The Story of Us; The In-Laws, Part 2/4

It was the middle of the day, about a week after we got back to Trenton, when we left Haywood for the Manoso family home in Newark, and I was incredibly nervous. Ranger had told me it would only be his parents today and I thought maybe I was ready. I'd dressed in my new "meet the parents" conservative dress; a dark blue jersey wrap dress, almost knee-length, and low-heeled blue leather shoes. I'd though about adding extra layers of mascara as armor, but I wanted to tone down the makeup for this. I was going for the "good daughter-in-law" look – not that I really had any idea of what a good daughter-in-law looked like. Dickie Orr's mother had hated me even before I'd set fire to the dining room table; of course, I doubt any woman would have been good enough for her baby, slime ball that he was. Angela Morelli hadn't really approved of me either, but I think she'd resigned herself to me but was maybe very relieved when Joe and I had our final blowout. So, anyway, I was going for simple and elegant.

Not sure I had the elegant down, but I could do the simple part, with minimal makeup and my hair loosely tied back. Ranger, of course, had just pulled black out of his side of the closet – black dress pants, black fitted button-up shirt, black jacket – and looked fabulous as always. So easy.

He'd already told me a few things about his family, but I suspected there were things being skipped in his story – fairly big things at that.

Ranger, named Ricardo Carlos after his father, would be named Ricardo Carlos Manoso IV by some naming standards, but his family doesn't use the whole suffix thing, they just alternate which name they use. My Ricardo Carlos is the fourth in the line, so he's called Carlos by the family while his father is called Ricardo, his grandfather was called Carlos and his great-grandfather was called Ricardo. Actually Ranger is almost always called Carlito, which means "little Carlos," and "little man," by his immediate family. I asked him if I should call him "Carlito" and the short "Babe" I got back was a definite no.

I've tried calling him by his given names – Carlos or Ricardo or Ric and none of them work for me. He's my Ranger, all that the name entails, the light and the dark, the public version of him and the shadow version. The decorated honorable soldier and the scary black ops specialist. The bad ass bounty hunter and my own man in black. The man who loves me and all my crazy. He's Ranger to me, the sum of all those things and more, and always will be.

But there was a young man before he was Ranger or even an Army Ranger and that boy was one of the middle children in a large family, six children, all the kids born in very close intervals. He has two older sisters, a younger brother and two younger sisters. If his full immediate Newark family, including spouses, is at a gathering, there are 4 generations present and about 20 adults and children. If the aunts, uncles and cousins are there, add another 35 people and the chaos levels reach epic. Ranger says the Manoso family in Miami is even larger than the Alvarez family – his mother's family – in Newark. There is some distance between his father's family in Miami and his mother's family in Newark, but I don't know why.

The house he was raised in is not any bigger than the Burg home of my parents – I asked him about his childhood bedroom and he told me that he and his younger brother slept on the back screen porch in summer and a sofa pull out in the tiny den in the winter, while all the girls shared the other two bedrooms. His father had worked at the dockyards at the Port and his mother worked nights as a CNA, but between supporting their children and helping various brothers, sisters, parents and cousins, money only stretched so far and a bigger house was not an option.

Being a Manoso kid meant you worked as soon as you were old enough to be set on a task – around the house looking after your younger siblings, helping prepare food, helping keep the house clean and the small yard maintained and around the neighborhood mowing lawns and running errands for shut-in neighbors, doing dishes and cleaning in Uncle Marco and Aunt Luisa's restaurant, helping with stocking and cleaning in the corner bodega run by Grandfather Ernesto, later taken over by his daughter Isabella.

I'd always thought of my upbringing as a Burg kid as a no-frills lower-middle-class existence, but while my father worked at the Post Office, my mother was able to stay home with my sister and me. We both had our own rooms, new clothes on a regular basis, family vacations at the shore in the summer and in general were free to run and play after school and all weekend. My first job, at 16, had been because I wanted the money to spend on things my allowance didn't stretch enough for, not because my family needed the income. In Ranger's family, there were no summer vacations and no such thing as an allowance.

When I asked Ranger how he managed to get in trouble while doing that much work, he grimaced a little and said that he'd always been good at stealth and sneaking out. I could believe that.

