"Are we there yet?"

Ritchie grinned back at Joey and slowed the car, parking on the street in front of his parents' modest home. It wasn't the house he'd grown up in. A few years ago, he and his sisters had finally convinced their parents to move into a nicer section of town. But it didn't matter what house it was – walking through the front door still meant going home. And the neighborhood was a lot like the one he'd grown up in. Before drugs and gangs had driven away the small businesses that once flourished, driven away the working class families who'd taken pride in their neighborhood.

He glanced over at Maria, sitting stiffly beside him. She'd resisted when he first invited them for Thanksgiving dinner with his family, but since her brother had made it clear he didn't want her showing up at the prison with Joey in tow, she'd given in. He'd played the 'Joey card' and he wasn't ashamed to admit it. Besides, it would be good for the kid to soak up some of the loud, crazy comfort his large family dished out on holidays along with the turkey and the sweet potato casserole and way too many pies. But the truth was, he'd wanted her to see where he came from.

The front door burst open and assorted nieces and nephews spilled out onto the porch.

He was out of the car and around the other side before Maria had gotten out, and helped her out with the plate of cookies she'd baked. Cutout cookies, shaped like turkeys, and decorated with colorful icing and sprinkles. A family tradition she'd carried on for Joey and that he'd insisted she bring along today.

"I should have baked a pie," Maria said, looking down at the homemade cookies that Joey had helped decorate.

"Don't be ridiculous," Ritchie said. "They're going to love these."

"I shouldn't have come." She'd gone from being stiff to looking like a bird that wanted to take flight.

"Well, I'm glad you did," he said, and whatever Maria was going to say in response was cut off as his mother hurried down the porch steps, wiping her hands on her apron.

"So these are the two you've been keeping from us," she said. "Hello Joey, welcome." She put her hands on his shoulders, bent down slightly, and kissed him on both cheeks.

"Go on in the house now with my grandbabies," she said, laughing as the younger kids grabbed onto his arm and pulled him along, Ritchie's five-year-old nephew tugging on Joey's pants leg, asking him if he knew how to play Mario Kart.

"You must be Maria," his mother beamed. "Ritchie! Take that plate of food for her so I can say hello."

"It's just some cookies, Mrs. Perez –"

"Please, call me Giana," she said, giving Maria a hug and kissing her on the cheeks as soon as Ritchie took the plate out of Maria's hands. "Or Mama G."

Mama G? It looked like Maria had already passed some kind of unspoken test. His sister Rosalie had been practically engaged to her husband, Eduardo before their mom had invited him to do the same.

She turned to Ritchie, giving him a playful slap to the side of his head before pulling him into her arms and hugging him.

"Why you wait so long to bring Maria and her brother to meet your family?" She turned back to Maria without waiting for an answer.

"Never mind. You come with me, we get to know each other," Ritchie's mom said. Maria looked back over her shoulder with a slightly panicked look as his mom swept her up the steps and into the house as effectively as the assorted nieces and nephews had taken control of Joey.

From the gleam in his mother's eye, she was already making plans about Maria. Ritchie chuckled to himself. He hadn't exactly explained the nature of his relationship with Maria to his mother. Who was he kidding? He didn't exactly understand the nature of his relationship with Maria himself.

But he sure liked the way she looked sitting at his family's table, he thought later as he watched her laugh at a joke his uncle told.

"What's going on with those partners of yours, Ritchie?" his dad asked, as he passed one of the bowls of stuffing around the table for the fourth or fifth time. Half the group was still eating turkey and fixings, while the other half had moved on to dessert. They had already made a serious dent in the pies, and two-thirds of Maria's cookies were gone.

His father had just turned 60 and was still working as a foreman on a construction crew. If you did that kind of manual labor your whole life, Ritchie figured, you didn't need visits to the gym to make up for that fourth helping of turkey and stuffing. His dad's skin was weathered from the years of outdoor work in the Florida sun, but Ritchie imagined he still climbed the scaffolds as confidently as he'd done more than two decade ago when Ritchie used to tag along at construction sites. Back then, all Ritchie had wanted was to put on a hardhat and follow in his father's footsteps, but the old man had pushed him down another path altogether.

"Sam and Camilla are doing the whole family thing," Ritchie said.

"Camilla's sister Olivia made a tofu turkey," Joey said. "They invited Maria and me, but we came here instead," his expression making it clear that he was much happier with the menu Ritchie's mom put on the table. Joey flushed a little and gave a shy smiled when Ritchie's mom reached over and tousled his hair and said she was glad.

Watching the exchange, Ritchie wondered why it hadn't occurred to him before to bring Joey over to his parents' house. Spending a little time weeding Mama G's garden and sitting at the kitchen table drinking cold lemonade and sampling the hot sweet bread and rolls she had baked every Wednesday and Saturday for as long as he could remember might be exactly what the kid needed. It sure was a great memory from his own childhood, and had kept him grounded in the simple things in life.

"So where's Jonnie?" his mom asked, and Ritchie grinned. He'd never get used to her nickname for his partner Jonathon, and he doubted anyone but his mom would have dared to refer to the fifth generation Bostonian with his fancy pedigree as "Jonnie." Not that Jonathon was uptight or anything – he just carried that air of formality that was part of his breeding, from the family estate he'd grown up in to the toney private schools he'd attended. But there was no such thing as formality in Mama G's house.

"Did he go back to Boston for the holiday?" his mom persisted. It was probably the only excuse she would accept for his nonappearance at the Perez family holiday table.

