Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
H er mother answered the door.
“Luciana?” She leaned out to peer beyond Lucy’s shoulder. “Did you come alone? Where’s Joel?”
Lucy shouldered past her mother and into her childhood home. “Hello, Mother. So nice to see you too. I know, it really does feel good to be on home turf again.”
Maria closed the door behind her and planted her fists on her hips. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you talking like Vanessa?”
“If you mean condescending and rude, maybe it’s because I’m sick and tired of everyone thinking the sun rises and sets out of Joel Morgan's ass. Is it not enough that your daughter wanted to see you on her own?”
A look of sheer terror morphed her mother’s face. “Have you called off your engagement?”
Not rolling her eyes took every ounce of her concentrated effort. “No, I did not call off the engagement.”
Maria’s sigh of relief could not have been louder. “Okay then, that’s good.” She waved her hands, shooing Lucy down the hallway. “Come to the kitchen. I just started making dinner. You can call Joel, and he can join us. There’s plenty.”
There was always plenty. Lucy didn’t once remember her mother cooking for two, but no way was she calling Joel. She hadn’t been able to sort through her emotions regarding him yet. It wasn’t fair to be mad, but she was hurt…and jealous that her own father would trust him more than her.
In the kitchen, the scent of fresh dough filled her nostrils, and despite her tumultuous feelings, she smiled. “Pizza.”
Her mother made the best homemade pizza, and years of trying to recreate it had never resulted in the same deliciousness.
“You can knead the dough.” Her mother pointed at the big plastic bowl with a damp dishcloth laid over the top.
Lucy removed the cloth and admired the fluffy round ball of dough. So good.
“So, why are you here?” Maria asked, as she rinsed the dishes in the sink.
Lucy shrugged as she poked at the dough. “I wanted to talk to Dad.”
“You saw him all day at work. Didn’t you talk then?”
Lucy focused on the dough in her hands. “This requires a longer conversation. And he was busy in the shop today.”
“Ah, that man. He loves building more than anything else. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with him when he retires.” Maria took out a block of mozzarella and the cheese grater and set up beside Lucy. “Why do you always knead like you’re afraid it’s going to bite you? Have I taught you nothing? You have to massage it, like this.” Her mother took over, her hands working from muscle memory, kneading and shaping the dough. “Pretend it’s Joel’s bum.”
“Mom!” Lucy gasped, horrified .
“What? You think I don’t know anything, Luciana, but I wasn’t born yesterday. God gave me your sister didn’t he? I know all about you young people these days.”
Lucy laughed at the ridiculousness of the conversation and resumed kneading vigorously as per her mother’s demonstration, trying not to imagine Joel’s ass in her hands.
“So, you want to talk to your father about something important, huh?” Maria slid the block of cheese up and down the grater with practiced ease. “What is it?”
Lucy shrugged again. She didn’t even know how she was going to start with her father, never mind how she’d explain it to her mother. So she considered her reply carefully, opting to answer a question with a question.
“Mom, do you regret never having had a real job?”
“What do you mean? I had a real job. It was taking care of you and Vanessa, and God knows most days that felt like having eight jobs.”
“Right.” She hadn’t meant to sound rude or insulting. Obviously, being a mother and a homemaker required huge amounts of work. But… “Did you miss not having a career?”
Maria stopped, faced Lucy, and propped her fist on her hip. “Luciana, I had more careers than I care to list.” But she did anyway, flicking each one off a finger as she went. “I was a chef, a nanny, an accountant, a counselor, a nurse?—”
“Okay, okay, I get it.” At a loss for how else to communicate this with her mother, Lucy sighed.
“ Patatina , I regret nothing of how I chose to live my life. And I don’t consider it a loss that I didn’t go work somewhere outside of my home for someone who didn’t understand my first priority was my family and that nothing else could come before them.” She went back to grating the cheese. “Besides, if I had been out of the house, you and Vanessa would have had no one. Your father worked enough for everyone. He was never home, or don’t you remember?”
She did remember, but differently. “I remember admiring how hard he worked. How proud I always was that he had his own company.”
