Page 101 of Bless This Hot Mess

Alma set down her napkin and leaned in seriously, “In a relationship, someone needs to drive the caboose. Which one of you will do that?”

“Mamma!” Rino looked assaulted. “No one is driving the caboose. A train has an engine, or sometimes it has two engines and usually, but not always, there’s a caboose. Or two.”

Eva took a deep drink of her wine and settled back into her seat with a delighted look on her face, “I’ve seen trains withthreeengines.”

“Three engines? Why?” Mamma stabbed at runaway gnocchi and successfully wrangled them into her mouth.

Leo lined up broken pieces of a baguette in front of his plate for demonstration purposes as he tried to work out the problem as someone fiercely fascinated in physics would do. “Just a guess but maybe for power, or efficiency? Multiple engines could be placed at the front of the train like this…”

“Double, or triple heading?” Eva offered with a smile cleverly hidden behind her wine glass.

“Or you could put two at the rear to push a train up a steep incline. To really push it over the edge when needed,” Leo continued, moving around the broken baguette and setting a salad spoon up against its bowl, pushing the bread bits up the hill from the rear. “Or, or! Even distribute a fewengines throughout the train. You’d get better overall performance that way. If one peters out…”

“Or gets performance anxiety,” Eva offered, chewing thoughtfully on a salami stick.

“Then another engine just takes over to finish the job,” Leo smiled and clapped his hands, having solved the three-engine problem masterfully.

“I rode my bike tonight, I think environmentally sustainable transportation is important to consider whenever we can,” Japheth chimed in. He realized, a little too late, that his comment might land a little flatly with a family that sold petroleum guzzling asphalt eaters. “But if Ihadto choose between riding the engine or the caboose…”

“You don’t have to choose,” Rino flew his hands up protectively in front of Japheth, as if warding off his own family. “Not right here, not right now.”

“What?” Leo shrugged. “It is important. If you have two cabooses, how will the train move? Or two engines? Maybe they pull in different directions. You must know these things before you buy the tickets to the ride.”

Alma clapped her hands, delighted, “Yes! This! I have been saying this for years. People jump into relationships and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, you’re a caboose, too? That’s a surprise.’ Why make it a surprise, why not know?”

Japheth’s face suddenly felt very hot and he wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the realization that all the transportation talk had a lot more to do with him and Rino than he’d originally surmised. “Engines… and… cabooses.” He felt faint.

Alma nodded sagely, “In every relationship there must be thepushand thepull.Sometimes you take turns. But you must discuss these things. You cannot both be very surprised on your wedding night. You may wish to take a test drive. Or a few.”

“We aren’t getting married,Mamma,” Rino said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We are eating gnocchi.”

“I agree, nottonight,” Alma conceded. “I’m just saying, you can’t both wake up one day and say to the other, ‘Oh, I thoughtyouwere driving this train.”

“Are test drives… allowed?” Japheth asked, and decided to heck with it, in for a penny, in for a pound, taking another delicious sip of his wine.

“Some people buy without trying,” Leo nodded, running through a few mental spreadsheets, “but not many.”

“What does the Pope have to say about that?” Japheth asked.

Leo looked at him curiously, unsure what His Holiness would have to say about his dealership.

Alma leaned across the table, plucked one of the baguette train cars from in front of her husband and then picked up her butter knife. She went to work, slathering it with butter before leaning in toward Japheth conspiratorially, “What they say and do in Rome is very different from what’s always right or wrong for us in Greater Napanee. I think about it like this, should a bunch of men in nice dresses half-way around the world tell me which side of my bread should be buttered?”

“Mamma!” Rino whispered in desperation now, having long given up the fight.

“What? I said they had nice dresses,” his mother shrugged.

“Sometimes the trains connect in the middle,” Eva said thoughtfully, picking up a spare fork, “like this.” She clacked the fork tines together, “very modern.”

“That’s a tale as old as time,” Alma gestured indelicately. “Scissoring, we used to call it.”

“Please stop speaking,” Rino said to no one in particular but hoping everyone would take notice.

Japheth, half hysterical, and more than a little tipsy now, found himself saying, “We… haven’t really… discussed… locomotive roles yet. But I’m okay to hop on and hop off whenever convenient. If there’s a commuter rail, I could take that? Just thinking about the environmental impact again.”

“I like this boy. He’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Leo considered him seriously.

“Me, too,” Alma agreed. “We are simply saying, if you want to test drive before you buy, you have our blessing.”