It’s A Man’s World

  “I can’t stay,” Lorenzo calls down to Annie as they descend into Dottie’s yellow kitchen, the scent of warm butter and cheese bringing him back to an easier time. “Nona is waiting for me, she doesn’t like when I’m late for supper.”

“Too bad, I’m thinking of making that pork roast. It will be too much for me and Mom. Charlie won’t touch it, all he eats these days is grilled cheese and coffee,” Annie answers with a flip of her right hand in the air.

“I’d offer to bring dinner at your house,” Dottie says, standing at the stove waiting for Charlie’s grilled cheese to brown without burning, never letting her eyes drift from the pan. “But can’t leave him alone.” They all stand silent long enough to hear Charlie’s heavy breathing, slow and steady, from the room at the end of the hall.

“That’s very generous, but Mary Green has been stocking my freezer while she’s taking care of Nona. But . .” he says and let’s a pause sit between them,  “I could use some help cooking for her. Annie,” Lorenzo says with a light of inspiration. “Nona could hire you to cook for her until you figure out what you will do, here. Or, before you go back, or whatever.” Lorenzo takes a seat on the cushioned chair in the corner of the room, the one that used to fit both him and Annie.

“Maybe,” is all Annie says before she begins a search of Dottie’s refrigerator for the ingredients in her dish, leaning in and squatting down, piling the red onions into the curve of her arm.

Dottie looks up from the pan and shakes her head in Annie’s direction. “Charlie, love of my life, he took us here to get you away from the hicks, from everything that would hold you back.” Lorenzo feels the air shift in the cozy kitchen, but doesn’t dare say a word. “We, Charlie and me, sacrificed so much for you to get that degree, that fancy degree in astrology you were destined to get.”

“Astro physics,” Annie corrects without looking up from the refrigerator.

“And never said a word when you gave it up. And Nona, she let you sit in her kitchen every afternoon of your life and never asked for anything back. She taught you to cook, and when you just disappeared with Jean-Pierre she might have taken it harder than anyone. She loves you, Annie, you owe her.”

Annie nods in agreement. Dottie shifts her eyes back to the pan and Lorenzo watches the spatula scoop under the brown bread and flip it over with a flick of her wrist.

“Charlie saved us, I think, as far as I can tell,” Dottie says confidently after the sandwich is safely turned and correctly browned. Dottie’s pearly-pink phone vibrates on the black- countertop. “He’s hungry, but good things take time.”

“He’s always hungry,” Annie says with a laugh, but Dottie doesn’t smile back.

She turns and looks at Father Lorenzo in the green-velour chair, his body comfortably encased but his feet firmly planted on the ground. He feels like Dottie can see through him.

“I was almost thirty-years old and had never been out of Portland, Maine, it was time for an adventure and that’s just what Charlie promised. He promised me a castle, and, well, he kind of delivered.”

“I definitely thought this was a castle when we first got here,” Annie answers, standing at the counter, carefully placing an onion on the wooden board and slicing it quickly with a long-bladed knife. 

 “Ready,” Dottie sings out loud enough for Charlie to stop texting. “So glad you’re here, Father Lorenzo, even though it would have been better if you had married Annie, all those years ago. Just imagine how different things would be. I saw you, you know, before you broke it off,” Dottie says, placing the hot pan in the sink. “Honestly, I was happy you loved each other.”

Father Lorenzo lets out a small noise as he tries to sit up in the chair, suddenly feeling trapped and exposed in Dottie’s kitchen. “I should go.”

“No!” Dottie answers without looking over her shoulder at him. She pauses at the open door to Charlie’s room. “Let me serve him, be right back.”

Father Lorenzo stays still in the chair, held in place by the surge of shame he feels knowing Dottie always knew about Annie and him. We were so young, he thinks. But what he knows is that he couldn’t pretend to be the type of man Annie needed, or the type of man who could prioritize that kind of love.

“I didn’t want to tell you when it happened, and it was too embarrassing to describe what I saw when Charlie was around and he was always around,” Dottie says as she returns to kitchen and takes her place on the stool at the kitchen counter. Lorenzo feels his insides tighten, and his loins tingle with a surge of warmth, remembering what must have been the moment Dottie had found Annie and him together.

Dottie picks up the white-box on the counter and pulls out a cigarette. As she lifts it to her lips with her left hand, her right hand pulls a pink lighter from her pocket. With a quick movement she lights the tip. With her first exhale her body relaxes back into the stool. “You were laying on the orange cushion in the window seat, looking out the window. Lorenzo was holding you. I’d heard the sounds from your room. I thought it was the cat trying to get out. When I opened the door I saw you were crying. I stood for a second, or maybe an hour, it was like time stopped in that star lit room. I remember hoping that Lorenzo was your future.” Dottie stops long enough to inhale another long drag.  “I heard you say, ‘Lorenzo, did you see something?’ before I ran outside and sat in my car to have a few smokes and calm down. Remember that car, it was an orange Buick Skylark, it was Charlie’s idea of American pride.” She laughs and looks around reflexively for her ashtray. “When I came back inside, that’s when you told me that Lorenzo was thinking of becoming a priest.”

“Technically, already had decided,” Father Lorenzo reminds her and he can see the sadness in her gray eyes.

“Yup,” is all Annie says before turning back to the onions sautéing on the stove.

