Chapter 35
“I haven’t seen you in almost two weeks, and now you’re at my doorstep at eight in the morning?” Anita’s looking at me skeptically from behind her door chain lock.
“You already buzzed me in,” I say to justify myself.
“Doesn’t mean I’m opening the door.”
I lift up the paper bags I’m holding. “I got you a bacon, egg, and cheese. New Yorker things. You can’t say no.”
“You better not have gotten me a shitty street cart BEC,” she says, her face closer to the door now that she knows I have treats.
“Hell no.” I lift the bag higher so she can see the label. “Daily Provisions. Runny yolk and everything. Come on, have a little faith.”
She opens the chain and stands in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “You can’t just show up at people’s doorsteps.”
“Don’t be such a silly goose,” I say, pushing past her and into the apartment. I park myself at her little kitchen table and start unwrapping our breakfast sandwiches.
“There’s no such thing. Geese are extremely serious.”
“Really?” I ask, momentarily sidetracked.
“Have you ever met a goose?” she asks. “They look like primordial dinosaur birds. They honk super loud, flap their wings, and they’ll bite you. They are the opposite of silly.”
“Huh.” I take a bite of my sandwich and predictably get yolk running down my arm.
She hands me a napkin, sits down, and begrudgingly grabs a sandwich. “Okay, this is not why you came here.”
“You don’t think I’m here to discuss geese?”
She narrows her eyes at me but says nothing.
She holds her sandwich in such a way that when she bites into it, she makes distinctly less mess than I did.
I keep chewing and so does she. I don’t know why I’m letting her stare me down—I’m the one who came here.
But once again I’m having trouble articulating how I’m feeling.
A problem, by the way, I never cared about in my entire life, but recently it seems insurmountable.
I don’t know if that new excess of stronger feelings is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.
“Thanks for the sandwich,” she finally says, breaking the silence. “Now what gives?”
I put my head on the table to avoid looking at her. I haven’t said anything to her about Nico since our conversation at the beach where I assured her nothing was happening. But that Band-Aid has to be ripped off—I need to stop being afraid to let Anita fully in.
I guess now’s as good a time as any.
“I’m in love with Nico, and I don’t know how to make it go away,” I say into the table.
There’s silence, and then an attempt to stifle a laugh that almost immediately loses out.
I look up. “Hey! That’s not funny?!”
Her lips are pursed, still in an attempt to avoid laughter. “It’s funny on so many levels,” she says finally.
“What?”
“You’re in love with someone you swore up and down you were just staying friends with.
Objectively funny.” I slump in my chair, annoyed that she’s got me so thoroughly pegged.
But she continues. “Also, you’ve never actually been in love, so you’re totally flustered and showing up at my house in a panic. That’s also objectively funny.”
“Someone being in a panic is the opposite of funny.”
But she’s fully ignoring me now. “And lastly—and most objectively funny—you genuinely think there’s some magic way to make it go away?”
“Can’t there be?” I ask, the desperation seeping out of me.
“Not that anyone’s figured out,” she says, containing the laugh that’s threatening to burst out.
“My sadness isn’t funny!” I throw my hands in the air. “This is my real life!”
“I didn’t say it was funny!”
“You’re holding in a laugh, and you literally just said multiple parts of my statement were objectively funny,” I whine.
“No,” she says, pointing her finger at me. “Your bumbling is the part that’s funny. Your sadness is not funny at all.”
“Okay, so what do I do with that?”
“I feel like there’s an olive tree metaphor here,” she says.
I put my head back on the table. “Come on, Anita. This isn’t the fucking time for that nonsense. You Italians and your insistence on poetic bullshit. I’m having a crisis!”
“You’re the olive tree in this metaphor,” she barrels on.
“I’m the olive tree?” I say incredulously, sitting up. I don’t know why I’m offended, but I automatically am because, come on, she’s putting me in a damned metaphor.
“Hey, olive trees are so individual,” she continues, ignoring my bluster. “They don’t need anyone; they survive droughts and even fires. They’re perfectly fine on their own. They can make olives and they can be picked or not picked, but it doesn’t matter to the tree.”
“Oh, so I’m just a loner who can survive drought. My reputation’s really skyrocketing here.”
“But,” she says, her finger over her lips to shut me the hell up, “with people they make beautiful olive oil! They’re better with humans. They make something great when they involve people.”
I’m annoyed because this is akin to my thoughts yesterday, which also means I’ve succumbed to their absurdity of making everything somehow always about olives.
“I can still involve people and not be in love with a person whose life is thousands of miles away.” Maybe I’m trying to convince myself a bit too. “We can still be friends—friends get to hang out, and that’s the best thing with him anyway.”
“The best thing?” she says with a smirk.
I gulp. “One of the best things, yes.”
A pang of sadness washes over me because it’s pathetic how deep my neediness for him seems to run. I should be thinking about sex. But I’d be lying if I said that’s the thing I miss most. I miss talking to him. I miss the way he made me feel delicate. I miss having someone I could say anything to.
Anita must catch the look on my face, because her expression softens. “Do you realize how rare that is? To like hanging out with someone all the time?”
“You and I like hanging out.” I’m once again in a mode of trying to convince myself.
