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“Dimitri’s going to Brazil,” Nica says, sliding into the seat across from Leon. He’s halfway through his coffee, looking at his phone—looking at his calendar, probably—and he does not seem surprised at the fact that she’s ten minutes late.
“Is he, now.”
“Yeah. Yeah, and I think he’s actually going,” Nica tells him. “Leon, get off your damn phone.”
He turns it off with a click. She winces at the noise and thinks for a moment about reprimanding him for not having it silenced, but she knows he’ll delve into notifications are pointless if they don’t actually notify me of things , or something, and that’s a battle she doesn’t feel like losing today.
“Are you going to get anything to eat?”
“What, now? Leon, it’s eleven in the morning and I have lunch plans at one.” Nica waves down the closest waiter. “I’ll take a small cappuccino with soy milk, please.” Turning back to Leon, she says, “Honestly, I’m impressed that I’m up this early on a weekend.”
“Early. Eleven in the… Anyway. What’s this about Dimitri going to Brazil? That’s a pretty big place.”
Nica gives him a look. One of those exasperated sister looks she’s spent years perfecting. One that says sometimes I wish I wasn’t one of the few people who understood your very niche and very annoying brand of humor . Or, she hopes that’s what it says. Sometimes she mixes that look up with her I’m very fond of you but trying hard to cover it look, and Leon can tell the difference better than anyone else she’s ever met. Leon’s the only one who can tell the difference, actually.
“Yeah, well. Dimitri’s a pretty big personality. He could fill it.”
“He could,” Leon says, and there’s a but coming. Instead of continuing, though, he looks at Nica expectantly.
She puts a hand to her chest and raises an eyebrow. “What. What?”
“But,” Leon says, and Nica feels in her chest the zing of vindication that comes with being right, “he won’t. He’s not going to go.”
“You don’t know that,” Nica frowns. Leon’s always passing some judgment or another on her or Dimitri. And, sure, he’s typically right, but it doesn’t make it any less rude.
“He isn’t.”
“I really think he is,” she insists, not because she believes it particularly strongly, but because it’s her natural instinct to argue with Leon. There’s something about being a younger sibling that flips a switch in her brain that she can’t turn off, even though she’s a full-grown woman.
“Mm,” Leon says passively. She knows it’s just because he doesn’t want to engage with her on a fight that she’s not going to back down from, no matter how wrong it is, but it’s easy enough to lie to herself and pretend it’s a victory.
“Well,” Nica continues. “He’s got this whole itinerary planned, see? He’s hitting a bunch of major cities, and then obviously going to a few lesser-visited places. Pretty swaths of nature and all that. Wants to get lost. Wooo . He told me everything. Invited me to come with.”
“If he’s not going, you sure as hell aren’t either,” Leon tells her, contemplating the dark swirl his coffee makes as he spins his spoon around.
“I might,” Nica says loftily. “You never know.”
Leon changes the topic quickly, which Nica is thankful for, because with each passing day she wants to go less, but she doesn’t yet know how to break it to Dimitri that, once again, she’s going to be backing out at the last second. “That aside, how have things been with you?”
“I mean, you saw me at the Cafe.”
Leon frowns into his coffee. He looks up, and there’s some steam covering his glasses, but Nica still knows what his eyes look like when he says, “Yes, but I didn’t really see you .”
She waves a hand as if she’s got no idea what he’s talking about. “Aw, well. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing the same sort of monologue from me.”
“Not really,” he says. “You’re a good storyteller. Besides, I wouldn’t keep coming if I didn’t like your monologues.”
And, well, Nica knows that’s a lie, because Leon is just too damn nice. Liars are always nice. She’s decent at being nice herself, when she has to be, though honestly she’s typically unobtrusive enough in the lives of others to not have to worry about being much of anything at all.
But Leon’s a liar. Leon’s a fantastic brother, would be a fantastic friend, probably, if she wanted to be that level of close with him. She’s talked to Michael, though; she knows Leon’s some kind of white knight for him, which seems a bit ridiculous, because he’s just Leon, but then again, she also kind of gets it. Leon has this fantastic ability to make everyone feel so wanted, so worthy, such a necessary part of everyone’s life.
So he’s a liar. Because Nica might not have ever attended a college physics class, but she sure as hell knows the world would keep spinning without her on it. Or him. Or anyone else. It’s not as if any of them are a big enough mass to affect those cosmic gravitational bonds that keep the earth on its elliptical orbit.
