by Stephanie Trott

Every Sunday afternoon, I kneel in front of my bedroom window and watch as your family pulls up outside. You arrive in separate cars: your mother, your father, your sister, you. Always last, always empty-handed for the weekly ritual of dinner at Nonna’s, the widowed old woman with flossy red hair who lives across the street from me. I watch from the second floor as you sit at the table and pick at antipasti, as your mother pours another glass of red wine, as your grandmother spoons gravy over macaroni and chicken cutlets. She serves you first, the baby of the family, the boy of the family, belonging in name to God.

You parked in the driveway until the night you backed your brand-new Civic out too quickly and smashed the back door of my father’s Jeep. O how he raged, demanded insurance, ID, blood. O how your mother screamed and your father waved money and made mine fume even further. His anger echoed in nomine patris a year later when you picked me up for our first date, one town over from fair Verona. You parked and waited a few minutes before ringing the doorbell, realized why the address I gave sounded so familiar. It was late July and the sweat beaded around your cornicello, a gleaming piece of protection.

We’d met face-to-face as lifeguards that summer, you the boy no one knew because you’d been in Catholic school your whole life. How quickly I wanted to be in your sight, to be seen by someone new. We worked the morning shift together and used towels as blankets in the early June air. Soon I was bringing us bagels and cream cheese and sweet milky tea, Taylor ham–egg-and-cheese when I had a few extra dollars. I didn’t consider how it was you could ask me out but never if I wanted a ride home after ten hours in the sun. I knew you had a crush on my friend, the older one who wouldn’t let me smoke cigarettes with her, who tattooed a half-face from Hedwig on her hip. It was her name you sighed right after you kissed me on my doorstep beneath the stained-glass glow of the postlight. My first kiss, not even truly meant for me. A piece of my body, given up for you. I laughed and called you Peter, a joke you didn’t understand even after seventeen years of Sundays.

You stood me up three times after that. I texted, called, waited for a sign. At home I listened to my father’s advice to call your house phone, to call upon shame and ask your mother where you were. Her confidence when she said you were at your grandmother’s. My confusion when I looked across the street and said you were not. 

Domine, we both knew there was never room for a Portagee girl at your table. Not even if my last name also ended in a vowel. Not even if I arrived an hour early like we do for Easter mass. Not even if I came bearing bitoque, arroz doce, pastéis de bacalhau. My own food from my own house, where we never eat at the same time, never all together, the dog left to keep vigil over the oven as it hums at 185 to keep someone’s dinner warm, waiting.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, kneeling in the bedroom, nose to window screen. Again and again and again. Outside the church bells ring in golden hour, cast starlings in legion from the belfry, and still, all these years later, the dinners continue. I light the cloves my mother thinks are incense and watch you through the picture window, a da Vinci dinner scene where no one ever notices the eyes looking down from above.