Zero. One hundred percent.
“I’ve been in LA about five years now, and I love it. I came from Boston, can you believe it? It’s freezing there just about all the time. Who are you here with?” She glances up the stairs and squints, as if she can intuit the answer.
“I’m alone,” I tell her.
She smiles wide. “Me too.”
Joseph looks back and forth between us. “Okay, miss?”
“I think so,” I say. “Thank you so much.”
“I should get going,” my mother says. She flips her watch over.
I grope forward. She cannot leave. I cannot let her leave.
“No!” I say. “You can’t go.”
She looks curiously at me, and I recover.
“I mean, we should have lunch.”
Her face relaxes. “I’m going to Da Adolfo today. You can join if you’d like. The boat leaves at one or one-thirty.”
“Sorry, one or one-thirty?”
Carol laughs. “It’s Italy,” she says. “Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s one-thirty, sometimes it’s not at all.” She holds her hands out like a Roman scale. “You just show up and hope for the best!”
She gives Joseph a little bow. “Thank you, truly.” To me: “I’ll meet you at the dock at one, then, yes?”
I nod. “Yes. I’ll be there.”
And then she leans in close to me. I breathe in the heady smell of her. My mother. She kisses me, once on each cheek. “Ciao, Katy.”
It’s when she pulls back that I realize I’m still clutching her arm.
She places her hand over mine. “You’ll be fine,” she says. “Just water and a little prosecco, maybe. Have a coffee and lie down. All the beverages!” Another rule of Carol’s: you can never drink enough water.
She turns, waves, and walks through the doors, disappearing down the steps and into the street below.
When she’s gone, so is Joseph, and Marco comes strolling inside. I rush up to him.
“Marco,” I say. “Did you just see a woman leaving here? She had lemons on her dress. Her hair was brown and long and straight. She’s beautiful. Please tell me you just saw her.”
Marco lifts his hands. “Half the women in Positano have lemons on their dresses,” he says. “And they are all beautiful.” He winks at me.
“What time does the boat for Da Adolfo leave?” I ask him.
Just then the young woman appears behind the desk.
“This is Nika,” Marco says. “She is family. She works here with me. Nika, say hello to Ms. Silver.”
“We met earlier,” I say. “Briefly, at the desk.”
“Of course,” Marco says. “That is right. Nika, she is everywhere.”
“Hi,” I say.
Nika blushes. “Hello,” she says. “Buongiorno.”
“Ms. Silver would like to go to Da Adolfo today.”
“Oh,” I say. “No, I don’t need a reservation. Just wondering what time the boat leaves.”
“One,” Nika says.
“Or one-thirty.” Marco holds his hands up and gently shakes his head back and forth, like, Italy.
Chapter Eight
I get to the dock at 12:45. I do not want to risk anything. I most definitely do not want to risk missing her. I’m now wearing a fringe-trimmed caftan cover-up over a bathing suit. My mother and I bought it on a trip to the Westfield Century City Mall. It was supposed to be for a weekend Eric and I were taking to Palm Springs for the wedding of his colleague. We ended up getting the flu and skipping the trip, and I’ve never worn it before. Today I paired it with waterproof sandals and my trusty, wide-brimmed sun hat.
It occurred to me, while I was getting ready, that perhaps I hit my head harder than I thought. That maybe I was in some kind of fever dream—could my mother really be here? But I saw her before I fell, and the recent memory is too real to be an imagined fiction. I have no other explanation besides the impossible.
The clock sneaks to 1:00, and I look around with anticipation. A family with two young children walks up to the dock, but they’ve booked a private water taxi. As they climb inside, one of the children, a boy probably four years old, starts yelling, “Il fait chaud! J’ai faim!”
One o’clock gives way to 1:15, and I take a seat on the ledge of the dock. The sun overhead is high and beats down hard. I take some sunscreen out of my bag and reapply it on my arms, shoulders, the back of my neck.
One-thirty. I stand. An expectant bubbling in my stomach settles into a knot. No boat, no Mom. I shake my head. Stupid, foolish, that I thought she’d show. Maybe, even, that I thought she was here at all. How could I have let her out of my sight?