So Soap Opera

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

My parents called from San Francisco, using a speakerphone so they could both talk at once.  Did I get my birthday present?  Yes, I said, the briefcase was beautiful.

“Coming up in the world!” my father declared.

“It’s not that we’re not proud,” my mother said, her voice wavering.  “It’s just that, that we worry.  No one can have all the answers.  And you . . .you really do tend to go overboard.”

“Next year—thirty!” my father thundered. 

“We want to come see you,” my mother said. 

“Well, we’re in the middle of construction. . . ”

“So tell us when’s a good time.”

“Okay, I will.”

*

“Nothing like family,” Stephanie said.  “Your face is the color of marinara sauce.”

“You have to get over that,” Carlos said.  “We’re self-made.  That’s what sets us apart.  We’re your family now.  Where we come from, how we were brought up—none of that matters any more.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

Then Carlos gave me a gold neck chain with RWR in the center.

“Very tasteful,” I said.  “Very apt.  Thank you.”

“RWR” Carlos said, fixing the chain on my neck. “It’s so perfect.”

“Unpronounceable, though.  I think it’s better when you can say the acronym like a word.”

“Oh, well,” he said, determined not to seem miffed. 

God, I was tired.  It’s terrible when Carlos is sincere.  But as I sat there, with the thing around my neck, he got not just sincere but sincerely soap opera.  Carlos! He kissed my hand and said—in front of Maggie—that I was his prince!  (Of course Stephanie was also there, but being waitress extraordinaire, she somehow conveyed that she hadn’t really heard us.)

I laughed—couldn’t help it.

“All right,” Carlos said. “Be like that.”  He stomped into the kitchen, made himself a gin and tonic and drained it in front of us.

Then he brought the gin and tonic bottles to the table and mixed himself another one.  “We do not conform,” he said, “to designated strata.”

“We’re beyond demography,” Maggie said.  (She’s so good with him and so good with me.  Where would I be without her?)

(Click here to read the next episode.)