Maria laughs, resting her hands on Bella’s shoulders. “In a jiffy! I like that. Now, Gio, you see Iris safely home, and I’ll look forward to making pancakes for this one in the morning.”
Bella leans back against her grandmother. “With cherries?”
Gio looks at me and shrugs. “I guess that’s sorted, then,” he says. “I’ll grab our coats.”
13.
THERE’S AN INTIMACY TO THE back of a cab late at night, especially with alcohol warming our blood and the ballet of city lights blurring around us. Our mornings at Belotti’s, we have assigned roles. Here we are free of such constraints, we’re two people who have studiously ignored the spark between us in favor of getting on with the job at hand. I’m not even sure what that spark is. Gio draws out emotion in me, for sure. Frustrated rage on our first meeting in the bookstore, as it happened, but spending time with him at the gelateria has been like taking a deckchair outside and sitting in the sun. I’ve basked in his company. I like him so much. He laughed at something I said around the dinner table earlier and, honestly, it was as if he’d stuck a gold star on my chest. And now we’re thigh to thigh in the darkness in this cab, and I don’t know what the hell to say. Small talk has always been my nemesis.
“Thank you for coming tonight,” he says, saving me from saying something stupid. “I was worried about how it would be without Papa at the table, and you being there helped take everyone’s mind off of it.”
I wish I could comment on how crazy it is to realize his biological father and my mother were in the same band so we could marvel at the small world, but of course the truth is that it’s no coincidence. I’ve engineered this in a roundabout way. Not that I ever intended to become as involved with the Belottis as I have.
“I enjoyed it a lot, your family are great,” I say.
He glances away out of the window. “I’m sorry if it seems like they’re reading too much into our friendship.”
“Are they?”
He passes his hand over his jaw. “There just hasn’t been anyone since Penny, you know?”
“No one at all?” I say, thinking of the glamorous, sharp-eyed woman in the gelateria across the street from Belotti’s.
Gio shakes his head. “A couple of awkward lunches, a movie date. Nothing that ever mattered, because I didn’t want to open the door to all those feelings again. So now that they see us spending time together, they are jumping to all kinds of crazy conclusions.”
“Crazy,” I say, feeling as if it isn’t that crazy because I feel something between us that I can’t put a name to. I’m wondering if I’m brave enough to put my hand on his arm when the driver catches Gio’s eye in the mirror.
“Sorry, guys,” he huffs. “Emergency construction this end of Chrystie tonight, burst pipe. I can go round but it’s gonna take a while.”
“We could walk from here?” I say.
“You sure?” Gio looks at me, checking if I’m just being polite on this cold Halloween evening.
The driver looks as if that’s exactly what he hoped we’d say, already slowing at the curb to total the fare and tick the job off on his cell.
* * *
—
IT’S SEE-YOUR-BREATH COLD WHEN we clamber out on the street, frost glittering on the sidewalk.
“Now I wish I had my Converse,” I say, putting a steadying hand out as my heel slips.
Gio catches it and pulls me into his side, tucking my arm through his. “Here, hang on to me.”
I cannot put into words how good it feels, just walking arm in arm at midnight with Gio Belotti.
“Will you always stay in New York?”
“Yes,” he says, no hesitation. “As long as Bella is here for sure, but Belotti’s is my life. Santo and Maria need me here.”
“Do you mind that? The obligation, I mean?”
“I owe them everything,” he says. “They gave me a home and their love—I lucked out when I was left with them. I’ll never take that for granted, you know?”
“I get that,” I say.
“And then after Penny…well, they held me and Bella together.”
I’m glad he had the love of his family around him at the worst time of his life. My life has been so very different from his. My mother was my only person. I felt like a fragile dandelion when I lost her, as if all the pieces of me had been caught up on a cold wind and blown in every direction. Adam snatched those fragments from the air and shoved them in his pockets, crushing them in his palms, making them small. No. I won’t let those memories in tonight, they have no place here. I’ve traveled too far and tried too hard to let him affect me anymore.
I slide on a frozen puddle and Gio catches me, his arm around my waist as he stops me from falling in a heap.
“God, I’m like Bambi,” I mutter, almost going again.
“I can hoist you over my shoulder, if you like.”
“I doubt it.” I laugh. “I’m sturdier than I look.”
“You did pack a hell of a lot of food away tonight,” he says.
“Rude,” I gasp and thump his arm. “I was just being polite to Maria.”
He laughs, shrugs. “Sorry. I guess I’m rusty talking to women.”
“Free tip—don’t tell them they eat too much,” I say, mock-offended.
“What should I say, then?”
“Are you asking me how to flirt?”
“I haven’t flirted in twenty years,” he says, then huffs. “God, that makes me sound old.”
I side-eye him. “You’re way too young to say stuff like that.”
He shoots me a look. “That’s flirting, right?”
“Just reminding you how it’s done.” I laugh softly as I do my best to stay on my feet.
“Got it,” he says, smiling into the collar of his jacket. “Bella showed me the video of you singing, you know.”
“Oh,” I say, glad my cheeks are already pink from the cold. Aside from Sophia, I thought I’d gotten away with the rest of the Belottis not seeing that clip.
“She just needed someone to step in and I was there.”
“You surprised me. It’s like you’re a different person when you sing.”
“People used to say that about my mum,” I say, remembering the way people sat up straighter in their seats whenever she took the mic.
“Are you a lot like her?”
“In some ways,” I say, picturing us as bookends on the sofa watching Sleepless in Seattle, reaching over to pass the popcorn between us. “In looks, yes, and I sound a lot like her when I sing, but she was more…more effervescent, I guess? Always the first one on the dance floor, a life-and-soul kind of person, someone people naturally gravitated toward.”
“And you don’t see yourself that way?”
I sidestep a frozen puddle. “There’s only room for one magpie in the family,” I say, because I don’t want to say that maybe I was more like that once, before life pressed me down.
“I don’t know, my family is full of them,” he says. “I see your shine, Iris. I mean, look at me—the guy who has locked himself behind the counter at the gelateria, according to my sisters, but here I am walking you home like a nervous teenager.”