Chapter 85
THE BINGO NIGHT THAT LAURA and I had been planning went off without a hitch, which would have left me feeling pretty good about myself had Mary Lou not flagged me down in the parking lot, as I was getting into my car, and asked if I could give her a ride home.
“How are you holding up?” she asked when I had eased the car past the guardhouse and onto the Via Principe Amedeo.
“Holding up?” I said, a little confused.
“With Paul gone.”
“Oh, right,” I said. The tender had been gone for over a week, but I’d been so busy that I’d hardly noticed. “It’s been hard.”
She gave me a sly smile. “I don’t believe you.”
I was so surprised, I laughed out loud. “What do you want me to say? That I’ve been totally fine?”
“That’s certainly better. If it’s accurate.”
I got serious. “Do you know that I’ve never lived on my own?”
Mary Lou rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. “That’s probably half the American women on this island.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, how’s it going?” she asked.
“I have to say, I don’t hate it.”
She blew a long stream of smoke out the window. “Jim doesn’t like it when I read in bed at night. I have to keep the lamp on, and he says he can’t sleep.”
“That’s the type of thing I’m talking about,” I said.
“When he goes to sea, I read until one or two o’clock in the morning.”
I liked picturing this version of Mary Lou, engaged in her own private rebellion.
My own acts of rebellion had been piling up around me.
Without Paul at home, I was sleeping in a little later, leaving the bed unmade, and going to the bathroom with the door open.
Twice I’d gone out to eat by myself, but otherwise I’d managed to survive on yogurt and bread and sausage and cheese and these apricot jam cookies, which I ate by the handful.
Of course, my big act of defiance was spending time with Teo.
“It’s nice to let loose a little,” said Mary Lou. “But we must be careful not to get carried away.”
This felt like a pointed jab, and I didn’t know if I could afford to ignore it. “Am I doing something wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far. Would you?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and I said so.
“I’m hearing that you’re spending a lot of time with a local reporter.”
I was floored. She was hearing I was spending a lot of time with a local reporter? From whom? Of course, I immediately thought of Laura, but all Laura knew was that she’d seen me with Teo at Feast Day and that I hadn’t shown up to a potluck. “Who are you hearing that from?” I finally asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. We were approaching the hospital, and she reminded me that I needed to take a right at the traffic circle. My hands felt clammy on the steering wheel, but I did as I was told.
I couldn’t let Mary Lou make too big a deal out of whatever she had or hadn’t heard, and I certainly didn’t want her running to Paul.
So I decided to tell her as much as I could get away with.
“He’s the nephew of my Italian teacher. We’ve been thrown together a couple of times, but it’s not like I’m—”
We were nearing Mary Lou’s house, and she interrupted to tell me that the driveway was difficult to find in the dark. I slowed the car and put on my blinker.
“I don’t need all the details,” she said. “But can I give you some free advice?”
“Sure,” I said tentatively as I turned in to her driveway and rolled to a stop.
“You need to clean up your act.”
I was speechless, which was fine, because she wasn’t done.
“Paul’s got a promising career ahead of him. And you may think that how you comport yourself has nothing to do with it, but I’ve been on this ride for a long time. And it does.”