Still, he’s a nice liar, and a good one. She can almost believe him. “Okay,” she says. “Then I’m glad you liked the one from two days ago.”
He nods. “I did. Quite a lot. That’s not what this is about, though. Outside of Dimitri, outside of your monologues, how is everything going?”
She points a tiny spoon at him, waggling it accusatorily. “Is this your way of asking me if I’ve got a boyfriend yet? You could be a bit slicker.”
“Nica,” Leon says, raising an eyebrow, “if I wanted to know if you had a boyfriend, I would just ask you if you had a boyfriend.”
“Oh,” Nica says, and then, “well, I don’t have a boyfriend, so. I guess I’m a bit—”
“—married to your work?” Leon finishes, and it’s scary how he manages to guess what he’s going to say before she’s said it. Is she really that boringly predictable? “That colloquialism would make a bit more sense had I asked if you have a husband.”
She’s pretty sure he’s being funny. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Michael seems to know most of the time, and so does Dimitri, but neither of them are here, so it’s just Nica, and she’s kicking herself for not knowing her own brother as well as she should.
“Don’t have that either,” Nica tells him, and it’s weirdly apologetic, but she’s not sorry about that, because she’s got no reason to be sorry about that, but sometimes she can hear her mother’s voice in her head telling her that she’s almost thirty, Nicoletta, isn’t it about time you made a family , and, well, if Nica isn’t close enough with the family she already has, if she’s too afraid to trust in Dimitri and confide in Leon, how in the hell would she be ready to make another one?
“Then how’s work?”
“Good,” Nica says. She plays with the napkin in front of her. “It’s good, it’s good. I mean. Bobbin winders. So it’s as good as bobbin winders get.”
“Pretty good, then,” Leon sort of half-laughs, and Nica’s pretty sure he wants to say more, but he gets cut off by the waitress depositing her coffee in front of her.
“Thanks,” Nica says, and takes a sip. She winces.
“Too hot?” Leon asks.
“Too hot,” Nica admits. “You remember when I first started drinking coffee?”
Leon really laughs at that one, short and bright, and a warmth settles in Nica’s chest that she knows isn’t coming from the drink. “Oh, I do. You wouldn’t talk to me for a week afterward. How could I forget?”
She lets her jaw drop, mock-aghast. “You didn’t warn me that coffee is terrible , Leon! I was twelve and I saw you drinking it and I thought oh, look, my brother’s got himself a drink, I’ll have some of it , and personally I think that is a very rational thing for a twelve-year-old to think.”
“You can’t blame me for not stopping you if you stole a sip while my back was turned! What could I have done?”
“Warned me that coffee is terrible!” Nica repeats. “You drank it, and– and Dad drank it, and so did Mom, so excuse me for assuming it would be fine.”
“You’re drinking it now,” Leon says, gesturing at her cappuccino.
“I mean, you gotta adjust quickly.” Nica talks as if it’s obvious. “With a coffee shop on every damn corner? What else is there to do?”
“I’m… not entirely positive I would qualify Dunkin’ Donuts as a ‘coffee shop’,” Leon says, and Nica can hear the punctuation in his voice, the apostrophe and the air quotes.
“It is. It sells coffee.”
“It’s a donut shop first, though.”
“Yeah, but Google Maps qualifies it as a coffee shop.”
“And Google Maps is infallible?” Leon questions.
“Hey, says the guy who would sync his brain with his G-Cal if he could.”
“There’s a difference between calendars and maps,” Leon explains, and he’s got that spark in his voice that he gets when he’s about to start droning about a topic that Nica, quite frankly, does not care about, so she steels herself for the oncoming verbal train that she’s sure will leave her bloodied on the tracks.
“Enlighten me,” she says, trying to be as sarcastic as humanly possible, but Leon either doesn’t pick up on it or doesn’t care, because he barrels onward.
“I get out of the calendar what I put in,” Leon says. “It’s the most literal interpretation of that adage: you get out what you put in. And it’s true. A calendar is not its own entity; the calendar is an extension of myself. The Maps app, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. You use that when you aren’t sure of things and need something that is entirely not you to tell you where to go. You use a calendar to set in stone your own intentions. So a calendar is only as fallible as I am. With Maps it’s out of my hands, though.”
