Page 67 of Unwritten Rules
“It won’t. But if you really want to make it up to me, we could go somewhere after the season’s over. Maybe the beach.”
“That sounds like it could be all right. Spend a couple of days relaxing. I’ll even let you pick the restaurants.”
“Oh, you’ll ‘let’ me?” Eugenio says.
“Well, maybe I won’t.”
Eugenio laughs and rolls over onto him, arms bracketing Zach’s shoulders, filling his entire field of view.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Zach says. “I promise I will.”
Chapter Nineteen
After the series in Detroit, they fly to Baltimore, a flight that starts out bumpy and never really settles. Zach’s nerves are similarly fraught. He spends most of the flight contemplating all the ways this could go wrong, even after his mother assured him that his friend was a welcome late addition. With the time difference, it’s almost ten at night when they land, and it takes another hour to get their stuff and make it to Zach’s parents’ house out in Pikesville.
The windows are lit when they get there, his mother coming out to the front stoop as they each wheel a suitcase up the steps.
Eugenio’s holding a gift, something actually gift-wrapped, one he withdrew from his luggage when they picked it up at the carousel. “It’s nice to meet you,” he says, and Zach’s mother insists he hug her in greeting, before turning and asking Zach if they bothered to feed them on the plane and then ushering them in to have the fourth or fifth meal of the day.
His parents renovated their kitchen sometime in the ’80s, all wood cabinets and Formica. It hasn’t changed, save the paint, which he convinced them to do when a crack appeared in the plaster, even if they didn’t let him pay for it.
Eugenio occupies one of the armless kitchen chairs, sitting across the table from Zach at a safe distance. He’s surveying the array of casserole dishes, white with blue flowers on the side, glass lids fogged with water. “This isn’t all for us, right?”
Zach’s mom shushes him and tells them they both look thin on principle, even though Zach’s been able to keep more weight on this season than he has previously.
“It’s not that much.” She pulls a pan from the oven, along with a foil-wrapped package that turns out to be warmed challah. “Go and wash your hands. There’s chicken.”
There’s chicken, white rice, a container of squash with puddles of margarine on top of it, challah, boiled green beans with carrots cut into coins, a little dish of stewed apples.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” Zach says, sitting.
His mother reaches for his hand, grasping it, and recites a quick shehecheyanu, something she always does when he comes home after a long absence. Though it’s different with Eugenio here, looking inquisitive, as she says the prayer thanking God for sustaining them, one said on special occasions including, apparently, Zach coming to a fundraiser with a polite friend.
“Mom,” he says, faintly embarrassed.
“We haven’t seen you since January. I can’t be grateful that you’re here? Let me go heat you up some soup.”
They eat. She sits and watches them, offering seconds, thirds, and asking if they didn’t like something when Zach declines fourths, complimenting Eugenio on being a “good eater.”
Eugenio is sitting straighter than he normally does, and he answers Zach’s mom’s questions between forkfuls of food, when she asks him where he grew up, where his parents are from, what they do, and what their parents did. If they ever get to go back to Venezuela to see family, which he does, but says the political situation is making it harder for them to do.
“Do you still have cousins in Russia?” Eugenio asks, when Zach’s mother mentions that’s where her mother immigrated from.
“No, we’re all here now.” She gets up, offering more food. And Eugenio glances in question at Zach, who shakes his head slightly.
They finish eating. Eugenio gets up to clear the plates to the sink without being asked, though Zach’s momtsks at him to sit back down and to rest, and then tells Zach to come help her repackage the remains of the food. Zach takes the things she hands out of the fridge, various reused cottage cheese containers with leftovers, a clear plastic Tupperware container full of what looks like vegetable scraps: carrot peels, onion paper, a few sad chunks of potato.
“I’m saving them to make broth,” she says.
“Eugenio does that too. He’s a good cook.”
And she pauses at that, looking to where Eugenio is browsing the set of cookbooks on the shelf. “Does he know how to cook kosher?”
“Um, I don’t think so?”
Which is how they end up in front of his mother’s cookbook shelf, taking out and then replacing various cookbooks. “This one,” she says, finally.
Zach pulls out theNew York Times Jewish Cookbook, puts it on the counter, shakes his hand as if protesting the book’s weight. “They’re gonna charge a baggage overage fee for this thing.”
