Chapter Text
“I’m bringing Carmy home with us.”
Stevie, to his credit, takes this in stride. He blinks at her and closes the book he was reading - an airport hardback in every sense of the term, thanks to its flashy lack of substance, the pop science buzzwords on the cover, and the fact that it was purchased at the stand by their gate in O’Hare.
“Are you sure you don’t want to start with something a little smaller first, like a doberman, or maybe one of those house pigs people keep posting on Craigslist?” His tone is as dry as ever, mild and reserving an actual response until he understood what, exactly, was actually happening.
“The ones that always end up growing into enormous pigs that absolutely were not as ‘micro’ as they were supposed to be?” It’s happened to three different people they know in the last two years. Something about the city makes trends sweep through social circles as fast and relentless as a stomach bug. Must be the close quarters and the overpowering sense of FOMO that comes free with the zip code.
“Seriously though, should I be expecting him to pop out of your luggage or something? I distinctly remember saying goodbye to him yesterday at Aunt DeeDee’s house.”
It hadn’t actually been at Donna’s house. It had been a little down the street from Donna’s house because there were some people Uncle Jimmy knew with a big truck and a lot of tarps and some loud equipment doing something about the brand new car-sized hole in the wall. Saying goodbye to everyone - everyone except Donna herself, who wasn’t feeling well and was laying down in her room - on the corner of the block felt odd, and it was only made weirder by the way everyone followed an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge what was happening.
“I don’t mean bringing him home with us now ,” Michelle says, her tone a little more irritated than she would usually sound only a few volleys into a game of verbal badminton with Stevie. She was usually up to give as good as she got, but right now her leg is jittering in place and she is resenting the thought of having to sit still for the next hour and a half and she suddenly needs Stevie to understand what she’s done and what she’s going to do before they land at LaGuardia. “I talked to him at Christmas, told him to come stay with us for a bit. When we get home, I’m booking him a ticket and he’s gonna get on a plane and come live in our guest room for-” A couple days , is what she’d said. “ For as long as I can convince him to stay.”
“Huh.” The overhead light that he’d been using to read glints off of Stevie’s glasses as he tilts his head, considering her plan. “Okay. Do you think he’ll actually do that, though? You said you talked to him, but did he agree to this?”
It’s a fair question, and the reasonableness of it provokes a flare of irritation. The back of Michelle’s neck feels hot and she bites down the urge to snap at Stevie that he doesn’t get how serious the issue is, how much Carmy has to follow through on the invitation. It’s not his fault. None of this is his fault, and it’s not like she can force her cousin to go along with the plan. Carmy’s his own person and he gets to make his own choices, and that’s the scary part, isn’t it? That’s the part she wants to snap at Stevie for pointing out.
“I mean he didn’t say ‘yes I’m going to come to see you in New York’ but he didn’t decline the offer either. He just kind of did that thing that he does when he doesn’t know how to react to something where he tries to be neutral and polite and just sort of looks at you like a deer in the road upstate.” It’s his too busy trying to figure out what he’s supposed to say to actually answer the question face. The look isn’t much less unnerving on Carmy as an adult than it had been on him as a young child when Michelle had first noticed it appearing.
“Ah, yeah.” Stevie nods with a knowing hum. He thinks on it, then grimaces. “I know the face you mean. Yeah, that’s definitely a solid maybe coming from him.”
“And I’m gonna turn that maybe into a yes.”
Stevie’s eyebrows raise above the frames of his glasses and Michelle sighs, waiting for him to start poking fun. All that happens is that he fishes his little foil packet of peanuts out of his pocket and delicately opens it without ripping any of the packaging. Honestly, Michelle would have preferred that he had mocked her stubborn conviction to essentially strong-arm Carmy halfway across the country from afar. The fact that he’s being quiet and serious and letting it pass without comment or needling means that, contrary to her earlier instinct, Stevie very much does grasp the gravity of the situation. She wishes that he didn’t.
If he didn’t see what the big deal was, then maybe Michelle herself was seeing things, and maybe the prospect of Carmy being home in Chicago isn’t as much of a train wreck coming hot down the tracks as she’s afraid that it is. Stevie has never been shy about telling her when she’s sounding fire alarms and nobody else can even see smoke. If he’s getting out of her way when she reaches for the extinguisher, then there’s at least something to the fear of flames.
Moment by moment, Michelle is becoming more dead-set on her plan. She is going to buy Carmy a plane ticket as soon as they’re home, and then she’s going to figure out how to get him to use it. It had been percolating in her mind since before the visit actually happened — as soon as she heard from Natalie that Carmy was between restaurant projects and was home for the foreseeable and indefinite future, she had started to get a prickle at the back of her neck that everything about that was a horrible idea. That had turned into wondering what he could want in Chicago when there was a whole rest of the world out there with amazing restaurants and nobody’s relatives around every corner. New York, for example, has some of the best restaurants in the country and also probably the planet.
