Anger Management [Meloghia]

Chapter 18: Morning Prep

Pesci woke up feeling uncomfortable. He had pain in his neck again. That was life with cystic hygroma. Sometimes his lymph nodes hurt but thankfully, it wasn't worse than that. He'd heard of cases where extensive surgery was needed to relieve pressure on the tongue and windpipe. He was very lucky. He could be cursed with sleep apnea as well, but he had been one of the lucky ones. He should be grateful to be the person he is in the health that he is. That didn't stop him from refusing to have a single mirror in his room though, and not just for the fact that he was convinced that Illuso was spying on everyone.

He got out of bed and got dressed. The events of yesterday came flooding back to his mind. A lot of it left him confused but he understood one thing. Gelato had been very sad. He knew that people got angry sometimes when they were sad. He didn't really get why he just knew that people did. He wondered if that's why Ghiaccio was so mad all the time. His father had been that way too. His mother tried to explain to him why he left. He knew it was because of him and his brother. His brother was in a wheelchair and Pesci was autistic. That was a lot for a father to accept. She tried to explain that things just didn't turn out the way his father had hoped. He didn't understand and he still cried anyway.

There was too much sadness lately, and Pesci wanted to make everyone happy. The first week after their dad left, his mother had made chocolate chip pancakes for them. He would do the same thing for his family. Pesci went downstairs to the kitchen and rifled through the cabinets. It was seven in the morning. He was usually the first one up. Sometimes he would see Risotto too. Maybe he was awake but just in his office?

Pesci got out all the supplies he needed and he remembered most of the recipe from memory. Any parts he couldn't quite remember, he guessed. He had had a lot of practice in the kitchen with his mom preparing meals. She wanted him to be okay on his own one day and worried about him incessantly. It's okay, Mom, I have friends that take care of me now. I'll be fine. He was careful not to touch the stove because he didn't want to burn himself. He poured the batter into the pan carefully but spilled a bit down the side of the bowl. Sometimes that happens. He wiped it up and waited for the bubbles on the batter to pop before flipping them. That was always his job when they made pancakes, he would point out when the bubbles started to pop and he would tell his mother to flip it. He was very good at that.

The bubbles popped and he flipped the pancake over. It wasn't round like a pancake should be. It reminded him of a fish, the lines on it particularly that of largemouth bass. He missed the days when his father took him fishing. Pesci had always been very patient and enjoyed the peace that accompanied sitting on a boat in the middle of a lake. His dad had shown him everything about different types of lure and how to cast the line properly. He'd even taught him fly fishing. He spent hours looking through his father's fishing lures as a child just gazing at all the different colorful lures. He had a collection of them upstairs in his room and knew what every single one was for. Prosciutto had gotten him a really nice fishing lure for his birthday last year that actually looked like a fish and was truncated in several spots so it would move realistically in the water. It must have cost him a lot seeing the material it was made out of. It sat on his nightstand where he could look at it every day.

He started humming to himself as he continued to pour more batter into the pan.

*********************************

Prosciutto smelled something from the kitchen and walked downstairs to find Pesci at the stove making pancakes. He smiled to himself. Pesci reminded him a lot of his younger brother, Pollo, who was autistic. He hadn't gotten to see his brother in years though. His parents disapproved of the path he'd chosen in life. They thought being involved in a gang made him a bad influence on his brother and so they made sure to keep him from Prosciutto. He still sent little toy model cars to his brother whenever he could. Pollo had a fixation on cars and the different models there were. He knew every part inside the car and the differences in engines, things that Prosciutto had no idea about. Pollo could tell make, model and the year just by glimpsing the car. Pesci had a similar fixation with fishing, something Prosciutto was also not familiar with.