I laugh under my breath. “Among other things. Maybe your sisters should be glancing across the street if they’re trying to fix you up.”
He sighs and lays his spoon down. “I don’t need fixing up.”
“From what I saw of them today, they probably just want to see you happy.”
“I’m happy enough,” he says, but his frown says something different.
“The fact you had to say enough at the end of that sentence tells me you’re probably not, really,” I say, and then I catch myself and wonder where that even came from. Did Priscilla sprinkle a little truth extract in with the vanilla?
He picks up his spoon again and slides it through the gelato, more for distraction than to eat it.
“I know you’ll understand this better than most, Iris. Losing Penny…the world stopped turning. All of my plans, my hopes and dreams, gone, just like that.” He pushes his spoon all the way into the gelato for emphasis and leaves it there. “Bella was the only reason I got out of bed in the morning. I’d lost my wife, but she’d lost her mamma, and I had to step up. God knows we were lucky to have family around us, but when I closed the door at night, it was still just the two of us walking around the edges of this gaping hole in our home. And you can’t live like that forever, can you?” He shakes his head, his expression bleak. “Me and Bells…we found our way through the mess together, and by some miracle we managed to rebuild a solid floor beneath our feet.” He looks up at me. “She’s pretty terrific,” he says.
“I’ll bet,” I say, thinking he is too.
“I’m not lonely,” he says. I don’t know if he’s trying to convince me or himself. “I have Bells, my family, the gelateria. So when I say I’m happy ‘enough,’ what I probably mean is my world is turning again now, and having experienced what it feels like when it stops, that’s something worth protecting. For Bella more than for me. My sisters think romance is the be-all and end-all because they’re lucky and they’re naive. I see it for what it is—fragile and unreliable, likely to blow a hole in your life when you least expect it.”
It’s clear from listening to him that his daughter is the center of his world.
“It sounds like you’re a great dad,” I say. “I grew up with just one parent too, so I know how that ‘you and me against the world’ feeling goes.”
Gio huffs softly. “You and me against the world. Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it.”
As he repeats one of my mother’s favorite phrases on a quiet breath, and he slowly lifts his gaze to meet mine, it feels for the briefest second as if he is talking to me. We look at each other across the table, a raw, vulnerable moment of connection that makes me want to reach across and slide my hands over his.
I don’t though, I’m not brave enough. I bury my spoon in the gelato instead.
“Let’s go back,” I say. “I’ll show you how mighty my tiny gelato machine is.”
I don’t miss his relieved half smile as he pushes his chair back, nor the evil eye from Priscilla as we leave.
8.
“PASS ME THE SPRING ONIONS?” I say, gesturing to the plate on the counter beside Bobby. He frowns, perplexed, and I quickly correct my English to American terminology. “Scallions.”
It’s Saturday night and we’re slammed out front in the restaurant. We only seat eighteen, twenty at a tight push, but table turnover is high and Shen is calling orders through fast enough to make my head spin. She runs the place like a well-oiled machine out there, commanding a handful of student waiting staff to make sure people are fed and moved through with an efficiency Gordon Ramsay would be envious of. It’s not the kind of place people come to linger—we’re a “fill up and go, wipe down the Formica tables in between” kind of place, with last year’s calendar still on the wall, an erratic cuckoo clock, and paper lanterns that have seen better days. There are no plans for change, though, it suits the diners who come here. There are other places for first dates and lingering over coffee.
Thankfully, we don’t have an extensive menu. People come for our noodle specialities, dishes that are the work of minutes as long as the prep is done before we open. I love the high-octane energy of it, the buzz of turning out sizzling bowl after bowl, the all-consuming concentration required to keep up the pace when it’s hectic.
Bobby is “helping” me out tonight as Robin’s still away and our usual commis is sick, which in practical terms means I’m mostly flying solo. It’s not really Bobby’s fault; he loves to eat good food but I don’t think his oven sees any action unless Robin is at the helm. Right now he’s got his paper chef’s cap on squiff and his T-shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders as if he’s put in a twenty-hour shift instead of two hours not-very-hard graft in our tiny kitchen. He’s keen on shouting “Service!” through the hatch at Shen every time he places bowls on the pass, and then spinning back to me and yelling “Three prawn, two duck!” or whatever he considers to be the next order in line. He nipped outside a few minutes ago to take a call and Shen stuck her head through the hatch and ordered me to kill him or else she would.
I glance up at the clock. Almost ten, just half an hour to go before we close up shop and I can collapse on the sofa. I don’t care if it’s lumpy. I just want to watch trash TV and sleep the sleep of the dead.
“I need your gelato more than life right now,” Bobby says, pressing his cheek against the stainless-steel fridge. “It’s hotter than a camel’s hoof in here.”
I open the fridge and he sways with it.
“Here. Cold water.” I press the bottle against his other cheek. “You’re not built for hot kitchens.”
“And yet I hold the unofficial record for longest time in the Russian sauna,” he says. “Go figure.”
I drop a handful of noodles into the sizzling wok. “Chicken, bottom left of other fridge.”
He groans as he peels himself off the door to get it for me. “You’re so bossy when you cook,” he says. “Are you like this at Belotti’s?”
I’ve been going to the gelateria every morning for the last few weeks, spending a couple of hours with Gio, experimenting with ingredients. I’m finding it hard to balance saying enough with not saying too much too soon and causing suspicion. I’m just relieved it’s cold out and demand is low so we have some time—the pressure would really be on if this had happened to them in the height of summer.
“No, because Gio listens to me.”
Bobby peels the lid from the chicken container and holds it out to me. “Bring him over. I want to meet him.”
“Gio? Why?”
“Because for the last nine months you’ve barely left this building, and now you’re in and out more often than the cuckoo in that revolting clock out there.”
The cuckoo in question pings out of the clock on a baggy spring whenever it feels like it, making a weird drunken hiccup-screech that makes nearby diners flinch. We tried taking it down but it left a stain on the wall so we hung it back again rather than have to redecorate. I don’t appreciate the comparison and I turn to glance at Bobby, one hand on my hip, the other tossing noodles. I swear I must do that movement in my sleep.