Then Michelle actually got eyes on him. Right from the moment she took in the way he was trying to keep Donna and the kitchen functioning, slipping right back into the same patterns, she knew what she was going to do. She had been so glad, the first time Carmy had left Chicago. While at home he lived in a holding pattern of quiet observation and round after round of endless attempts at defusing situations before they happen or without really knowing what the problem actually is, and it ground him down bit by bit. Michelle did not want to watch that happen again, not even filtered through phone calls with Natalie and once a year visits where she’ll wonder if something is wrong or if he’s always carried himself as if in a perpetual state of emergency.
Come stay with me in New York for a few days, she thought, moments after laying eyes on him. She didn’t say it yet — that sort of thing had to wait for the right time. The thought was already there, though, pulsing in her mind like a beating heart. Come back with me. Don’t stay here. The idea had come on fast and only grown more insistent once Michelle actually said something to him about it. Getting Carmy to agree to come for a visit was a background thought to the rest of the day and she repeated the offer more than once. Even when the car came crashing through the side of the house, it wasn’t displaced in her priorities list. In fact, it became the only thing on Michelle’s mind.
Maybe it was some kind of adrenaline response, but she’d felt completely calm in the immediate moments following the crash — there had been the initial jolt of shock and then she had the crystal clear and steady thought that the second I get home, I am booking his fucking ticket. Michael was pounding on the car window and Richie was behind Michael and it wasn’t clear if he was trying to pull him away or push past him to get closer to the car and Natalie had a hold on the sleeve of Carmy’s sweater so tight it was worrying for both her fingers and the sweater’s fabric and Michelle just stood there while everyone else ran around and wondered how soon was too soon to tell Carmy to get his ass on a plane. The timing is important — can’t wait too long or it’ll sink back to normal again and pulling him out will be next to impossible, but can’t go too quick either or he’ll baulk at feeling like he’s abandoning everyone in the middle of a crisis. It’s a delicate art, this sort of extraction.
All of this Michelle explains to Stevie, working through her thought process and the moment it had all crystallized. He listens attentively, nodding at a few points and humming a couple of times. Then, when Michelle goes quiet, his eyes drift from her face to the carpet of the aisle between the rows of seats. Stevie is thinking. That’s what he does when he’s thinking hard about something — it was one of the first of his habits and quirks that Michelle had noticed when they met.
It’s because I have an intense stare, he said to her without being asked, the first time he noticed her noticing this. I used to just look at the person I was talking to but eventually my mom told me it looked like I was trying to set her on fire with my eyes, so now I look at something else when I’m giving something a good think.
“You’ve really thought this through, then,” Stevie says eventually, looking back to her. His face is calm and his voice direct. “You’re bringing Carmy to New York with us.”
“Yeah. Hope having him around for a while isn’t going to bother you too much.”
Notably, it isn’t a question — it’s not is that okay or do you mind. This is not the sort of question they ask each other. Sometimes, shit happens, and sometimes when shit happens it gets a little inconvenient for a while. None of that is a question. It just is.
One time, a friend of Stevie’s from college had his house burn down. They hadn’t been living together for very long, but Michelle got home and there was a man who smelled like smoke asleep on their couch.
They talked in the kitchen in hushed voices. Stevie had apologized and said he should have asked first but he didn’t sound very sorry and Michelle had just shook her head and shrugged. I’m a straight shooter type of gal, she told him, I don’t like to waste time on bullshit. Let me be clear — I don’t care about getting asked for this kind of thing. Shit happens. We’re a team now, that means when shit happens in your life it happens in mine too. A text before I got home would’ve been nice, just to let me know, but I’ll roll with what I’ve gotta roll with, just don’t be shocked if I do the same. And he’d looked at her and she’d looked at him and he’d nodded and said deal and that was when she knew that they were going to last. If she were being honest, Michelle hadn’t really been sure, up until that point.
So, no, she wasn’t asking permission. She was telling him that this was how it was going to be, because her baby cousin is drowning and she didn’t have time to run it by Stevie first before she threw him a fucking life preserver. Thankfully, by this point they both know the drill, and so he knows to get behind her and help her grab the rope.
“I like Carmy,” is what Stevie says. “Don’t know what it’ll be like to live with the guy, but it’ll be interesting at least. Any idea how long he might stay for?”