Beside her, Maria snorted. “Barone & Sons would not be what it is if it weren’t for me. If I hadn’t done the work that needed to be done at home, raised his daughters, made sure everyone had everything they needed, groceries bought, bills paid, laundry done, do you think he would have had time for that company?” She didn’t let Lucy reply. “No. We built that company together, patatina . Him at the shop, me at home. One could not have done it without the other. You might not see it that way, but that’s the way it is. Barone & Sons was my career as much as his. I just ran a different part of it. Behind the scenes.”
With the cheese grated, Maria went to the cupboard to pull out a large rectangular baking sheet, which she handed to Lucy. “Make sure you stretch it all the way to the edges.”
Halfway through trying to stretch the dough to fit the pan, she heard the front door open and her father holler in Italian, “Maria! Who gave you a new Ferrari? Do you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?”
When he entered the kitchen, his face broke into a surprised smile. “ Patatina ! Why are you here?” His smile dropped marginally. “Did you call off your engagement?”
“My God, what is wrong with you and Mom? Why is that your first assumption?” She threw her hands in the air, abandoning the dough to flop onto one of the chairs by the kitchen island. “Can’t I come visit my family without my marriage having to be in crisis?” She would not mention that she had stormed out on Joel mere hours ago.
Her father shrugged as he deposited his lunch kit on the island and headed to the refrigerator to fill a glass with water. “I’m only asking. So, is the car yours?”
“Hm,” was her response.
Luciano raised an eyebrow over the rim of his glass as he drank.
Maria came back from the window where she’d been peering out to see the vehicle in question. “That’s a fancy car, Luciana. I hope you didn’t ask him to buy it for you.”
“Of course I didn’t! He just, I don’t know. It was at the airport waiting for us when we arrived yesterday, and he said it was for me. I know I can’t keep it, but it was the only vehicle I had this morning.”
“You can keep it,” her parents said in unison.
Frustration rose in her abdomen. Who were these people and where were her parents? “It’s a hundred thousand dollar car that I didn’t earn in any single way. It’s way too much of a gift for no reason.”
“Your fiancé gave you a gift, patatina . It would be rude to refuse it. Besides, Joel is a very wealthy man. He can afford to shower his future wife with gifts. Let him. Win gold and?—”
“Do not finish that sentence.” Lucy refused to suppress her eye roll this time. “I swear, you two act like he shits homemade meatballs. I don’t get it.”
“Watch your tongue,” Maria said in Italian. “Do not speak about your future husband in that tone in this house or any other.”
“Are you sure you didn’t call your engagement off?” her father asked in English.
Tears blurred her eyes. She was so freaking close to shouting, “We’re already married! We have been for four years!” But she didn’t. Instead she said, “Why did you give him Barone & Sons?” She tried to keep the sound of her tears out of her voice, but she couldn’t. This heartbreak was impossible to hide.
Her father had the decency to appear ashamed. Her mother made quick work of fitting the dough into the pan and slapping on homemade sauce.
“Why can’t I be the and Son ?” God, she hated how jealous she sounded, like an insolent child on the verge of a meltdown. She hated that she couldn’t accept her father’s choice.
It was a solid choice. Joel was a brilliant businessman. He could likely catapult Barone & Sons to heights she’d never even considered. There was no one she trusted in business more, and she loved how his mind worked, his ethical standard, his work ethic, his uncompromising generosity, the gravity of his leadership.
If she set her emotions aside and objectively looked at who was best suited to run her father’s business, it would be Joel. And she loathed how much she envied that, because he hadn’t poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into Barone & Sons. It wasn’t his legacy. It was hers. And she had wanted nothing more than to fill her father’s work boots since she was a child.
“ Patatina ,” her father hummed gently, like he used to do when she fell and had run to him in tears. “I would never want you to be a son. You and your sister are my most precious gifts.”
“Just not good enough to run the company,” she stated dryly.
“Too precious to run the company,” he corrected. “And why would you want to, anyway?” He sounded genuinely curious, like he legitimately could not fathom why she’d be interested.
