Startled out of my thoughts by my mother’s sharp rebuke, I look down at the pot of boiling water in front of me. I’m standing at the stove in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in my hand and no idea how long I’ve been off in la-la land, brooding about Lili and the lout.
Long enough to overcook the pasta, evidently.
Leaning on her cane at the stove beside me, my mother crossly pokes me in the arm.
“Look at that soggy mess. Put it down the drain and start over.”
“Sorry, Mamma,” I say, sighing. “I’m preoccupied.”
Her gaze stays on me as I pull on a pair of oven mitts and take the heavy stockpot over to the sink. She watches me as I dump the pasta, refill the pot with hot water, and bring it back to the stove. She continues silently watching as I salt the water and turn up the heat.
This hawkish focus is nothing new. My mother is like one of those creepy paintings in a haunted house whose eyes follow you everywhere, looking right at you no matter where you’re standing.
Or where you try to hide.
“You’re right to be upset,” she says abruptly. “The Irish are despicable. To give one of them such a jewel is…” She curses in Italian, gesturing angrily.
“It’s not that he’s Irish. It’s that he’s a canaglia and a mascalzone with the manners of a barnyard animal. You should’ve seen the way he strutted around, pompous as a peacock.”
A peacock with size sixteen feet.
Shaking off the unwelcome memory, I continue. “I’ve never met anyone so horrid. He barged in here like he was Julius Caesar at the Colosseum, expecting us to shower him with rose petals and virgins.”
Under her breath, my mother says, “Not that he’d find any of those in this house.”
I look at her sharply.
She waves a hand at me like she’s swatting away a fly. “Oh, don’t give your own mamma such an evil glare. It’s not like I’m a ragazza stupida, you know.” She taps her glasses with a finger and waggles her eyebrows. “I see what goes on around here.”
I know she isn’t talking about me, because literally nothing is going on around here where it concerns me.
Unless she found my collection of sex toys and erotica.
No, that can’t be it. She’d already have had a stroke and keeled over dead if she found those.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She smiles. “No? You haven’t seen that pretty boy Lili sneaks into her room at all hours of the day and night?”
I’m scandalized. I simply can’t believe the matriarch of the Caruso crime family would allow her granddaughter to have illicit liaisons in the house, let alone with the son of the pool man.
“You knew about that? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“To who? Your brother? And get the poor boy shot?”
“To me!”
“Why, so you could ruin all her fun by putting an end to it?”
“Yes!”
She clucks. “The piccolina principessa is going to be married to the same idiot for the rest of her life, Reyna. She deserves to live a little first.”
When I only stand there staring at her in disbelief, she says more softly, “It’s one of my great regrets that I didn’t allow the same freedom for you.”
After a moment of profound shock, I say faintly, “Please hold. My brain has melted.”
She turns and makes her way to the kitchen table, hobbling with the help of her cane, then drops into a chair and sighs.
Dressed all in black—as all widows in the family dress, regardless of how long their husbands have been dead—she looks much older than her sixty-five years.
She’s never colored her gray hair and wears it shorn close to her head like a man’s. The style of dress she wears is frumpy and unflattering. She’s not overweight, but refuses to do anything whatsoever to make herself even slightly attractive, including wearing makeup or updating her eyeglasses to a style from this century.
After my father was killed, she simply gave up.
I know it wasn’t from grief. I think it’s that she never wanted another man to notice her again.
Life with my rageaholic Sicilian father was hell for all of us.
Especially after she was diagnosed with MS and he brought his twenty-two-year old mistress to live in the guest cottage so he didn’t have to “fuck a cripple,” as he put it.
Watching my mother hold her head high and grit her teeth through all his cruelty and indiscretions taught me to have the same strength when my own husband turned out to be worse than my father ever was.
So much worse, I never could have imagined it.
Gazing at me fondly, Mamma says, “You’re the best thing I’ve done with my life, stellina. I’m very proud of you.”
I have to turn back to the pot on the stove so she doesn’t see the water welling in my eyes.
My mother giving me a compliment is an event as rare as a UFO sighting.
I murmur a thank-you, staring at the water and willing it to boil so I’ll have something to do other than struggle with this awful feeling in my chest.
Anger is so much easier for me to deal with than tenderness.
Anger gives you armor. Tenderness strips you naked to the bone.
“You would’ve made an excellent mother,” she continues in a thoughtful tone. “It’s a pity you couldn’t have children. Or should I say…made sure you couldn’t.”
When I glance at her, startled all over again, she chuckles.
“I don’t blame you, tesoro. Enzo as a father?” She shudders. “You were smarter than I was. Not that I’m saying I regret my children, mind you. You’re the love of my life.” She thinks for a moment. “Your brother, meh.”
I laugh. “I know you don’t mean that. He’s the firstborn and a boy. It would be a crime punishable by death in Sicily if you didn’t love him the most.”
She shrugs. “Then it’s lucky we’re not in Sicily.”
I scoff. “Oh, Mamma. You’ve been at the wine again.”
“No, but that reminds me,” she says, perking up to look over at the wine cooler next to the refrigerator. “How about a nice pinot noir?”
“Since when do you drink anything but Chianti?”
“Since I started watching this charming young man on YouTube with his own channel all about wine.”
“You’re watching YouTube?”
She nods as if her deciding to get on the internet isn’t as monumental as the moon landing. Up until last year, she’d still been using a rotary phone.
“Pinot is his favorite. He drinks it by the gallon. Let’s have some with the tagliatelle.”
“Wow. Wonders never cease. Okay, Mamma, you’re on.”
I head to the wine fridge, select a bottle, and bring it over to the counter to open it, when a man walks through the kitchen door.
It’s the Irishman.
My heart clenches. My face goes hot. I draw in a sharp breath and freeze.
“Hullo,” he says in a throaty voice, gazing at me.
Past my shock, I manage to say, “You.”
He sends me his signature smirk “Aye. Me.”
He’s holding a wrapped bouquet of white roses. He’s wearing a black suit again. Armani, by the looks of it. His tie and shirt are black, too. On any other man, that much black would make him look like a game show host or an undertaker.