I raised my son alone for twenty years, and then I watched him marry the man he loved. I thought the hardest part of that day would be letting him go. Then I heard the groom say five words that made me call 911.
I raised Mateo alone after my husband abandoned us as soon as he found out I was pregnant with a boy.
His name was Diego, and he disappeared before I even had a chance to hate him properly.
One day he was pacing back and forth in our apartment, shouting that he wasn't ready to be a father.
He also took the envelope with money that we kept in the kitchen drawer.
For almost twenty years I knew nothing about him.
Mateo grew up asking me questions that I couldn't answer without breaking both of our hearts.
“Did my dad know what my favorite color is?” he asked me once when I was six years old.
“No, my love,” I told him.
I settled him on my lap.
“No. He left on his own.”
I repeated it many times over the years.
Sometimes I even believed it.
When Mateo told me he was gay when I was fifteen, I won't lie, at first it was difficult for me.
Because I grew up in a house where people whispered about everything I didn't understand, and some of those whispers had stayed in my bones longer than I wanted to admit.
He was standing in my kitchen, thin and trembling, with his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt.
I was chopping onions for the soup.
“What did you break?”
"Nothing."
"So why do you look like you're about to confess to robbing a bank?"
She laughed with a trembling voice and then began to cry.
I dropped the knife.
“Matthew?”
For a horrible second I didn't know what to say.
She noticed. I still hate myself for that.
I crossed the kitchen and hugged him.
“Okay,” I told him.
She cried louder.
“No,” I said, squeezing him. “Besides, I love you. And forgive me if I ever made you afraid to tell me anything.”
He whispered, "Are you disappointed?"
“Only from myself.”
That was the truth.
After that I learned, I listened, and I apologized when I made a mistake.
I messed up, of course, but I loved him more than my confusion, and I accepted him completely.
From the beginning, something about Lucas seemed strange to me.
He was too polite.
She brought flowers the first time she came and asked if she could help set the table. She laughed at Mateo's jokes.
But there was something defensive about him.
“Where did you grow up?” I asked him that first night.
“In several places,” he said.
“Military family?”
"Something like that."
“What does your family do for a living?”
She looked down at the plate for half a second.
“My mom died. My dad… it’s complicated.”
I didn't insist.
Even so, after he left, I told Mateo, “He seems like a good person. But he keeps a lot of things to himself.”
Mateo smiled.
