Page 59 of Tito
“Really?” I exclaimed. “I can’t imagine that at all with how you two are now.”
“I can't either. But I told him to mind his own damned business. That he wasn’t my dad, cause my dad was dead anyways. And my mom was soon to go…” Tito sat up in bed. “Oh, wow…”
I stared at him. “What happened?”
“She was sick,” he explained. “I think it was her heart. More like she had a broken heart, I thought at the time. But she wasn’t getting better. Rocky came out to get me. He said we needed to go see her. That if we did, it might remind her that she had kids. Like my sister was just ten or so.”
“What happened?”
“Rocky called me selfish. Said we were her sons and we needed to step up. Go and see our mother.”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
“I told him to go fuck himself.”
I gasped and sat up. “You didn’t!”
He nodded and looked away. “I did, but I’m not proud of that day, Valen.”
“Geeze Tito. You were a teen and had lost your dad then your mom was sick. You can forgive yourself, ya know?”
“I may not ever do that. We actually fought like… with our fists. He said he would make me go. I said he couldn't and that he was a pussy. He needed to get away from me. In my head, I felt justified. Like why couldn’t I stay in the woods? Live by the pond. Have peace and let the world go by?”
I stared at him and squeezed his hand in mine. “It must have been so awful.”
He shrugged. “I felt calm and peaceful out there. I could often pretend that my whole world had not cave in on me. I could forget. Until Rocky came and tossed that rock into my peace.”
“Rock?” I asked.
“He was so good at skipping rocks. I spent lots of time doing that too since I had hours to kill while camped out. You know the old saying of tossing a pebble into the pond and it makes the ripples spread out?”
I rolled my eyes. “You fooled me there. I thought you meantliterally.”
“I did mean that! I had this rock that I’d found on the trail and for a month or more I would hold it in my hands and drop it from one palm to another. It was a super smooth one so it helped with my nerves, I guess? He kept trying to talk to me and I was blatantly ignoring him while I played with that stone and then he snatched it from me.”
I stared at him. “Oh, wow.”
“It was like my… well, my rock?” Tito chuckled a little. “He’d skipped it along that water perfectly. It tapped the top of the water like 5 times before it went down.”
I stared at him and asked in a hushed tone, “So, what did you do?”
“My peace shattered and my rage came out. The same rage that I felt when they told me my father wasn’t ever coming home. I attacked him and we fought like two juggernauts. We rolled along the ground, we punched at each other. Grappled together like wrestlers. We had bloody noses and busted lips.”
“Oh, no…”
“Oh, yes…” He nodded at me.
“So what stopped your fight?”
Tito paused as he looked stunned for a full minute.
“Tito?” I called to him.
He blinked and looked over at me with a grin on his face as he said, “We both heard our father’s voice.”
“What?” I stared at him in disbelief.
Nodding, he explained, “He shouted at us to stop. He said our mother needed us. It was his voice in Italian, no less.”