"He's got a hot date," Ritchie said, and grinned as he got the exact reaction he was looking for. "Going to some fancy restaurant for dinner."

"A hot date!" His mom shook her head then brandished her fork in the air. "Thanksgiving is not the time for a hot date. Thanksgiving is the time for family. Next time you tell Jonnie to bring this 'hot date' here so we can meet her."

"Okay, Mama," Ritchie said. "But you know Jonathon. Chances are by next week the romance will be over."

"That boy needs to settle down and find a good woman. A man needs a good woman," she said, and looked over at Maria with a gleam in her eye. "A woman who knows how important family is."

Here it comes, Ritchie thought.

"Look at Maria, here," his mom continued. "It's a good woman who takes care of her little brother like you do." She turned back to Ritchie. "And beautiful too. A woman like Maria is a treasure, and the right man would be a fool to let her get away."

"And don't forget she bakes really good cookies," Ritchie's brother-in-law chimed in from the other end of the table. "That's important."

"So, Mama, you want me to fix Maria up with Jonathon?" Ritchie asked innocently, then grinned when Maria almost choked on a bite of pie.

"You think I can't reach across the table and smack you?"his mom said.

"Mama," Ritchie said, laughing and feigning to the side to avoid an imaginary blow.

"You always did have a smart mouth," she said, but laugh lines around her eyes belied the stern expression she was trying to put on.

"Behave yourself," she said. "And pass me that plate of cookies Maria made."

* * *

Fix her up with Jonathon? Sure, Maria knew Ritchie was just teasing his mom for being so obvious about her opinion that Maria was a good match for Ritchie, but it made her wonder just exactly what his mother – his whole family, for that matter – thought her relationship with Ritchie was. Did they think it was strange that she and Joey were living in his house with him? Or did they just assume that she and Ritchie were sleeping together?

When she'd asked Ritchie about it, he'd given her a look and said,"Stop worrying about it, I don't discuss my sex life with my mother."  So she still didn't know exactly what he had told his family.

Anyway, whatever Ritchie had said about them, his family had certainly been welcoming. Ritchie's nieces and nephews seemed thrilled to have an older boy with Joey's gamer skills in the house, and Joey was soaking up all the attention. And Mama G was fussing over him like the grandmother he'd never had.

It made her happy, but it also made her yearn for a family of her own. She imagined how different their lives would have been if her stepfather hadn't died. If her mother hadn't gotten cancer. If Tito hadn't started spending time with all the wrong people.

She looked over at Joey, laughing as he shoveled a fork full of apple pie into his mouth with one hand while surreptitiously slipping a piece of turkey under the table in his other hand to the stocky bulldog lying quietly by his feet. If sitting here, surrounded by someone else's family, was a little bittersweet for her, well, it was worth it to see Joey so unreservedly happy.

https://youtu.be/DQYNM6SjD_o

When Ritchie's sister Rosalie asked her if she was doing any Black Friday shopping, she saw Joey sneaking glances at her. His face broke into a grin when she said, "I might be going by a certain electronics store to do a little early Christmas shopping." She hoped Ritchie's appreciation for loud video games extended to having the latest edition of Rock Band hooked into the Xbox in his family room. What she'd do when they moved back into her small apartment she wasn't sure, but at least for the next few months Joey could rock out to his heart's content.

"Are you and Joey spending Christmas here in Miami, Maria?" Rosalie asked as she deftly moved the saltshaker out of the reach of the toddler perched on her lap just before his chubby fist closed around it.

"Yes, do you have any family here?" Mama G asked.

None that she'd be spending the holiday with, other than Joey. All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to answer. She straightened her shoulders. There was nothing wrong with a small, quiet Christmas. Just her and Joey, like always.

"No, I – "

Ritchie broke in before she could answer. "Maria, Joey, and I are heading over to the house in Bimini for the holidays," Ritchie said.

Ritchie had a house in Bimini? She knew she was staring at him with an expression of complete shock on her face. Because going to Bimini for Christmas was news to her.

"Cool!" Joey said. "Where's Bimini?"

"It's in the Bahamas," Maria said.

"Cool! I've never been out of the country. I can't wait to tell the guys at school."

"Ritchie, I don't know. Joey doesn't even have a passport."

"Come on, Sis, you're not leaving me at home!"

"No, of course not. I just don't think – "

"Relax," Ritchie said, cutting her off again. "Since he's under sixteen, he doesn't need a passport for Bimini. You have one, right?"

"Yes." She hadn't been out of the country since her trip to Italy to study art in what now seemed like another lifetime ago, but her passport was still valid.

The bigger issue was why Ritchie would announce plans for the holidays that he hadn't even discussed with her? Mama G was beaming her approval, as if this confirmed her suspicions that there was more to their relationship than Ritchie just taking her little brother under his wing.

Ritchie leaned over and whispered in her ear, "I'll explain later." But she wished he'd thought about explaining before blurting his plans out in front of everyone. Now, Joey was all excited and it would look strange to his whole family if they didn't go, but Maria wasn't at all sure that spending Christmas with Ritchie in some tropical paradise was a good idea. 

Author's Note:

What do YOU think about about Maria and Joey spending Christmas with Ritchie in some tropical paradise?  Good idea?  Or looking for trouble?

Music:  Miranda Lambert - The House That Built Me

This song made me think of how Maria must be feeling when she sees Ritchie's family all together, and can't help but think how different her life would be if her step-father hadn't died, if her mother was still alive, if Tito had never gone to prison . . .  Do you think being with  Ritchie's family for the holiday makes her happy or sad?