Michelle chews on the inside of her cheek. “I don’t know,” she admits, and it’s the truth. “Might be a while. I hope it’s a while. There are a lot of great restaurants around the city and with a pedigree like his, he’ll be snapped up in no time. I already have a few people in mind that I’m gonna call, ask them to get the word around a bit. I said ‘a couple days’ when I first brought it up to him but I just…”
“A couple days is a foot in the door.”
“Exactly.”
They talk a little bit more — logistics about the spare room in their condo and whether it’ll be a fight to get Carmy to accept a flight out with no return date to go with it. And then the flight attendant comes around taking drink orders. Michelle gets herself a tasteless and excessively priced spritzer and a ginger ale for Stevie while he opens up his book again. The flight attendant leaves, makes her way down the rows and back again, hands her the beverages, leaves once more. The cabin lights are dimmed, but it’s still early enough that most people aren’t sleeping. Reading lights dot the rows of seats and the castoff from Stevie’s makes one of Michelle’s sleeves look like a different colour than the other.
It’s only once he soundlessly closes the book again that Michelle realizes that Stevie hasn’t turned a single page since he opened it. He tucks a finger into the pages to mark his place and turns to look at her.
“That was a lot,” he says eventually. His voice is quiet and light but it’s serious, too. “With your family. With Donna. That was a lot.”
Michelle doesn’t agree. She doesn’t need to - that also was not a question. It was a lot. Her family is a lot. Her Aunt Donna is a lot. Nobody’s driven a car through a wall before, but she would be lying if she said catastrophe was an unfamiliar Berzatto holiday tradition.
How did that Don Henley song go?
Somebody’s going to emergency, somebody’s going to jail.
“Are you okay?” The question comes after at least a few full minutes of silence.
The Don Henley song is stuck in Michelle’s head now. It probably will be for a while; it always is. Michael and Richie had belted it at her every time they saw her for weeks, when she first told everyone she was moving to New York. She listens to its soundless persistence for a little longer before answering the question.
It’s a tough question. She loves her family, in the small doses in which it is tolerable to be around them, but when things go bad they go bad . Stevie tells her that she doesn’t have to go every time she gets quiet while they wait at the gate for their flight to Chicago. Say the word and we’ll get on a plane to Knoxville instead. We can visit Dollywood.
(It’s not always Knoxville. It’s whatever the little electronic sign above the next gate over says. Let’s go to Boulder instead. Did you know I never learned to ski? We could always do Rochester. The Mayo Clinic fascinates me. I don’t think there’s anything in Tacoma but one thing that will not be there is your aunt and her questions about when we’re having kids.)
And then they always go back to Chicago, because Michelle loves her family and so does Stevie and the thing they don’t warn you about hightailing it out of the place you grew up is how much of you stays behind with the people who weren’t the reason you left. Also, whenever she gets the mass text about dates and times, she always gets a second one, minutes later, directly to her. I miss you. Please come. And Michelle has never been able to tell Natalie ‘no’ when she says please.
Is she okay, though?
“I will be as soon as Carmy’s plane lands.”
Stevie nods like that’s a fair answer, and turns towards the window at his shoulder. He doesn’t open his book again. Michelle sighs, shifting in her seat. She’s tired and there’s a tight fist of tension at the back of her head and the top of her neck that is going to turn into a headache any minute now. At least once she’s home there will be more to do. She hates waiting; it makes her restless. Suffice it to say that Michelle has never been a huge fan of this part of travel.
When they get home, they crash hard, sleep for about twelve hours, and then get up and go right to making arrangements. The guest room is freshened up and scrutinized with Michelle’s realtor’s eye, and then Carmy’s plane ticket is booked for just under a week later. It’s definitely short notice, but she did that on purpose — the less time to overthink and maybe to back out, the better. Less time also means less opportunity for Donna to make Carmy’s life hell once she finds out that he’s leaving. There is no doubt in Michelle’s mind that the news is not going to go over well, and it makes her cringe a little to imagine what he’s going to tell her. If, if, she reminds herself, he even decides to come.
Waiting for an answer is excruciating. It isn’t even really phrased like a question when she texts him the information, and even so, his lack of a fight in response is telling. Michelle starts to wonder, just in the very faintest back recesses of her mind, whether she might be overreacting. And then Carmy texts back, his entire answer contained in ok see you soon and all doubt is gone.
The consequences come quick. Michelle answers the first call that she gets, because it’s always easier to just let Donna get it all out than to duck and ignore her. That would just make her call over and over and be more upset when you finally did answer. It’s a lesson most people in the family learned early and with emphasis. Besides, there’s a not-insignificant part of Michelle’s mind that is acutely worried about where whatever might be waiting for her when she answers might end up directed if she didn’t pick up. If Donna is reading her the riot act, it means she’s leaving Carmy alone, and he’s the one in dish-throwing range. Michelle can handle it.
