The child is frankly adorable, round-limbed and pink-cheeked, and I’m thrown completely off guard when he holds his arms out to me.
“He’s a total ladies’ man,” Maria says, passing him over without a second thought. I feel a moment of pure panic—I don’t have any practice with small children. No nieces or nephews, no friends asking me to be a godparent or babysit. I do my best to look as if I know what I’m doing with Leo, balancing him on my hip as Maria did, my arms around his small, robust body as he leans back to get a good look at me. I smile when he grins, showing me the two milk teeth that have just broken through his bottom gum. I’m caught unaware by the unexpected pleasure holding this child brings me, as if an age-old instinct awakens at the weight of an infant in my arms. I laugh as Leo clutches a great handful of my hair, and when I look up, Gio is leaning against the door frame watching me. He holds my gaze until I look away, flustered, and Bella appears behind him and bounces over to me, taking the baby as she showers him with kisses and shoots me a small smile.
“I hear you aced your piano test,” I say.
“Concert pianist in the making,” Maria says, her arm around her granddaughter’s shoulders.
“Iris helped me,” Bella says, bending to place the wriggling baby down. He shoots off toward the sofas on all fours with impressive speed, and a small, shaggy dog ambles up behind him. No one bats an eyelid as the dog sniffs the baby’s foot, at which Leo scoots himself around until he’s nose to nose with the pup.
“Bruno, poor old boy,” Maria murmurs, as one of Gio’s sisters leans over the arm of the sofa to fuss the dog’s ears before scooping Leo up.
I stand among the Belottis as they chat and laugh and move around me, three loving generations, and I feel…I don’t know, warmed? I always tend to feel a bit like a kid standing outside with my face pressed to the window among other people’s families. My mother made sure my childhood was busy and I knew I was loved, but there was no escaping the fact that it was just the two of us. Losing anyone is devastating, but there must be some comfort to be drawn from shared memories and experiences with other people. I don’t have that. No one else remembers my childhood, and if and when anything happens to me, no one will be able to share my mother’s stories.
“Drink?” Gio says, coming to stand beside me.
I realize that this is the first time I’ve seen him out of the black-and-whites he always wears at the gelateria. His dark shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, and there’s a grown-up spice to his cologne that makes me think of smoky woodland walks and late-night bourbon. I glance at other people’s glasses, anxious to fit in.
“Wine would be good?” I say.
Before he can move, Sophia arrives at my other side and hands me a glass of red.
“Mamma has us well trained. You’ll never be here more than five minutes without a drink in your hand,” she says.
“Just wait until you leave,” Gio says. “She’ll insist you take half the contents of her fridge with you.”
Maria claps her hands on the other side of the room, a glitter of jewels and a clatter of bangles.
“Now that everyone has arrived, let’s eat!” she says, and her family get to their feet and follow her into the dining room. Gio smiles and places a light hand on the small of my back.
“After you.”
I find myself seated between Gio and Sophia around a long, beautifully set table, and although it looks formal, the people around it make it anything but. Gio’s sisters are a force to be reckoned with when they’re together, each amplifying the other, and they all take delight in winding Gio up. You’d never guess he wasn’t their biological brother. Partners and children make the numbers up to sixteen, plus me—I know because I do a discreet head count. I can’t even fathom what it must be like to be a Belotti, to spend your good times and your bad ones inside a family like this. Is it claustrophobic? The noise around the table never lulls, multiple conversations overlaid with old family jokes and traditions, laughter and shouting from the kids. Maria often slips into fast Italian, the others too, occasionally. It’s passionate and lyrical to my ear, their speech punctuated with hand gestures, whole arm gestures. They speak with their bodies as much as their tongues, Gio included—he’s more animated tonight than I’ve ever seen. It’s life, but not as I know it. I wonder what it was like around this table ten years ago, and twenty years ago, how the faces and fashions have matured but the people have stayed the same. I should think the room has stayed the same too: leather-spined books filling the cabinets that line one wall; another fireplace, this time filled with fresh flowers. A slender chandelier hangs over the length of the table, delicate glass droppers that bounce light around the walls. Everything about the room looks as if it’s been this way forever, an unchanging backdrop for the Belottis to love, change, and grow in. And now Santo is absent from this tableau, a place still set for him at the far end, a glass filled for him, Gio’s toast for his speedy return to health the most poignant part of the evening. Will I ever get to meet him, I wonder? I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Thinking of him reminds me that my place at this table is temporary, an unwelcome thought I press to the back of my mind tonight.
Maria’s food is a feast, traditional dishes she tells me she learned from her mother back in Naples. She weaves stories of life in the shadow of Vesuvius with the flair of a natural storyteller, evoking the vibrancy and colors of the old city, the winding cobbled streets, the tall, golden stone townhouse she grew up in as the youngest of seven. She speaks to me in the language of food, of spices and herbs, of sweet pastries and bitter coffee, aware I’m sure that she has led me to safe culinary ground where I’m more comfortable.
“Limoncello time, I think,” Francesca announces, standing up. Gio’s eldest sister is very like her mother in both looks and style, glamorous and always on the edge of smiling. She produces a glass-stoppered bottle of spirits and holds it aloft. “Pascal made it this year, so apologies now for your headaches in the morning.”
Everyone groans and her French husband shrugs benignly beside her and raises his wineglass, Leo on his lap. Maria shoos everyone back through to the living room, and I find myself beside Gio on the deep sofa in front of the fire. I have that three-glasses-in wine buzz and quietly decide to go light on the limoncello.
“Bruno,” Gio says, plucking the small dog up on to his lap. He’s some kind of terrier, I think, a small, scruffy furball with kind eyes who turns himself around a couple of times and then settles into a relieved ball on Gio’s lap.
“He’s fourteen,” Gio says. “Missing Papa like crazy.”
“I always wanted a dog,” I say, giving Bruno’s ears a scratch.
“Did you ever have one?”
I shake my head. “It was never the right time.” I don’t add that our lives were always too transitory and finances too unreliable to add a third mouth that needed feeding to our tribe.
Francesca comes through balancing a tray of crystal shot glasses and places it carefully on the coffee table. She hands me one first, as their guest, and I sniff it as everyone else leans in and grabs a glass. Gio shoots Bella a warning glance when she shows interest and she rolls her eyes before sliding back into her spot on the floor by the fire. I pretend not to notice when Maria allows her granddaughter a sip from her own glass, and I’m pretty sure Gio turns the same blind eye.