“Dad, I’ve been working there since I was a teenager. ”
“Yes, because you needed money and it’s a good job.”
“Yes.” God, give her patience. “And because I love it. I’m good at it. I bring a lot of new ideas to the table, ideas you’ve implemented, and that have made the business better. I’m invested.”
Her father was oddly quiet for a moment, as if letting her words sink in. Her mother said nothing, pretending to be deeply focused on assembling the pizza.
“Luciana, how many days a week did I work when you were young? Do you remember?”
“Six and a half,” she answered automatically. “Monday to Saturday, and half day on Sunday.”
Luciano nodded. “And do you ever remember me taking a sick day?”
“No, but you probably should have. You went to work with some nasty bugs.”
He ignored her. “What about vacations? Do you remember how many we had?”
She could see where this was going, and she answered in a dull staccato. “Two weeks a year. We either went camping or to Italy and you left home early to come back to work while Mom, Vanessa, and I stayed for the summer holiday.”
“Hmm,” he rumbled, nodding to himself. “Did I ever take a snow day?”
“Okay, Dad, I get it, you worked hard. You were gone a lot. But why would you think I couldn’t do that?”
“ Patatina .” He reached across the counter to take her hand. “It’s not that I think you can’t do it. It’s that I don’t want you to. Why would I want that for my daughter? A lifetime of slavery to a company? Nothing more than brick and wood. The time I lost with my family, I can’t get that back. It’s gone. Why would I want that for you?” His eyes grew shiny in a way that made her panic .
If her father cried now, she’d be a mess.
“But I don’t want to be a stay-at-home mom while my husband is away working day and night either, Dad. I know Nico had his fantasies, but?—”
“What fantasies? What does Nico have to do with anything?” Maria finally chimed in.
“He had the wonderful idea that he would inherit Barone & Sons and marry me and I’d stay home raising his babies and cooking him spaghetti.”
The kitchen filled with stunned silence.
And then her mother started yelling in Italian. “You see, Luciano?” She smacked his forearm with a spatula. “I told you that the degenerate was out for money and power. You’re too good, too generous. You gave him a chance, but I said he was going to double cross you and he almost did. Marry Luciana, ha! Never.”
Lucy’s jaw dropped. Wow, she always assumed her mother adored Nico, the golden boy from Italy, come to save the family business from being lost.
Luciano waved Maria’s spatula away. “Of course, I’d never let him marry Lucy. He can’t. He’s her cousin.”
“Second cousin, Dad, and technically?—”
“He’s gone now, so it doesn’t matter, but Luciana—” He turned back to her, a regretful expression on his face. “Had I truly known how much you wanted the business, I would have gladly given it to you.”
Tears dripped down her cheeks. “I told you so many times, dad.”
Luciano shook his head, expression full of regret. “I wouldn’t believe it. It was never what I wanted— my daughters working as hard as I did. I wanted a better life for you. An easier one.”
This time, Lucy reached for her father’s hand. “And it is, Dad. If I ran the company now, it would be easier for me than it was for you. You started from scratch, no customers, no money, no employees, nothing. But look at it now. We are turning people away, we’re so busy. There’s money and staff who know what they’re doing.” She patted his hand. “I could take a vacation, get married, have a—” She swallowed the word, a familiar fear stopping her. “I can have all the things you want me to have, because you worked so hard, Dad.”
Luciano pressed his fist to his eye. Maria slipped the pizza into the oven. And Lucy’s heart filled with love and respect. This whole time, she thought she wasn’t enough. The wrong gender. The wrong child. But truthfully, her father had wanted to protect her, to save her from a life of endless grinding, like he’d done.
Running Barone & Sons would still be a grind, always hard work, but she’d meant what she said. He’d laid a foundation that would make it so much easier for her than it ever had been for him. And for that, she was forever grateful.
“Maria,” her father said, his voice rough like sandpaper. “Get the grappa. Tonight, we celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?” her mother asked, shuffling to the liquor cabinet.
“Our daughter, taking over our company.”