A Winter in New York(6)
Pulling my phone out, I check the time. A little after nine. I can see Belotti’s coming up on the right and drag my feet, unexpectedly nervous now I’m near. It’s not as though anyone is going to recognize me. I bear a startling resemblance to my mother, but it’s been more than thirty years since she would have been here. I pause and step to the side, imagining her making her way along this exact same sidewalk in the mid-eighties. What would she have had on her feet, I wonder, gazing down at my own apple-green Converse? Nothing, probably, if she could have gotten away with it. She’d have been much younger than I am now, eighteen or nineteen at most, shiny-eyed and full of ambition. My chest constricts as I think of her, even more so when I think about the fact that she isn’t here anymore.
For a while after she died, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a world without her in it. I still can’t, not fully. My mother was always brimming full of bright, wonderful life, a human rainbow. Watching cancer systematically strip her of her colors was profoundly difficult, a dimmer switch turning in the wrong direction no matter what the doctors did to try to slow it down. I’ve never felt more hopeless than in those final days sitting at her bedside, desperate to keep her with me for one more conversation, one more reassuring clasp of my hand, one more smile. She insisted on staying in her flat, surrounded by her belongings and the memories that accompanied them, rather than going into hospital. At the exact moment she died, the large woven dreamcatcher hanging above her old cast-iron bedstead began to slowly twirl. Some might have said it caught on a wind from the cracked-open window, but I am my mother’s daughter and I prefer to think that she blew on it just for me, to let me know she was safely on her way, and that it was time for me to be on mine too.
What would she make of my doing this, going to this gelateria that she seems to have intentionally kept me unaware of? Why would one of the family members give her their recipe? I’ve no intention of revealing her secret, of course, but I yearn to understand how the pieces of her life then intersect with my life now, to press a conch shell to my ear and catch the echo of her across time.
Belotti’s looks much the same as it did last night: no queue, no sign of being open. I step inside the sheltered doorway and study the freehand glass painting up close, noticing how fresh the colors are, how carefully cared for it is for an aged piece of art. I know from looking at the gelateria’s website that they’ve embraced the design as a central part of their unique business fingerprint, recreating it on their aprons, menus, and cups. I’m lost in thought as I examine it, so much so that I don’t notice the movement inside until the door opens, making me jump.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” the guy says as I step sharply back, startled.
I summon a smile. “It was my own fault, standing too close to the door. I was just looking at the artwork.”
He glances at it too, and then at me. For a moment I get the same déjà-vu feeling as when I saw the door, as if I know him already. Which is crazy, of course, because I don’t, and he doesn’t look especially like the guy in my mother’s photo, so that can’t be it either.
“Are you open yet?” I glance past him into the empty shop.
“Not exactly,” he says. “I’m just firing up the coffee machine, but there’s no gelato.”
I could leave now—the gelato is why I came, after all, but coffee and a chance to step inside is better than leaving altogether if I want to know what this place was to my mother.
“Coffee sounds good,” I say, and he lifts his shoulders and moves aside to let me pass.
“You’re early for the festival,” he says, heading behind the counter.
“Oh, I know. I was just here yesterday, actually.”
He gestures for me to take one of the oxblood leather bar seats at the counter as he turns his back to kickstart the coffee machine into life. I watch him fill the bean hopper, observing the easy confidence of his moves as he sets two cups on the counter and adds milk to the foamer. I’m a coffee junkie, just the sounds and smells are enough to relax my shoulders from around my ears. I unwind my scarf and place it on the swivel chair beside mine, taking in the old-school mahogany and brass atmosphere of the place and the welcome glow of the multicolored Tiffany-style glass lampshades. There’s a small upright piano in the far corner and family photographs fill the walls, generations of Belotti men and women standing behind this same counter. The place has barely changed over the years, which is, of course, all part of its charm. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and all that.
“So what brings you back again so soon?”
I pause as he places a simple white cup and saucer in front of me along with a jug of hot foamed milk and a bowl of sugar cubes. His own coffee is black; I appreciate that he’s given me the option. I stir in a little milk, using the distraction to decide how to answer the question.
“Coffee at Belotti’s?” I say after a beat, throwing in a smile and feeling stupid, but it’s enough of an answer to suffice.
“About all we’re good for at the moment,” he says, sighing into his coffee cup.
I look at him properly then and notice the dark circles beneath his eyes, the furrow between his eyebrows. Something is clearly troubling him.
“Will you be open later, with your gelato? I might call back. My friend said I really need to try it.”