“Right,” Nica laughs. “Man, I can’t believe the same household produced you and Dimitri.”
“ And you,” Leon is quick to add. “It produced you, too.”
Nica goes back to her coffee, covering up her expression with a sip. Sometimes she forgets they’re a family.
Setting down her cup with a light tink , Nica asks, “So why’d you set up this coffee date in the first place?”
Leon readjusts his glasses. “Because I don’t check in on you as much as I should.”
She scoffs. “I mean, you see me often enough doing my monologues, don’t you? Besides. I’m twenty-eight. I’ve grown up a fair bit since we were kids. As much as I love you, and as much as I appreciate it, I don’t need your big brothering.”
“Mmm,” he says noncommittally. “So, back to bobbin winders…?”
“It’s nothing,” Nica waves him off. “Same old, same old, you know? Make some money, do my monologues, entertain Dimitri’s insane travel plots for as long as he stays glued to them. How’re you?”
“Making some money, listening to your monologues, entertaining Dimitri’s plans for travels for longer than you are,” Leon responds.
“Unfair.”
“Accurate,” he corrects. “Nica, if he keeps asking you to go—”
“He doesn’t mean it,” she laughs, rolling her eyes. “Besides, even if he did, he only actually ends up going half the time, and half of those times he doesn’t stay gone more than a month, and all of those times he ends right back where he started. I can’t afford to take off of work for an unspecified amount of time to go who-knows-where to do who-knows-what with my baby brother, Leon.”
Leon takes a slow sip of his coffee. It must be somewhat cold by this point, considering Nica was late and he’d been drinking it since before she arrived. “You don’t need to lead him on about it, though. Besides, I think you do want to go.”
Nica scoffs. “And, what,” she blusters, “I pussy out at the last second?”
“I mean, I’d say it in a less crass and probably kinder way, and also you said it, not me, but…”
“Oh, come on , Leon,” Nica says, fighting to keep her volume down. “It’s totally unfair to call me the coward when Dimitri’s the one who refuses to lock himself down in a steady job, can’t hold a relationship more than a few months at best, runs away from—”
“He tries, though,” Leon interjects. “Nica, obviously romance isn’t the end-all-be-all of a person’s life—goodness knows it’s certainly not the end-all of mine—but, really, when
was
the last time you had a boyfriend?”
“I,” Nica starts, and then she stops. She takes a long, long swig of her cappuccino. This is an entirely unfair and targeted question, because Leon knows Nica’s shit at managing her time in the same way he does, knows that Nica’s busy at work and busy at play and spends her free time with herself or her friends, knows what her answer is before she even says it. But then again, he’s always been like that.
Leon doesn’t say anything. He waits for Nica to continue.
“A few years ago,” she admits.
“And when was the last time you left Boston?”
“Okay,” Nica says, pointing a finger, accusatory, at Leon’s face. “Okay, that one’s not fair, because you never leave the greater Boston area either.”
“I have no reason or desire to,” Leon says simply, shrugging.
“Yeah, and neither do I.”
“That’s not true,” Leon says. “You’re younger than me—”
“—by, like, two years, Leon, Jesus—”
“—and you’ve got the type of social network that should, for all intents and purposes, want to travel, should it not?”
“Stop psychoanalyzing me,” Nica tells him. “You’re not a therapist.”
“No, but I’m your eldest brother, and sometimes I have to take on such responsibilities.” There’s a glint in Leon’s eye when he says that—of humor, of love—and Nica feels, for a moment, so deeply ashamed.
She doesn’t like that he feels that he has to take care of her when she’s nearly thirty. She’s no Michael Tate; she can handle herself on her own, thank you very much, no Leon Stamatis Patented Parenting needed, none at all. Which, okay, is not that fair to Michael, who is a lovely man and a great friend to Leon, albeit kind of dorky and boring, but still. Nica’s a big, big girl.
“You really don’t,” she tells him. “I’m– Leon, I’m fine. I appreciate that you come to my performances, and I appreciate that you want to have these meetups with me, but I can handle life on my own.”
“I know you can,” Leon says, and he says it so quickly and so honestly that it makes Nica’s heart hurt. “That doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes need a support system. We all do.”