That’s what she tells Stevie, sitting across from her at the table, who suggests maybe just letting it go to voicemail when she shows him the caller ID. He pulls a grimace and waves a hand, indicating that she should do as she sees fit.
The call is… It’s not good. Michelle hasn’t lived in the same state as either her mother or her aunt in over a decade and still just hearing the tone and volume pierce through her phone’s speaker is enough to have the hair on the back of her neck standing up and her body cold all over. The instinctive fear of realizing that you’re in trouble is one of those things a person just doesn’t outgrow, apparently. As for the call’s contents, it amounts to essentially what Michelle had expected that it would, give or take the placement of a few specific cuss words and the places where the heartbroken tirade pauses for a drag of a cigarette or a drink of something.
“You may have never looked back after you up and abandoned your family, Michelle Valerie, but you have no business trying to take my son away from me too. What the fuck are you trying to do to me, taking my boy all the way out there to New York fucking City with you? I just got him back. I just fucking got him back for once, for once he spends time with his mother and here you are taking him away again. Are you trying to destroy this family? Are you trying to tear apart this whole family? Do you plan to take Sugar, too? Mikey?” Long pause. Shuddering breaths that make Michelle’s own lungs feel tight. “Just like your mother, Michelle. You are just like your mother.”
Ouch , Stevie mouths from across the table. He can hear the whole conversation - it’s not like Donna’s keeping the volume down. Michelle rolls her eyes in response. Most people would probably be less than thrilled at the just like your mother comment, but it stings a little extra coming from Donna. It was meant to. Donna hasn’t spoken to Michelle’s mother in more than ten years, not since their big fight. Their last big fight, which came after a dozen other big fights.
It was a surprise when Michelle kept getting invited to the family holidays after everything that happened between her mother and her aunt, and then it very quickly wasn’t a surprise anymore. It was an extension of the fight, really. Who is Michelle going to choose? Well, she’d never got on with her own mother and the thought of a silent house punctuated only by her father listening to baseball on the radio like it’s the 1950s and her mother’s pointed questions about when she was going to get a ring on her finger already is the kiss of death to any sort of holiday cheer. Donna would ask the same questions, obviously, but neither her mother nor Donna were the reason she came home to visit in the first place. She was still welcome at holidays despite the ban on her parents precisely because she accepted that first invitation, Michelle is sure of it. It was proof that Donna had won that last fight with a brutal finality, though she’d never understand that Michelle wasn’t choosing between the two feuding matriarchs at all.
Please come. It won’t be the same without you.
Michelle can’t say no to Natalie, and so she’d put her mother and her aunt out of her mind and made her choice. She picked her cousin. It wasn’t like she and her parents were ever on long phone calls on Sunday evenings terms anyway - there wasn’t much of a change, after. Her dad sent her birthday cards with a twenty dollar bill tucked inside, like clockwork every year. Her mother occasionally left a passive aggressive voicemail on her phone. Michelle became a guest of honour in Donna’s house, proof that at least someone recognized all the hard work she did for this family. It bought her a degree of leeway, that pride of place did. Until she spent it this year, first on telling Donna to her face that no she very much did not seem okay, and now on texting Carmy the link to his e-ticket and We’ll come pick you up when you land.
“We might not be welcome back at holidays again,” is what Michelle says to Stevie when Donna finally hangs up. “It depends on if she remembers she’s pissed at me by the time the next one rolls around.”
“That’d be a pity. I meant what I said at dinner, I do love Berzatto Christmas. But I think I’ll find a way to live without the excitement. Also, hey.” Stevie taps the side of his coffee mug and waits for her to look at him before finishing. “I’m proud of you.”
Michelle pulls a face on instinct, rolling her eyes and turning her phone face-down on the table. Something sharp and spiky rolls through her chest and up into her throat. “Oh, fuck off.”
“I’m not fucking with you, I mean it,” Stevie says. He holds her gaze steadily, one eyebrow raised just enough to indicate that the reaction hadn’t been a surprise but it was mis-matched to what was happening — not the first time or the last they’ve been down this road. “I’m proud of you for stepping in when she was getting into it with Natalie at Christmas and I’m proud of you for getting Carmy out of there. You were right, I saw him too. It’s bad for him. He needs to get out, and sometimes you need to get pulled out. So yes, I am not fucking with you, I am proud of you, and I said that because I meant it.” He pauses, gives it a moment in a very particular way where Michelle knows that he’s just giving it a moment and then he’ll have more to say. Eventually, she waves her hand in a ‘get on with it’ kind of circle and he finishes the thought. “Yeah. So, like, respectfully? You gotta get your head out of Berzatto-land and back in the real world, Mitch. Not everything is a backhanded whatever, you know?”
