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The words punch me right in the gut. So hard I swear it takes me a moment to breathe again, and I realize why. Because deep down I’ve asked the question and wondered about the answer.
My mom’s hand slaps over her mouth, but it’s too late. “Ivy, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Not I didn’t mean that. I shouldn’t have said that.
She did mean it, and an ache opens inside me. I turn and go to bed.
I’m pretty sure I won’t be sleeping much tonight.
Chapter Ten
I’m still thinking about the fight with my mother the next day as Heath sets up the video and sound equipment. It isn’t some crazy professional setup, but I’ve been assured he can get the job done.
We’re in a small apartment looking over Rockaway Beach. It took an hour via subway to get out here, and Heath had chatted much of the time. At first with me, and then when he realized I wasn’t talking back, with the various other travelers around us. He was a chatty motherfucker. He now knew the basic histories of a ninety-two-year-old woman on her way home from visiting a friend at a nursing home, a twenty-three-year-old grad student who was totally hitting on him, and a tourist who thought he was heading to MOMA. He is in for a treat because he gets to see Queens instead.
I am the dour center of the universe. The black hole everyone tries to avoid getting sucked into.
Not even the sight of the beach calms me today.
“Do you know Mrs. Marino?”
I look up, and one of the interviewees stands there in her brilliantly colored housedress, a full gray helmet of tight curls around her head. “No.”
Anna Maria Brambilla is a sixty-eight-year-old retired nurse. From the file I read on her while Heath charmed the A train, she’s been married to her husband, Phil, for forty-eight years. He’s seventy and worked for the Port Authority most of his life.
For some reason Heath believes their story will help train his AI to better match people.
“Well, she’s the loveliest lady I ever met.” Anna Maria takes this time to sit across the bistro table from me. She does not seem to understand that I came out on the balcony to be alone. “I was barely nineteen when my mother took me to her.”
Through the haze of my misery—and lack of sleep—I find something interesting in her words. “You went to a matchmaker?”
Heath likely mentioned all of this in his long explanation of his methods, which I nodded through and heard very little of because I was thinking about the fact that my father would be ashamed of me.
“I went to the matchmaker.” Anna sits up, shoulders back. “My mother scrimped and saved, and she was so excited when Mrs. Marino took us on. She didn’t take on every client she met with, you know.”
I do not know, and I am curious. I have to admit to being cynical about things like matchmaking. I put it in the same basket as the mystical arts. I don’t think anyone can know how two people are going to work in a relationship. It’s a money grab, like most things. It’s precisely why I feel okay doing what I’m doing. Heath is full of enthusiasm and says all the right things, but at the end of the day, he’s creating something that will potentially build up vulnerable people’s hopes, take their money, and still leave them divorced a few years down the road.
“I would think she would take the clients who could pay,” I reply.
Anna shakes her head. “Oh, she’s not like that. I mean, obviously, she got paid and paid well, but she also took on clients who couldn’t pay her a dime. I heard a very prominent member of our city once went to her and asked to be matched and she said ‘Mr. Mayor, I wouldn’t match you with a goat, and I don’t like goats.’”
I snort at that one. “So she took you on and matched you with Phil?”
“For me it was very quick. I spent a day with her and then filled out all her forms and answered all the questions and she did her research on me.”
I feel the need to interrupt her. “What kind of research?”
“Oh, she talked to my friends and former teachers. I know she had tea with my priest. And of course she interviewed my whole family extensively. All my sisters and cousins. She even went to prison to talk to my brother. Now he was in prison because he got too involved in Gino Rossi’s business, which was too involved in Sicilian business around the area.”
I could make that leap. “He was in the mob.”
“He was mob adjacent,” Anna corrected. “Until he went to prison, and then he was totally a mafia man after that. But the point is how thorough Mrs. Marino is.”
