Free All This Talk of Love by Christopher Castellani Page A

talked to the parents of the underage kids she knew from high school, and if they hadn’t thought the party was a good idea, they wouldn’t have let their sons come. A few of the moms do show up to check on things and deliver care packages to be taken back to the dorm in the morning.
    Prima’s at the kitchen table with her parents, half out of her chair, lecturing her mother for the hundredth time on why the trip to Italy must happen, there’s no point protesting, when the front door flies open and Ryan appears out of nowhere.
    “Where are those two candyasses?” he shouts. He drops his duffel bag in the foyer, runs down the hall, and hugs Prima so hard he lifts her off the ground.
    “What on earth are you doing here?” she asks. His next break is not until Th anksgiving, and he was home for the confirmation just two weeks earlier.
    “I don’t miss a party.”
    Ryan loves his brothers. And maybe he’s lonely, up in New York, the middle of nowhere, all by himself. He has a thousand friends and a scholarship and girls throwing themselves at him night and day, but he has a sad streak, too. Prima can’t take her eyes off him. Th e blond crew cut, the sandals, the sunglasses—he looks just like Tom twenty years ago. She falls in love with her men every time she sees them.
    “My favorite Italians!” he says to his nonna and nonno. He hugs them, too. Any other kid would rush to his buddies. Prima notices Mary Walsh, mother of Charlie (a boy with no manners at all), watching Ryan’s respectful behavior from the living room with her jealous little mouth.
    “You’re half-Italian, you know,” says his nonno, his arm around Ryan’s shoulder.
    “ Th at’s right,” Ryan says. “ Th e good half.” Th e punch line in a routine they’ve done a thousand times.
    “ Bravo . ”
    “How’d you get so tan?” asks Maddalena.
    “Booth,” he says. His puts hands on his hips, posing. “Buy ten sessions, get one free.”
    She shakes her head. “ Th ose things are poison.”
    “I live in S yr acuse, Nonna. Th e sun’s out, like, four days a year.”
    “You risk your health, you get cancer, then how good will you look? Tell him, Prima.”
    “Mom, relax.” Prima’s no fan of tanning booths, either, but this isn’t the time to get into it.
    Th e cancer talk chases Ryan out of the kitchen. He presses himself up against the sliding glass door Prima just windexed until Zach and Matt notice him from outside. Th en they all four hug, the twins and their younger and older brothers in a huddle. Prima rushes for her camera, but by the time she gets to them, they’ve broken up and Ryan has his arm around some girl.
    Th e torches on the deck aren’t throwing much light, so Prima turns on the floods. Still, as the night comes on and the kids spread out onto the lawn and into various rooms of the house, she has a hard time keeping track of where everybody is. Her mother and father disappear from the kitchen. She goes upstairs to look for Tom, finds him asleep on their bed in his underwear in front of ESPN, and pulls the covers over him in case one of the kids walks in by mistake.
    She sits for a moment beside her husband on the bed, her hand on his shoulder, wishing, briefly, that he were the partying type. She checks herself. He works sixty hours a week. On Saturdays he takes care of the lawn and the cars. On Sundays they go to ten thirty Mass, then to brunch in the same corner booth at Klondike Kate’s, then for a beer at Grotto’s to watch the Phillies or to his brother’s out in Lancaster to play cards. On some Sunday evenings on the way back, Tom puts his hand on her thigh, which means they’ll head straight to the bedroom when they get home. It makes her happy—thrilled, really, and, every time, relieved—to see his hand rise slowly from the steering wheel, to feel its warmth and to hold it there in her lap. No, Tom Buckley is not the partying type, but he and Prima have their own rhythms, and it’s nothing to