And yeah. Yeah, she knows, and yeah, she does need to get her head out of that shit because it’s poisonous and it makes her act like an asshole because it makes her assume that everyone else is an asshole. Michelle groans, covering her face and pushing the heels of her hands against her eyes. It’s going to smudge her mascara to hell and back but who gave a shit, it’s not like there’s anyone but the two of them here.
“Sorry,” she mutters, lost in her sleeves. Stevie deserves better than that. The whole world deserves better than that. The problem with the instinct to bite back is that sometimes you think you’re biting back and nobody bit at you in the first place. There’s never going to be a minute of her life when Michelle isn’t sarcastic, pushy, frankly a bit of a bitch. She likes herself that way. Most of the Berzattos are that way, and she likes them like that too. But sometimes it twists into mean in a way that she isn’t proud of. She isn’t always sure where the line is.
Scraping herself together, Michelle grits her teeth and picks her phone back up. There’s a text from Donna on the screen but she doesn’t read it, stuffing the device straight into her pocket instead. That can wait for later. Not that any of it really matters in the end anyway. It’ll go one way or the other, really. Either Donna will never forgive this slight and she’ll never forget it or it will completely disappear from her mind by the next week. Only time will tell if the endless free passes Michelle got for being the deciding blow that ended the war between Donna and her mother have finally run out. In the meantime, she’s got shit to do and things to get ready because her cousin is coming to town.
—
As soon as Carmy is under her roof, safely tucked away under the quilt in her guest room, Michelle takes what feels like her first full breath since Christmas. It’s not like everything is magically okay now - Carmy certainly isn’t okay, and he’s just one little piece of the whole fucked up puzzle, but she’s finally done something about it. Michelle has found the one piece of that puzzle that she can do anything about at all and she’s done it. That’s the part that’s driven her the most out of her mind - knowing that things need to be done, that nothing is alright in Chicago, and not knowing what to do. Who to try and help, never mind how.
Natalie has Pete and her friends from school. She’s got a home and distance and she’d mentioned while on a walk with Michelle, looking away like she wasn’t sure what the response would be, that she had started therapy after Thanksgiving. And Michael has… Well.
When they talk on the phone, Natalie doesn’t have a lot to say about Michael that’s encouraging. Michelle is worried about Michael but it’s not like she can do anything about that . They were close when they were younger but the older they got and the more Donna took a shine to her the more strained her relationship with Michael got. They were a competition of their own, really, or at least a battlefield on the war between their mothers.
Grandpa Berzatto, right? Michael Berzatto. A looming figure gone before any of her generation was born, and so of course the oldest grandchild is named after him - both of them were, at the beginning and the end of the same year, one down each branch of the family tree. Michael and Michelle. They thought it was funny when they were younger. Used to tell people they were twins, when they were real little. It’s not like that anymore. At least Richie is there, though. At least Richie is always there.
Thank god for Richie, said almost no one ever and Michelle several times over the course of her life.
One time, she was seventeen and going out with a guy who was far too old for her and a massive asshole on top of that. When she finally dumped him and his reaction scared her enough to tell them what was going on, Michael and Richie got a baseball bat and a tire iron out of the garage and broke every window and light cover on the guy’s car. Richie took one of the pieces from the tail-light to wood shop class the next day and while the teacher was off making sure some sophomores didn’t lose any fingers using a table saw, he sanded down the edges and put a hole through it, then gave it to her on a keychain. Michelle still has it somewhere. Michelle still has that keychain somewhere and Richie still has Michael and so that’s one thing she doesn’t have to worry about not being able to fix.
So there’s nothing to do for any of them, because Natalie is going to be okay in ways that even Michelle isn’t, and Michael is out of her reach, and Donna is out of everyone’s reach. (Donna needs help. She’s obviously suffering and needs some serious help, but Michelle learned long ago with her own mother that there’s no forcing help on someone who won’t accept it and will stop speaking to you for months if you try to push it anyway.)
But Carmy… Carmy is in her guest room and it’s still pretty early but she thinks he’s asleep and this she can do. This, him , Michelle can help.