There’s truth to those words, but it’s a truth that feels like weakness. Who the hell is Leon ’s support system? Who does Leon go to for help? Not Nica, certainly; she’s apparently enough of a headcase that Leon feels the need to do the adult version of installing a baby monitor in her room. Not Dimitri; if that boy was advertised a net made for catching people on their downward fall, Nica would sue whomever promoted him. And probably not Michael; Nica doesn’t really… well, she doesn’t really understand the weird intricacies of his and Leon’s friendship, but she doubts Michael’s holding together Leon’s sanity.
It’s, like, possible that Leon actually goes to a therapist, but that seems way too personal a question to ask her the man she spent her childhood growing up alongside, so she keeps her mouth shut.
And either way, Leon doesn’t have Nica checking in on him, making sure he’s eating healthy or going on dates or enjoying his work or whatever the hell else he’s doing to mother her. Leon’s stronger than that. Leon’s not like her.
“Well,” Nica says calmly, “thank you very much, but I really am okay.”
“Okay,” Leon says, holding up his hands in a very I’ll-let-this-drop way, which infuriates Nica to no avail, but she really doesn’t want to keep talking about this, so she doesn’t fight him on it.
“I have something to get to,” Nica says, which is a total lie, because she doesn’t actually have to get moving until about 12:30, and it’s currently not even noon, and she’s sure Leon can see right through her, but she doesn’t care. The cafe feels hot, small. She has to get a breath of fresh of air and hopefully not spend any more time thinking about their conversation than is absolutely humanly necessary.
“Okay,” Leon says again. “I’ll pick up the tab.”
“You really don’t need t—”
“Consider it another older brother treat, will you? It’s one coffee. You can cover it next time.”
And that means that there will be a next time, which Nica feels conflicted on at this second, even though she knows she’ll agree to it in the future. Also, Leon is lying, because he always insists on paying for their coffees, and Nica always relents, but she doesn’t call him out on it.
“Thanks,” she says, getting up and out of her seat. “You’re– Leon, you’re a good brother.”
“I’m just exhibiting basic human decency, Nica,” Leon says, already halfway to opening up his calendar.
“That’s… yeah. Thanks,” she repeats, because if Leon’s impromptu therapy sessions and genuine inquiries about her life and covering the fucking tab on their fucking coffees is basic human decency, Nica’s a bona fide monster.
“I’ll see you soon,” Leon calls after her, and she gives him a little wave as she leaves.
It’s brisk outside. Not cold, but brisk, and Nica needs to clear her head, so she decides she’ll take a bit of a walk instead of getting directly on the train. She’s off work today, and she’s meeting a friend at one for lunch, but she’s got about an hour to kill before then.
Her sneakers clip a steady pace down the sidewalk, Leon’s words reverberating through her head.
So, okay, sure, she’s thinking about this. Alright.
Nica isn’t a coward. She’s no Leon, not as stalwart and unyielding as him, and she never will be, and she knows that part of that is he’s always going to be her big brother and she’s always going to be his baby sister, but it still pisses her the hell off for reasons she has trouble articulating.
But Nica’s not a damn coward, not the way Dimitri is. She’s not a mess like him, either. He’s got a shit memory, and he’s missed her birthday quite a few times, and he really can’t keep anything together for more than a few months before he gets bored as hell. Sometimes she wonders how he even finances his absurd travels, but knowing Dimitri, he probably just walks up to the gates of an airport and asks sweetly for them to let him in, and they do.
Dimitri really needs to grow up, Nica thinks.
He’s going to Brazil, or so he says. He wants her to come with, maybe, or so he lies; Nica’s not really positive why someone would want her to traipse around the globe with them, and as much as she loves Dimitri, she’s positive she might literally eat his head off by the fourth day of one-on-one with him, and she’s pretty sure the feeling is mutual.
Siblings are… complicated. Nica wants to punch Leon’s teeth in for how much he tends to treat her like she’s three, but also she knows that without him she’d be a bit of a mess, and Leon’s handling enough Michael Tate’s as is right now. Nica– shit, Nica loves her brothers something fierce, loves Leon more than she loves most anyone else in the world, but sometimes she doesn’t particularly like them.
And she’s fine, really. She says that out loud to herself— I’m fine, really —and thinks that maybe if she repeats it enough times, maybe if she tries her hardest to convince herself that it’s the truth, she’ll stop feeling so conflicted about if she should take Dimitri up on his offer or not. Maybe she’ll stop being– well, fuck, being a coward. Maybe, for once, she’ll follow Dimitri, and take a plunge worth taking.