Angels Twice Descending Read Free Page B

“You’re right,” he said. “You are the reason. For everything.” Simon gave her a gentle kiss on the forehead. “That’s why I’m saying thank you.”
    *    *    *
    “Are you sure you don’t want me to heat that up for you?” Simon’s mother asked as he shoveled another heaping spoonful of cold ziti into his mouth.
    “Mmff? What? No, it’s fine.”
    It was more than fine. It was tangy tomato and fresh garlic and hot pepper and gooey cheese, and better than leftover pasta from the corner pizza place had any right to be. It tasted like actual food , which already put it head and shoulders above what he’d been eating for the last several months. But it wasn’t just that. Takeout from Giuseppi’s was a tradition for Simon and his mother—after his father died and his sister went away to school, after it was just the two of them knocking around an apartment that felt cavernous with just the two of them left in it, they’d lost the habit of having daily meals with each other. It was easier to just grab food whenever they thought of it, on the way in or out of the apartment, his mother heating up TV dinners after work, Simon picking up some pho or a sandwich on his way to band practice. It was, maybe, easier not to face the empty chairs at the table every night. But they made it a rule to eat together at least one night each week, slurping down Giuseppi’s spaghetti and drenching garlic knots in spicy sauce.
    These cold leftovers tasted like home, like family, and Simon hated to think of his mother sitting in the empty apartment, week after week, eating them on her own.
    Children are supposed to grow up and leave, he told himself. He wasn’t doing anything wrong; he wasn’t doing anything he wasn’t meant to do.
    But there was a part of him that wondered. Children were supposed to leave home, maybe. But not forever. Not like this.
    “Your sister tried to wait up for you,” his mother said, “but apparently she’s been up for a week straight studying for exams. She was passed out on the couch by nine.”
    “Maybe we should wake her up,” Simon suggested.
    She shook her head. “Let the poor girl sleep. She’ll see you in the morning.”
    He hadn’t exactly told his mother he was staying over. But he had let her believe it, which he supposed amounted to about the same thing: yet another lie.
    She settled into the chair beside him and stabbed a ziti onto her fork. “Don’t tell my diet,” she stage-whispered, then popped it into her mouth.
    “Mom, the reason I’m here . . . I wanted to talk to you about something.”
    “That’s funny, I’ve actually—I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something too.”
    “Oh? Great! Uh, you go first.”
    His mother sighed. “You remember Ellen Klein? Your Hebrew school teacher?”
    “How could I forget?” Simon said wryly. Mrs. Klein had been the bane of his existence from second grade through fifth. Every Tuesday after school, they’d fought a silent war, all because, in an unfortunate playground incident, Simon had accidentally dislodged her wig and sent it flying into a pigeon’s nest. She’d spent the next three years determined to ruin his life.
    “You know she was just a nice old lady trying to get you to pay attention,” his mother said now with a knowing smile.
    “Nice old ladies don’t throw your Pokémon cards in the trash,” Simon pointed out.
    “They do when you’re trading them for kiddish wine at the back of the sanctuary,” she said.
    “I would never!”
    “A mother always knows, Simon.”
    “Okay. Fine. But that was a very rare Mew. The only Pokémon that—”
    “ Anyway. Ellen Klein’s daughter just got married to her girlfriend, a lovely woman, you’d like her—we all like her. But . . .”
    Simon rolled his eyes. “But let me guess: Mrs. Klein is a raging homophobe.”
    “No, it’s not that—the girlfriend’s Catholic. Ellen had a fit, wouldn’t go to the wedding, and now she’s wearing