Chapter 18
“Mamma, Pa, what’s happening?” Andrea asked, rushing in the kitchen door of his parents’ house. He’d been halfway through a cappuccino at Giada’s when Franca texted him that they had called city hall looking for him. “Franca said you needed me to come over right away.”
“Your sister is on WhatsApp and wants to talk to you,” Paola said, gesturing at the tablet he’d purchased for his parents so that they could do video calls with their far-flung family.
It ended up being largely forgotten between uses, often lost among the hundreds of books that lay on every possible surface in the house.
After the fifth time he’d received a call asking for help to find it, he’d encased the tablet in a neoprene cover with a GPS tag glued to the front.
Now, if they couldn’t find it, he’d only have to fire up the app on his phone to locate it somewhere between the Elena Ferrantes and Italo Calvinos.
“You called me over to talk to Carla?”
“She said you never respond, so—” Paola chucked her chin at the screen.
“You never respond,” said Carla, scowling at him from the tablet.
“This may not go well for you,” Antonio mock whispered, waggling his eyebrows, from the living room. “Get out while you can.”
“Ciao, Carla, I’m sorry. I’m only running a little town over here. It’s summer, you know. Lots to do,” said Andrea.
“Yes, yes, I know. So many important cultural events. Did you have the sagra with the guy who dresses up like a giant squid to serve the fried calamari?”
“The kids love him.”
“Sure, look, I want to talk to you about something important.”
“I am going to water my zucchini,” said Paola, turning for the door.
“You didn’t plant zucchini this year,” Andrea called after her as she walked out the door. “Is this an intervention?” He turned to Carla.
“It’s an offer. Look, I know that you’re having some kind of moment of nostalgia disease back there or something, but you have been there for four years and it’s getting a little bit concerning.”
“Nostalgia disease?”
“Well, you’re too young for a midlife crisis.
I know this because Alex is having his right now, and we are ten years older than you.
Of course he didn’t decide to move back to Gloucestershire and become a sheep farmer, did he?
No, he decided to take up triathlon and spend thousands of pounds on something called aerobars. Like a normal person!”
“Carla, I am no sheep farmer. And I don’t have nostalgia disease. I like this work and I am doing good things. I know it’s difficult to understand, but I am really OK.”
“For now,” she said, shaking her finger at him.
“What are you going to do when the term is over and you have to go back to the real world? Don’t you want to meet a single person under the age of ninety?
Your résumé is still salvageable at this point, but what kind of skills are you building when the GDP of your entire town is in a close race with the revenue pulled in by a Coca-Cola vending machine at a rest stop on the highway to get there? ”
“And I suppose you have a solution to this,” he said, recognizing that Carla was on a roll. Once she got going, there was no stopping her without either a natural disaster or tranquilizer dart.
“Yes. We’re hiring. It’s not in my department, but I am very good friends with the woman who runs it.
Director of financial planning. You get a bonus, equity, the best benefits package there is—you know, one that will allow you to have an actual family someday?
And tech is a great place to work, no matter what you’ve heard about AI destroying everything.
You’ve got to at least give it a chance. Will you talk to her?”
“You’re making an awful lot of assumptions about me. How do you know what I do or don’t do?”
“Because Mom tells me everything.”
“Right, because Mom knows everything?”
“I know most things,” Paola said, pushing open the kitchen door with her good hip, a basket of plums in her hands. “Like the American girl lives in your house, and that she’s the one you took in the kayak.”
“You’re living with an American woman?!” Carla shouted from her perch on the table.
“No.” Andrea turned to his mother. “How do you know about the kayak?”
“A mother knows,” she said, waving her arm into the ether.
“Ah, yes, maternal clairvoyance and a line of hawk-eyed gossips that runs straight down to the shoreline,” Antonio said to his newspaper.
“I rented a town house to her. Temporarily. She is only here trying to get citizenship.”
“Oh, don’t tell me, she wants to stay there? Please tell me she’s not one of those people who fell for the one-euro house thing.” Carla shook her head.
“No. She’s not staying here. And we don’t do one-euro houses. You know what? I appreciate the ambush, seriously. But I have a lot on my plate right now, and all I can promise is that I will honestly consider the offer.”