"What time do your parents expect us?" I asked, as Ranger drove, silent as always, and I fiddled with the hem of the dress.

"They don't," Ranger said, just the ghost of a smile on his lips.

My mouth gaped open and I stared at him. I finally found my voice. "What? You didn't tell your mother that we're coming?"

"We didn't tell your mother we were coming, either."

"That's different! My parents had already met you!" I wanted to run my hands through my hair, but I'd taken a lot of trouble with it and I'd mess it up. I settled for waving my hands in the air.

His right hand dropped off the steering wheel to still one of my hands. "Babe, it's better this way. Unless you want to have to meet the full family the first time."

"You couldn't just call your mother and say we wanted to meet just them the first time?"

"I could try. Doubt it would work."

I closed my eyes and scrunched up my face. "Okay, this is not helping. I was already nervous and now I'm terrified. Have you ever mentioned me to anyone in your family?"

"They know about you from the Scrog incident. My mother saw you at the hospital."

I blinked. "That's it? So they have no idea that you've even been seeing anyone?"

"Last I was home, I wasn't."

"When was the last time you were here?"

"About 8 months ago." Ranger reached for my hand again. " They're not used to hearing much about my life. You will be a welcome surprise." He smiled at me and I smiled back, and then he ruined it. "That's what I am counting on, anyway."

"Oh, my god, Ranger, they are going to hate me."

"They won't."

My family and I had our problems, I would never deny that, and there were times that I thought maybe I needed to have a nice long break from all of them, but – 8 months since they'd seen him last? "What happened in your family?"

"When I was a kid, I was trouble. Disruptive. My parents were spending all of their time dealing with my shit and there were 5 other kids to think about. The family was stretched for patience, time and money. " He drove for a bit without saying anything else, and I just left him alone to put his thoughts together. "I stole a car, got caught, was sent to juvie and my little brother was trying to follow me into joining a gang, so they did the only thing they could think of – when I was 14, they shipped me off to Abuela Rosa, my father's mother, in Miami."

"That must have hurt, being sent sent away."

He barked out a laugh. "It was a lot like boot camp, but involuntary. Abuela believed in the proverb 'idle hands are the devil's workshop' and she made sure I was kept very busy and heavily supervised, between school and sports and church."

I'd never thought about a teenaged Ranger before, but imagining him as a wild, willful boy was not difficult. "I'm not sure I can see you sitting still in church as a boy or a teenager." A fair amount of my time as a child had been spent on a hard wooden pew, sitting, kneeling and standing as my mother prompted me to do along the service. To me, church had been an obligation; sometimes with some beautiful pageantry but mostly it was being forced to dress up and sit very still indoors for long periods on end, not my favorite thing as a child.

"Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam," he said with a shrug.

"What?" That did not sound like Spanish.

"One of the things you repeat often as an altar boy, whether you believe it or not. 'To God who gives joy to my youth,' " he translated from the Latin. "I was raised in the church and parochial schools, it was a central part of my family's life, both in Newark and Miami. I was even an altar boy and in the children's choir." He glanced at me. "Until my voice broke and I discovered girls."

I laughed then. A young, probably angel-faced Ranger with a high sweet voice in a choir robe. It was definitely a new mental image. "You discovered girls or they discovered you?"

"It was a mutual thing," he said, a slight smile on his face. Ranger humor, not something I heard very often, but he had a very dry, understated wit. I loved the fact that I could make Ranger smile. From the little lip up-twitch that said he was thinking about smiling to the full flashing smile that made other women drop things, Ranger had a beautiful smile and it was usually reserved just for me. The rest of the world generally got the serious blank face.

As he drove, though, the smile left his face. We turned off of the Turnpike and onto Route 81, which took us past Newark/Liberty Airport. The traffic was heavy through here and it had most – but not all – of his attention. I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the downturn of his mouth.

"But, later," he said and his eyes got that grim, distant look that meant he was seeing things in his past, "as a solider, I only saw the hell that I'd been threatened with in church for disobedience. War, slaughter, punishment, never-ending torment. The redemption, the kindness, the light – until I met you, I forgot that ever existed, in or out of church."