(Michael caught her on the way out, when she and Stevie were leaving. She was worried for a moment, because he had that intense look on his face that meant trouble could be coming, and when he said heard you asked Carm to come stay with you for a few days in New York she steeled her nerves for one last explosion for the road. Michael was silent and Michelle was silent and he still had a hold of her arm but he wasn’t squeezing or anything so she let him keep his hand for now. And then he just said Good. Get him the fuck out of here and do not let him come back. Then he gave her a hug so tight she couldn’t breathe and kissed her on the cheek and said love you, Mitch and he was gone.)
“So, you have some kind of action plan then?” Stevie asks her when she gets back to the kitchen after looking in on Carmy in the guest room. Maybe checking on him was a bit of overkill, it’s not like he’s five years old, but knowing for sure that he’s out cold was… reassuring.
“Yeah,” Michelle says. “Call my friend with the fucking restaurants and get him an offer he can’t refuse-” She stops abruptly as soon as she sees the sparkle in Stevie’s eye and the grin beginning to curl his mouth and she points a finger square at his face. “If you make a Godfather joke right now, Steven, I will…”
“What?” he asks, with a beatific smile. “Arrange to send me to sleep with the fishes?”
“Maybe I fucking will,” she shoots back, but she’s smiling too now, and Carmy is asleep in the other room with only his hair and one fist clutching a pillow visible under the quilt, and the tense fist of Christmas dinner and flying cutlery and a car crashing through the wall begins to let her go. Finally.
The first couple of days pass in a bit of a blur. Michelle and Stevie are still settling back into the routine of work after the holidays and Carmy cooks a lot. Like, for every meal, there is something happening in their kitchen. He approaches it all with a level of intensity that rivals that of someone taking a very important test, and thankfully far less shouting and breaking of glass than his mother’s approach generally involves. Stevie says he feels like a king that first night and Carmy just looks at him all silent and strange-eyed and then Stevie tells him that’s a good thing, buddy, thank you, this all looks really great. And then Carmy smiles and looks down at his plate and the tips of his ears are pink and it’s so easy.
It’s always been… so easy. Making Carmy happy.
Thankfully, the thing that Michelle was the most worried about doesn’t happen. Carmy doesn’t fuss about going back to Chicago. Michelle asks, about four days after he gets there, how it went when he told Donna that he was leaving and where he was going. He shrugs one shoulder and his hands go still on the counter. They’re covered in flour. He’s making a type of pastry that Michelle can’t pronounce and he got some special kind of flour for it - that she also can’t pronounce - at a shop near the building that Michelle didn’t know existed.
“She wasn’t happy,” he says. One of his hands flexes, a twitchy little centimetre of a spasm that tracks a tiny stripe through the flour with his index finger. Carmy looks like he’s going to say something else at first. His mouth is pressed into a line and when he lifts his hands off the counter they’re shaking just a little bit. Then it seems like he’s going to say nothing at all. And then, just when Michelle is about to walk away and leave him to it, he says, “It really hurt her. That I left so soon. It hurt her.”
So she hurt you back, Michelle thinks. Jesus, Aunt DeeDee. She doesn’t say it. She just smiles at him, soft and gentle, and asks, “So are you going to go on the tour of the place?”
“Oh, the restaurant your friend said is looking for someone?”
“Mhm.” Michelle hums her answer and watches his face closely. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking sometimes, and even harder to tell what he’s feeling. There’s no immediate indication that he’s opposed to the idea, at least, so there’s that. “He said I could bring you by tomorrow and they’ll show you around. I’ve got a property showing down near there, I could give you a ride.”
Carmy looks at the flour like there’s some kind of answer in there. Maybe his answer. Then he breathes in and out in a quick little rise-fall of his shoulders and he says, “Okay. Yeah, okay. I’ll go.”
Oh fuck absolutely yes. Stay winning, Michelle Berzatto, you are that bitch.
“Perfect,” she says when she’s sure none of that is actually going to come out of her mouth. “That’s perfect. You’re gonna love it, I know you will.”
And he does. Carmy fucking loves the restaurant. He declines her offer to pick him up and he stays for hours, then he talks nonstop when he starts making dinner as soon as he gets back. It’s not overly loud or quick, but it’s constant, and there’s an unmistakable brightness in his voice. Michelle would like to say that she had expected this, but she didn’t. Or maybe she did, but not quite to this extent. She knew he was restless at not being in a kitchen professionally, that he had come home to Chicago indefinitely with the idea that he could finally go to work with Michael the way he’d always dreamed about.
It wasn’t going to happen. Michelle and Richie had a rare one-on-one conversation about it the morning after Christmas - she had asked him, candidly, if he ever thought Michael would cave, and he had sighed in a way that made him sound frustrated and tired and then taken a long time before answering. No, he’d said, I don’t think Mikey’s gonna change his mind on that one. Before you ask, fuck no I don’t know why. You know what he’s like.
