I am pretty pleased with it, and nervous too now it’s time to carry it out to the waiting family. We lift the board between us and someone dims the lights as we crab carefully sideways to place it down on the counter, resplendent with its lit candles.
The family sing again, and I feel Gio’s eyes on me as everyone exclaims at the sight of the blazing cake.
“Buon compleanno, mia nipote,” Maria says, her arm around her granddaughter’s shoulders. The candles illuminate Bella’s face as she holds her curls back to lean forward and blow out all the candles on one long breath, earning herself a ripple of applause, and Sophia’s phone flashes as she captures the moment.
“Iris made the cake,” she says. “Isn’t it amazing?”
I feel heat creeping up my neck as everyone looks at me.
“I like to cook,” I say, shrugging away their effusive praise. My mother would be deeply unimpressed to hear me reduce my years of training and kitchen experience to “I like to cook,” but here it’s accepted on face value.
“I like to cook too but it never turns out like that,” Francesca says, her eyes on the cake.
Pascal, her husband, nods sagely but doesn’t dare say a word.
A knife appears, the cake is cut, and champagne flutes are found and filled. There’s a groan of horror when Pascal produces a bottle of his lethal limoncello, but he just smiles and shrugs, nonchalant as he tips a little into everyone’s champagne.
I find myself beside Bella, and I reach down into my bag and dig out the small gift-wrapped box.
“Happy birthday,” I say, and she grins, excited.
“You shouldn’t have,” she says, pulling the string bow open. “But I’m glad you did!”
I chew the inside of my bottom lip as she unwraps it, hoping I’ve got it right. I know I have when she opens the box and touches her fingertip lightly against the little silver piano charm.
“I love it,” she whispers, lifting the silver link bracelet from the box.
I help her fasten it and she holds her wrist out for us to admire it.
“Perfect,” I say.
She looks at me, and then back at the bracelet and smiles. She’s about to say something when one of the kids starts banging the piano keys, a discordant, out-of-tune clatter that makes people wince.
“Bella, stop them, I beg you,” Pascal says. “Play something for us?”
She looks wrong-footed. “I don’t—”
“Something Christmassy?” Maria chips in, overhearing.
Sophia helps her niece out. “I’ll sing if you play. And you too, Iris?”
I sensed that was coming and knock back half of my lemon-laced champagne for courage. “Of course.”
Bella lifts one shoulder and sighs, but the sparkle in her eyes suggests she’s actually quite happy to be in musical demand. She takes a seat on the piano stool and tucks herself in, then glances up at Sophia and me.
“Umm, I played ‘Jingle Bells’ for the school concert a few years ago?” she says, the upward inflection at the end of her sentence turning the statement into a question.
Sophia looks at me and laughs, and I pull up the lyrics on my phone. “Got it.”
Bella begins to play, her quick fingers conjuring instant Christmas spirit with the chirpy introduction. Sophia’s voice is every bit as clear and confident as she is when she starts to sing, and I find myself happy to join in, because I’m not the only one. Everyone knows the words and joins in to more or less a degree. Enthusiasm from the little ones, a shoulder jiggle from Maria, and Gio’s sisters have the kind of blend to their voices that only comes from decades of singing together. Gio has his back braced against the wall nearest to the door, and for a second I catch his eye among the noisy bonhomie and he gives me a look that whisks me straight to the Monday Night Motel. It sears me. And then he looks away, distracted by movement outside the glass door. Most people don’t notice that there’s someone out there in the doorway, but I do and panic ices over my vocal cords. I’m singing but there’s no sound coming out, because there’s a hooded guy outside and Gio is frowning as he unlocks the door. Don’t open it. Please, Gio, don’t open the door. I put a hand out on a nearby table to steady myself, unsure how everyone else is still singing with this happening, how Bella’s speed is getting quicker and quicker to make the children laugh, a crazy spinning-top whirling faster and faster. I want to scream at everyone to shut up because it’s all white noise as Gio takes a surprised step backward and the stranger walks into the gelateria and throws his fur-lined parka hood back.
Bella’s hands go still on the keys and the singing dies out as everyone realizes there’s someone new in the room.
“I didn’t expect a welcome party!”
My breath slams back in, as if I’ve been choking on a piece of meat and someone just thumped me hard on the back and dislodged it. It’s not Adam. It’s not Adam. I don’t know who it is, but it’s not Adam Bronson.
“Dad?”
Gio is staring at the newcomer, incredulous, and Maria rushes forward, her arms out in an embrace.
“Felipe, this is a real surprise!”
Everyone springs back into action, the moment of inertia broken. Someone takes the new arrival’s coat, babies are placed in his arms, champagne glasses are refilled, the birthday party a reunion party too now. Gio’s bronzed, globetrotting father is swamped, and I hang back, watching the scene from the edges. Now that I know who he is, he’s recognizable from my mother’s photograph album, black-and-white stills from high-energy gigs, electricity leaping from the images. He’s considerably older, of course, but he has that Peter Pan kind of wiriness that refuses to age and a head of steel-grey hair. I thread my way toward the kitchen door and watch him, transfixed.
“Tell me I’m nothing like him.”
Gio is behind me, he must have ducked into the kitchen for something. His fingers curve around my hip, and he quietly tugs me into the kitchen and closes the door.
“Are you okay?” I say, touching his face. “That must have been a shock for you.”
“He always does that. Appears out of thin air like a genie out of a bottle.” He shakes his head, a resigned lift of his brows as he puts his hand against the door over my shoulder and leans into me.
“I’m so glad you’re here, cucchiaino,” he whispers.
The term of endearment takes me back to our first night together upstairs, to the movie, to the rooftop, to his bed. I stand on tiptoe to kiss him and straightaway it’s how it always is between us, a lit fuse on dynamite. He takes it up a notch further, urgent, trying to escape the reality happening on the other side of the door.
“We should stop,” I say, wishing with every fiber of my being that we didn’t have to.
He rests his forehead on mine. “I know. I just needed to be with you for a moment.”
“I have a lot of moments like that,” I say, unguarded, and he pulls his head back and looks me in the eyes. He doesn’t say anything, just cups my face and strokes his thumb over my cheek. I look at him, and he looks at me, and there in the kitchen with his entire family on the other side of the door, we say things with our eyes that we can’t say with our mouths. His breath fans my lips as I silently tell him of the darkness I hold inside me, and his heart beats beneath my palm as his eyes tell me he longs for me, for the magic that happens when we touch.