I blinked at him. The longer we were together, the more I saw of a side of Ranger that I doubt most people knew even existed. He'd once mentioned the need to work on his karma to me and, at the time, I'd thought it was just a strange little throw-away comment. But it wasn't. He had deeply-held beliefs about the balance between right and wrong and the huge gray area in the middle and he'd spent a lot of his adult life operating in the dark gray and near-black, just this side of "wrong," and he often felt the weight of it.

But now, knowing that, like me, he was the same product of a Catholic upbringing with the huge heaps of guilt that were often used to keep children in line, it made a little more sense to me. Nothing quite like the guilt that a strong Catholic mother or grandmother could pile on. I knew a little about that myself.

"Do you ever go to church now?"

"I have," he said. "Mostly for family weddings or baptisms."

"But sometimes for other reasons?"

"When I first got back, I was- looking for something. Didn't find it then, in the church or out of it." I nodded. This was more of the karma thing. "But now," he said, glancing away from the road to my face, "I found it." He reached for my hand again and brought our joined hands to rest on his thigh as he drove one-handed. His thumb ran over my wedding rings.

For a guy who favored action over words, he could come up with some amazing words when he put his mind to it. The tightness in my chest and the sting at the back of my eyes made me uncomfortable. I wasn't so great with words, either, and sometimes I struggled to tell him what he meant to me.

So I did the usual thing: I changed the subject. "What about Rachel? And Julie? Did they meet your family?"

"My family in Newark never met Rachel. We only married to give them my army benefits and pay – it was just Rachel and her mother and I owed them that much security. There was never a relationship there."

"Didn't your mother want to meet her granddaughter?"

"She did. One of many things my mother has been unhappy with me about. But by the time I was done with my first tour, Ron had already adopted Julie and I'd signed my rights away and Rachel and Ron thought it would just be confusing for Julie to meet them. My mother was furious."

"That seems like it was unfair to you. And to Julie."

He shrugged again. "Rachel and Ron were doing the best they could for Julie and that was what mattered. Then, when I got out of the Army, I was not in a good place. Being around Rachel and Julie or my family, it was just too much: too much noise, too much physical contact, too many assumptions and questions and demands and expectations. I should have waited longer before I went back."

I tightened my fingers around his. "And so you did what you are good at: you withdrew from all of them." I'd seen him do it before, hell, he'd done it to me several times.

He nodded once and drove in silence. He let go of my hand as he turned off the expressway and onto arterial streets, handling the Porsche with his usual skill.

"How is Julie?" I asked.

"After Scrog, Rachel wanted my visits stopped and contact completely cut." His voice was cool and level, as though he was just reciting facts and not saying something that cut him deep. I must have made a noise at that, because the corner of his lip tipped up and he continued, "Julie's therapist convinced Rachel that it would be better for me to have more visitation, not less. I've been flying down twice a month since and we talk on the phone every couple days."

I'd overheard a couple of their conversations – the first time the change in his posture and the softening of his voice as he answered his phone had alerted me that something very unusual was going on. The context of the discussion told me who he was talking to and it almost brought tears to my eyes to hear his gentled voice and soft words to her.

"You said that Julie was one of the many things your mother was unhappy about. There are more?"

"There is a long list that she has to rehash every time we see each other."

Well, maybe that explained the 8 month absence. And today, we were going to see his mother. Would I be yet another thing that he and his mother fought over? I wanted to bang my head on the dash board. Or maybe bang his head on the dash board.

"Maybe," I started, "we should call them first before we stop by. Come back another day."

He turned down a quiet side street and pulled to the curb in front of a small, neat, bungalow-style house with a tiny, well-kept lawn. The bungalow was a pale cream color with deep blue trim and looked immaculately cared-for. There was a row of rose bushes, just budding out, along the walk from the street to the house and then plants in bright pots lined every one of the wide concrete steps up to the house.

"Too late."

tbc

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A/N – yes, I am aware that the Catholic Church approved "common language" for mass in the early 1960s. But the church - actually one of the California missions - my aunt dragged me to (because I was being raised by "heathens") held out for at least one service a day in Latin for quite awhile past that. I'm also aware that "idle hands are the devil's workshop" is not actually in Proverbs, but it is based on something that is.

I thought we were going to be able to meet everyone in one chapter, but apparently not.