“I hope so, because I can’t figure out why it seems that you’re hiding from your real life. You’re too smart to be stuck down there, you know?”
Even after they said their goodbyes to Carla, who had to go pick up Alex because he’d gotten a flat tire while riding his bike in Regent’s Park, Paola wasn’t quite finished with the conversation.
“Why didn’t you tell us about the American?”
“I didn’t tell you about Lora because there’s nothing to tell,” said Andrea. “She needed the apartment and I needed the motivation to finish the renovation. There’s no story.”
“She seems very nice. Pretty also,” Paola mused, washing the plums in the sink.
“She is. But we have become friends, that’s it.
She’s moving to Switzerland, and I am…” He trailed off, feeling a vibration from the phone in his back pocket.
He pulled it out to check. “I’m needed in town.
Love you guys, gotta go.” Andrea kissed his mom on the forehead, grabbed a plum, and walked out the door.
Meetings at nine in the morning usually gave Lora plenty of time to be ready, but since she didn’t get up until almost 8:30 today, she was in full sprint.
That morning, she’d lain in bed, lingering in the moment between sleep and wakefulness, and replaying parts of the night before.
After Pamela died, there were hard moments in Lora’s life, but none that required much more than a quick pep talk that she could give herself.
If there was something extra heavy, she might share a bit of it with Vilmari.
But last night, she’d felt that she needed Andrea to get through that storm.
It was scary to think that this was an experience that she was not meant to have on her own.
Despite rushing around, Lora decided to throw in a load of laundry five minutes before her call started.
In a burst of nervous energy, she gathered up some dirty clothes and shoved them into the drum of the washing machine.
She plugged in her computer, making sure that it had enough battery for the call, and decided to also charge the handheld vacuum that she’d bought to tidy up.
Feeling organized, she sat at the kitchen table.
“Dr. Brooks! It’s great to see you!”
“Hello, Dr. Bruker, Dr. Hess. It’s nice to see you too.
” Lora smiled into her computer screen, thankful that she’d worked some magic with a couple of frozen spoons to de-puff her eyes from last night.
However, she’d put zero work into getting dressed below the waist and her cream-colored blouse was currently paired with polka-dot sleep shorts.
“We wanted to connect with you to see how you are progressing on preparations for your presentation,” said Dr. Bruker, his tortoiseshell glasses reflecting back into the camera.
“Things are going well. I’m still working on a preliminary literature review and have been honing the hypotheses that I presented in my application. I should have a good idea of methodology soon, as I’ve been using the Stinson and DeSantis papers as reference. And will be able to—”
“Wonderful!” Dr. Hess cut in. She always cut in. “Of course we are also wondering about your progress toward being able to secure funding. It’s such a difficult task, we do acknowledge.”
“Things are also progressing well there.” Lora smiled. And that was true, if she considered the bottom falling out on her childhood “good progress” toward being granted research funding. “It seems that everything is on schedule, and I don’t anticipate any delays.”
“Interesting. I’m surprised, given what we know about Italian bureaucracy,” said Dr. Bruker, his left eyebrow lifted.
“Yes, it can be challenging,” Lora said, bristling at the comment for some reason.
“But I’ve actually found that—” But she was not able to finish her sentence because just as the washing machine went from the “fill” part of the cycle to “spin,” the extra electricity, plus all of the plugged-in appliances, had snapped off the circuit breaker and shut down the router.
And Lora sat staring at nothing but a frozen screen.
When he knocked on the door to the town house, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Lora’s text was short: “No electricity. Had to end a meeting.” She opened the door, and he couldn’t help but grin at her half-professional, half-asleep outfit.
“Don’t laugh,” she said, clearly trying not to laugh at herself.
“I was in the middle of a conversation with the people who are going to be assessing my work for the next three years, so you know, I’m not feeling like I left a very good impression.
Though I think the house did it on purpose.
One of the professors made a dig at Italian bureaucracy, and boom! Lights out.”
“Poor old girl,” he said, running his hand up the wall in the entryway. “She had to stand up for us. I’m assuming you found the circuit breaker.”
“Yeah, I did. I probably should have texted you back to let you know that I am OK, but I didn’t mind seeing you again today.”