“Well, the past is the past. You never know who your future will be.” Dottie smiles and sits up a little in her seat. “I need a cup of tea.”

“Let me make you a cup, Mom,” Annie says, already opening the cabinet to find Dottie’s favorite red coffee-mug with the white hearts, the one Maeve painted for a Mother’s Day gift so many years ago. Annie opens the drawers and starts the kettle and thinks of all Dottie gave up when she left Maine to make things better, and how happy Annie was that she did.

“Well, I’m trying something new. I’m going to save myself without a man to save me,” Annie says, filling the silver tea-infuser with the richly scented creamed earl-gray that smells like a lavender scented summer day before turning off the flame under the pan filled with onions.

Annie finishes the tea by stirring two cubes of sugar and a quick pour of milk into the steaming mug. Father Lorenzo watches Annie caring for her mom and thinks of that first summer Annie and Dottie stayed in Cambridge and he’d dreamed Dottie was his mother too. It was before the wedding. Before Maeve. It was the first summer Annie and Dottie hadn’t spent on the rough seaside in Maine where they didn’t need fans or air conditioning. Annie and Lorenzo would lay for hours on her bed underneath the spinning ceiling fan in her attic bedroom, spritzing themselves with cool water, talking about the places they’d rather be than the hot city. Annie knew Dottie was worried she’d made a mistake cutting off all ties with her uncles and Papa Nate in Maine, because they had nowhere to go if Charlie got sick of them.

All Lorenzo knew was that Charlie had started working late, not helping out like he did when they first moved in, and spending nights at a bar. Dottie was always angry, stomping around the kitchen, tapping her manicured fingers on her arms. Annie was worried. Annie knew how Dottie got when it was time to go. Before Charlie brought them to Cambridge they had lived in five different houses in different parts of Portland. Annie knew Dottie had no fear of picking up and starting all over again. The question was, where would they go?

Regardless, in every place they’d lived Dottie had found something that she could make feel special and sparkly with a little elbow grease and vision. It was Dottie’s mission, from the first moment she saw the tired gray house on the corner of Pemberton Street, to transform it into a home. When they’d pulled up to the shingled house that first, cold-winter night, Annie looked up at the small balcony on the third-floor and saw that the round arch, over-hanging the wooden railing, was covered in decorative orange-lights, Annie’s favorite color. It was the first magic trick Dottie performed on that sagging, gray structure.

They decided to stay at the end of that summer when Charlie proposed.

“What’s wrong with needing a man?” Dottie says, breaking the silence in the room.

“I’m always looking for something outside myself to feel redeemed. I need to figure out me.”

“Charlie was redeemed, maybe JP can be redeemed, absolved. What do you think, Father?”

“No,” Father Lorenzo answer too quickly, feeling guilty for his judgment but unable to hide it. “This is different. There was collusion, with Khadijah and JP’s mama. And Charlie changed, after you found out, Dottie. There was a price for your forgiveness, nothing is free.”

“Truth,” Dottie admits.

“It’s still a man’s world, no matter what anybody tries to claim. Right Mom?”

“It’s true,” Dottie says quickly. “Really, he knew he had me forever. I couldn’t really leave him, where would we go? We belonged to him by the time. We couldn’t go back to Maine,” Dottie says and Lorenzo feels the bitter truth of her words in the back of his throat.

“But Charlie didn’t keep you down,” Lorenzo says defensively, feeling his body moving forward and sitting up in the chair.

“No,” Dottie says. “I know I used my sexual prowess to catch Charlie.” Lorenzo looks at her face and there is a glow on her lifted cheeks. “And then his guilt tied him to me. But never forget, if it weren’t for Annie, Charlie wouldn’t have felt obligated to change anything.”

Annie cringes at the memory.

“Some might say that was a mistake, you know, doing it with Charlie in the office storage room in Portland after he picked up his order of shirts. But him and me, we were one from the moment of that little transgression. Nice word, right?” she smiles and Annie has to smile back. But Lorenzo feels the heat of embarrassment warm the back of his neck.

“I need to go home, Nona is waiting. Thank you for the dinner invitation, maybe next week,” he says quickly as he pushes himself up and out of the green-velour chair. “Think about cooking for Nona, she would love it Annie.”

Annie walks toward him for an embrace, but she doesn’t look him in the eyes. Sometimes, Lorenzo thinks, love can separate us.

 “I was supposed to be the big dreamer, reaching for the stars, literally. But I failed. Now all I can do is cook. Is my purpose to be a house elf?”

I want to save you, are his thoughts as he pulls her into his soft embrace. Instead he says, “Taking care of others is the how we understand God, it is how we are meant to serve.”

Annie pulls back from his body and her eyes are brimming and red. “I served him and I gave up myself. I didn’t want to take care of anyone but he made me! Or maybe I did it willingly. Maybe I can’t be anything but chattel, maybe this is me. I need some air,” Annie says, fumbling down the hallway, grabbing her coat and her bag before disappearing out the front door.

 Dottie shrugs her shoulders and puts her hands in the air. “She’s been a mess since coming back. Says she’s in constant shame of taking up too much space but always feeling invisible. I don’t even know what that means, sounds like something JP would put in one of his songs. But she’s sad, Father, so sad.”

Before leaving, Father Lorenzo hugs Dottie good-bye and wonders if he should go back to Church because he too needs absolution from his constant shame of taking up too much space to hide, or maybe to bury, his own brokenness.