And yeah, no matter how strange and distant things have gotten with them, no matter how far they’ve come from being twin terrors at the park with matching skinned knees and missing front teeth, Michelle knows what Michael is like. It made any small twinge of guilt she had about deliberately luring Carmy away from the one thing he’s always wanted more than anything else flip over into determination. It wasn’t ever going to happen, so she wasn’t taking him away from anything. What she was doing was giving him a chance at something else.
The way even just a tour of the place affects him isn’t what Michelle had anticipated, and it makes her wish she had visited him where he’d worked before this. She and Stevie had always meant to do so eventually but the timing was never right. There was always this thing or that thing or the other thing to take care of and they just never made it. Watching him cook that night and listening to him talk about the setup he had been shown through and the workflow he had observed, Michelle wonders if the restaurant had really been that mindblowingly amazing or if maybe this is just what Carmy was like when in his element.
Maybe the version of Carmy in Michelle’s head is forever frozen the way he had been in high school, before she had moved away and stopped seeing him all the time. When she closes her eyes, she thinks it’s the current version that she pictures, but to be honest he doesn’t look all that different, so it’s hard to tell. The point is that Carmy has always been awkward — awkward, odd, strange, shy, weird, there were any number of ways to describe him.
(Once, Natalie punched a kid in their neighbourhood who wouldn’t stop asking Carmy what was ‘wrong’ with him. She was fourteen and it was the first time she’d been in that much trouble at school. The time Stevie had asked, offhanded and casual, maybe the third time he’d met her family, if Carmy had ever been formally evaluated for anything, Michelle had whipped her head around to look at him with murder in her eyes. There’s nothing fucking wrong with him, don’t be an asshole, she had snapped, and Stevie had blinked at her in the mystified way he still does sometimes and said, I didn’t say there was anything wrong with him, did I? )
At any rate, Carmy has always been awkward and whatever the hell else, and she figured that he probably always was and always would be. Which, whatever, right? Michelle personally thought that was fine and if anyone had a problem with it, well then fuck ‘em. And then she sees this , the easy slope that takes over his shoulders, the way he gestures when he explains a specific dish and his hands are steady and confident, the way his curls fly around all wild when he looks up from what he’s doing — up from the counter, over to her, over to Stevie, back down again, talking the whole time. And she wonders what she had been missing.
When Carmy bends down to adjust the racks in the oven, needing them at a specific height, Michelle makes eye contact with Stevie over the curve of his back. He pulls a face and waggles his eyebrows at her and she allows her smile to grow wide and bright in response. With any luck, he’ll end up working at the place, and then Michelle’s grand plan will well and truly be in motion. That beginning shine will probably wear off — it usually does, no matter the situation or subject matter, even gold loses its glitter after you stare at it for long enough — but Carmy is already talking about some ideas he has after looking over their menu, and it seems like this could be good for him. Really, really good for him.
Carmy fucking loves the restaurant and the people who run the restaurant aren’t fucking idiots so they hire him pretty much immediately. He comes home excited, with pink cheeks and waving hands, saying a bunch of food-person words that sound vaguely French. Michelle doesn’t know what most of it means and to be honest she doesn’t really care - what the words mean isn’t the point. The point is watching Carmy start to really fucking breathe. Sometimes, Stevie will ask what the food-person French words mean, and even though she truly doesn’t give a shit, Michelle loves to watch this happen. She loves to watch Stevie ask and Carmy answer, because Stevie has always been so interested in other people and even just watching him listen makes her almost interested too, and because Carmy talks with a confidence she’d always wished she could see in him when he’s asked about this sort of thing.
Listening to Carmy talk - about the restaurant, about what he was practicing, about the food-people French words - Michelle closes her eyes and feels something relieved and proud flutter in her chest. It really does feel like she’s managed to do something good here. Something right.
And then things are… They’re exactly that. They’re good. They’re right.
It’s not all a walk in the park, obviously. Carmy is head-over-heels for this place he’s started working and it’s clearer by the moment that he really is one of those lucky fuckers who actually managed to stumble upon an honest-to-god calling in life, but a job is a job and he wasn’t in the best of straits when he arrived there and that doesn’t just disappear. There are ‘adjusting to a new workplace jitters’ to be accounted for, and those are the likely culprit of why Michelle sometimes finds him up at weird hours of the night, sitting in the living room and looking out at the city skyline with his arms folded tight over his chest. The work is great and he loves it but he’s worried about his coworkers liking him — this he admits to Stevie one morning while absent-mindedly making omelettes that look like they belong in a fucking magazine spread. He’s never sure how he’s getting on with people, especially at the beginning, can’t get a read on how they’re feeling. Also, it’s good to start getting Carmy out of the condo for a while, because much as it’s been amazing to essentially have a live-in personal chef, it got annoying to have him constantly in the kitchen day in and day out.
