Page 109 of Promise Me Sunshine

“Come eat!” my mom shouts from the kitchen, and Miles finally resurrects.

There are goblets of wine and garlic bread and a trough of spaghetti, homemade, in marinara sauce, also homemade.

“Serve yourself!” Mom calls, her head in the fridge, hunting down the Parmesan.

Miles takes a humongous scoop of pasta and I quickly reach over and scoop half of it back into the bowl. “Pace yourself,” I warn out of the corner of my mouth.

He sort of follows directions, but agrees to another serving when my mom offers it to him. He’s just scraping the last of the sauce with the side of his fork when my mom stands up with an evil grin and dons her apron. She opens the oven he hadn’t realized was warming the actual main course.

She turns with the baking dish between two oven mitts and his fork squeaks against his plate.

“That’s…” he says dimly. “That’s an entire duck.”

And it is. Complete with roasted potatoes and olive gremolata.

This one is not a “serve yourself” dish. Mom piles Miles’s plate with food. I’ve learned the hard way to yank my plate away from her the second I’ve gotten the amount I want to eat. My dad has passively come to accept reality and just takes it upon himself to top off our wineglasses while my mom tortures us with ancestral cooking.

We eat and chat and eat and chat. Miles clears his plate, but I detect a bead of sweat running down the side of his face. The remains of the duck are cleared away, and Miles pats his stomach and sits back.

My mom stands and with the flair of a magician pulls a kitchen towel off the top of an enormous vat of salad. “To help you digest,” she explains when Miles catches some of the salad in one hand as she overfills his plate.

“You don’t have to eat it all,” I say out of the side of my mouth a few minutes later. He’s three quarters of the way through and is chewing like a cow on cud.

The salad and salad plates are cleared away and Miles gets up to help with the dishes. “Sit down, sit down,” Mom says, waving him away. “You can help when we’re done eating.”

He turns to me, eyes wide with horror.When we’re done eating?he mouths.

“There’s two more courses,” I whisper.

He clunks into his chair, hands flat on the table. Mom plates the fruit that Miles brought and hands out the tiny dessert forks for us all to eat from the plate at once. Dad goes to the cabinet and emerges with half skinny/half bulbous cordial glasses.

“Dad. No.”

“It’s a digestif,” he explains to Miles. “Would you like some?”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Just say no!” I whisper to him. I try out this tactic myself. “Dad! No!”

He ignores me and sits back at the table, handing out the glasses to everyone but me. “Miles, are you Italian by chance?”

Miles shakes his head.

“Well,” my dad says. “You will be by the end of this meal.”

He and my mom laugh heartily, as if my dad hasn’t been making that joke for thirty years.

“Dad’s not Italian either,” I explain to Miles. “But he’s a big fan of grappa.”

Dad pours the clear liquid for each of them.

“Seriously,” I whisper to Miles, “You don’t have to—”

But he shoots it back in one go. He does not (1) grimace, (2) gasp, or (3) cough. But I’m pretty sure he’s not breathing and his eyes have gone glassy. He might be having a brief tête-à-tête with God.

Mom and Dad drink their own grappa and eat fruit and gab. Dad fills Miles’s grappa glass twice more before I’m surreptitiously able to swipe the grappa bottle and restore it to the cabinet before a fourth round can be dispensed.

By the time the cookies course (final one, I swear) comes out, I’m the only one who’s not drunk as a skunk. We move the party back to the living room.

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