dinner by Roman De Niro. In addition to the fact that I have never been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner before – not even by Terry's family, who adore me by the way – I was also excited that I was going to be inside the De Niro household. I was going to meet the rest of his family.

It was both exciting and scary.

Exciting because of the obvious reasons that I've never had a Thanksgiving dinner before and that one other reason we've chosen to not acknowledge right now – you know the unnamed emotions I was feeling for Roman – yeah, that.

Scary because I had no idea what to expect. Roman mentioned a grandma – his legal guardian – but never mentioned anything about anyone else. No parents were brought up in conversation, no mention of anything that I should and shouldn't say around them. With all the things he mentioned about his grandma and how strict she was, that unnecessary lesson on how I should act around her, he hadn't mentioned a peep about his parents. That worried me.

Viktor had said something about irresponsible parents, and then too, he had only mentioned them in the past tense. Was my theory about them possibly being dead, right? A shudder ran down my spine. For once in my life, I didn't want to be right. Not about this.

"Be polite. Say thank you. Offer to help," Mom reminds me for the thousandth time as I wait for Roman to pick me up.

"I know, momma. I'm not all that bad."

"No need to get snappy, I'm just reminding you."

"I'm naturally well-mannered. There's no need for you to do the reminding."

Mom snorts but doesn't say anything as she pushes a camera in front of her, asking me to smile. I groaned, covering the lens of her camera. "Mom, you've taken two million pictures already; I think that's enough."

"It's not always you dress up, let me have my fun."

Sometimes, I pitied her. Mom always wanted a girl child – when I was very young, I overheard her telling Nana once about how she used to pray for a girl when she was pregnant. And then I heard her talking about how happy she was to have me and how she can't wait to put me in beautiful dresses all through my life and have thousands of photographs of me all over the house. When I was very, very young, she did succeed in pushing my head into so many dresses and dolling me up – all the pictures in the living room and the photo albums in the attic are proof enough for that. And then I grew up, developing a style of my own for myself – putting a damper in the rest of her plans.

Not wanting to feel like a disappointment to her more than I already did, I let her have her damn pictures. I even smiled for a few.

"At what time is Roman picking you up?" she straightened one of the buttons on my dress, nervously chewing on her lips, "Will he be here before your dad gets back from the shop?"

Mom had cleverly sent my father on an emergency shopping trip – to buy bleach, I think? She had hidden our bleach bottle before dropping a glass of wine on our white carpet. She gasped and then sent him running to the grocery store. Good, now we would have an extra bottle of bleach; we could perhaps use it to bleach his brain?

"He will be here, any minute now." I didn't know that. But considering that Roman had texted me when he left his house ten minutes ago, that was just my intelligent guess.

And on cue, there was a honk outside. I didn't even stop to check to see if it was Roman as I practically ran outside the house. I think a part of me was scared that mom was going to make Roman and I stand together for a picture.