Despite the growing pains of a new workplace, especially one as intense as Michelle has heard kitchens at those high-end spots can be, things are playing out better than she ever could have hoped. The thing that makes her feel the most optimistic, though, the most convinced that New York was going to breathe life back into her cousin the same way it had done to her, comes late on a Thursday morning.
They got Carmy a key to the condo printed about a week into his staying there, and he’d gone out on his own before Michelle was up. She has never quite been able to brute-force herself into being a morning person, and she sleeps in whenever she can. In fact, she’s just starting to pull herself into a grown adult professional, staring blankly at the coffee pot as it brews, when the front door unlocks and opens. The walls are well insulated here — thick walls make good neighbours, she’d told Stevie when they were first looking around for somewhere new — and so she doesn’t hear the conversation happening until she looks over and Carmy is shuffling across the threshold, paper bag in one arm while he tucks his keys back into his pocket with his free hand, phone trapped between his shoulder and his cheek.
Michelle opens her mouth to offer to help with the bag, but Carmy breezes right into the kitchen, flashing her a smile as he passes, and the next thing he says makes it clear he’s talking to Natalie, which stops anything she’d been about to say still and airless in her chest. Carmy is on the phone with Natalie. He’s talking about some specialty shop he found that sells some fancy syrup made of flowers, and he’s talking about how he wants to try and get some desert glaze right before his boss puts him on the spot for it.
(Carmy never calls his boss by name. It’s always ‘the Chef said it had to be’ this and ‘well, the Chef wanted us to’ that. Stevie asked her one night if she thought Carmy even knew what the man’s name was himself, and Michelle would put it at a solid fifty-fifty shot whether or not he does. Whatever his name is, the man in charge of the restaurant sounds like an imposing figure, even without having heard much about him at all. He doesn’t come into Carmy’s work anecdotes much — people in general don’t. Michelle gets the sense that this is a very… professional work environment. The work comes before everything. The work is everything. Even so, what little she’s gleaned so far says that he’s a perfectionist with high expectations. So, Stevie said to that observation, a chef, then. )
When the items in the paper bag are removed and lined up, some odd collection of very specific ingredients that Michelle wouldn’t even begin to know what to do with, Carmy doesn’t get right into whatever he has planned for them. He stops by the counter, one hand braced on it, the other holding his phone, and leans back, looking up at the ceiling. He isn’t smiling anymore but he’s not frowning either and he doesn’t have that tense sort of ‘something’s going to go wrong at any moment’ expression he gets when he tries to watch every part of a room at once even when everything is quiet and fine. As he stands there, his free hand taps the countertop in a thoughtless little pattern, and the way his face is relaxed and free of worried creases makes him look young.
“Sure,” Carmy says in response to some question from Natalie. There’s something hinting at amusement in his voice and his eyes flick over to Michelle. The corner of his mouth lifts into a half-smirk that feels like it’s telling her some kind of inside joke. “I’ll say hi to Pete, yeah.”
Fucking Pete, Michelle thinks, rolling her eyes back at him with a snicker. God bless him and his dopey little sweater-vest, ironed-khaki heart.
With the coffee done brewing, Michelle retreats back to her and Stevie’s room, leaving Carmy still on the phone. His voice fades into a comforting buzz and she sets the coffee mug on the bedside table, swiping a coaster over to tuck under it when a voice in her head that could be her mother and could be her aunt chides her about rings on the wood. Then, unable to really explain why, Michelle lays back down. She lays on her back and stares at her ceiling and doesn’t know how to explain or reckon with the sudden difficulty she’s having with getting a full breath in. Michelle breathes in the scent of coffee and digs her fingertips into her bedspread and thinks to herself that the trim at the top of the walls needs dusting.
It’s not until there’s a quiet buzz from her phone, tucked into her sweater pocket, that Michelle realizes the voice from the kitchen has gone quiet. Carmy’s call with Natalie must have ended, which means that she knows with a fair degree of certainty who the message on her own cell is from. Sure enough, there it is.
Sugar says the readout, and then, under that, Thank you. Whatever you said to him to get him to go out there, thank you.
Oddly, it isn’t any easier to breathe after that. Michelle closes her eyes, which have started to sting a little bit, and tries to pretend that her chest doesn’t feel like someone is sitting on it. It’s weird, how feeling something good can sometimes be so much like feeling something bad.