“But it’s not the same, is it?” she says quietly.
I purse my lips. And slowly, I shake my head. “No. It’s not.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, Anita! That’s why I’m fucking sitting here!”
Her grin is back. “Oh, you think I can solve this for you?”
I put my head in my hands, needing once again to not look at her. “Just give me some goddamn advice already!”
“You keep this thing from me, tell me nothing, storm into my apartment, and now you think I’m gonna have a solution to a problem you’ve been thinking about nonstop for weeks?”
“I brought you a sandwich, don’t forget that part.”
“Noted,” she says, and even though I’m still not looking, I can hear the smile in her voice. “But I really can’t tell you what to do.”
“You told me to go to Italy,” I remind her, lifting my head up to level a stare at her.
“I’d say it was a suggestion.”
“You practically pushed me onto the plane,” I retort, and she grins, not denying it.
But I rub my hand across my face, knowing snark isn’t going to save me from talking it out.
“Come on, this is me being open about my feelings instead of ignoring them and talking to you about the breakfast sandwich all morning. This is me knowing it’s not working and gathering the best minds I’ve got to advise me! ”
“Advising doesn’t mean anyone else should tell you what to do,” she says, eyebrows raised.
I sigh. She can clock me better than anyone.
“I know I’ve done that for too long,” I admit. “I don’t like planning. I just want to work. But I have to get better at steering my own path. I know that.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she says softly. She reaches her arm across the table to pat me, like I’m a dead man walking and the only comfort she can provide is tactile. She stays silent, waiting, letting me collect my thoughts while her hand stays on me as reassurance.
Maybe instead of letting men steer me, I should’ve let in more women to stand beside me.
I take a deep breath, not sure where to even begin now that we’ve at least admitted I’m going to have to participate in my own decision.
“I am sorry I’ve let you not talk about it,” she says, surprising me.
“Well, how would you have known about this,” I say, waving her away.
But she shakes her head. “I don’t mean this specific thing about Nico.
I mean generally. I let my dislike of John and the fact that we never have enough time together make it so I avoided the hard stuff in favor of keeping our time together light.
I should’ve made it more obvious that you could talk to me about anything. ”
“I’ve always known that, Anita,” I say truthfully. “I just took my time realizing I should.”
She nods, letting the silence sit between us for a moment.
“How’d you leave it with Nico?” she finally asks.
I meet her eyes. I guess there’s no avoiding it now.
“We love each other. But we live in different places, and we don’t want different lives.
I love my work and New York, and that’s not changing.
He loves his work and Manciano, and that’s not changing.
So we left it where we left it. We said goodbye.
We said we’d be friends. What else is there to say? ”
“You don’t want to fight for what makes you happy?” she asks, although I can see that even she’s not convinced that’s good advice.
I sigh. “I’m never getting that story.”
She crinkles her nose. “What story?”
“You know, I’m not the big-city gal who goes to the small town to roll out pasta and gives up everything for love and a simpler life.
I wish I could be that girl in the goddamn Hallmark movie.
That girl would stay, because Nico deserves someone who stays for him, and lets Gia retire and rolls the fucking barrel in the quirky small-town race.
That girl doesn’t mind giving up everything she’s built because she values the socially acceptable things like love conquering all. ”
“I’m sorry, but that’s a bullshit narrative that, frankly, is always insulting to the women,” Anita pushes.
“Okay, but that’s what ‘fighting for happiness’ looks like in this narrative.”
“Bullshit,” she repeats. “Those stories always make it seem like one person has to sacrifice to have love. And that makes for a great story. But that’s not reality.
Reality is messier and bigger, and not everything gets to be simple.
You should be equals who make choices that make sense for both people’s lives. ”
“Okay, but that’s the problem with the options we have. There is no equal option,” I say. “I’m destined to be like Gia and give up my great love for my work.”
At that she snorts. “I’m sorry, but you’re not Nonna.
Nonna’s amazing and a total badass, but she’s from a different generation.
She chose from the options that were in front of her.
She chose what she wanted and that’s worked for her, but it doesn’t mean she was otherwise doomed in love.
She chose to close herself off after my nonno died.
You can admire her, but that’s not exactly an example to live by. ”
“With me and Nico, it’s not a choice,” I say defensively. I pick at my napkin so I don’t have to see the way she’s looking at me. “It’s the reality of our situation. I don’t get to have both. If I need to be here, then I can’t be with Nico. That’s it.”
“He didn’t want to leave Manciano?”
My brow furrows. “Obviously he can’t leave Manciano.”
“Did you ask him?”
At that I stand up. “Did I ask him? Did I say, ‘Hey, person whose wife left him because she didn’t want to live in this small town that you love: Do you now want to leave this town you were willing to lose your wife over?’”
“Don’t yell at me,” Anita says, not looking offended in the slightest.
“I’m not yelling!” I yell.
“That’s a totally misguided way of looking at something that happened like ten years ago,” she says calmly.
“He was just taking things over after his grandfather died and setting up his own systems. They weren’t right for each other anyway, and that just exacerbated all the ways they didn’t work.
She didn’t want to make it work.” She wipes her hand across her face, thinking. “You really didn’t ask him?”
It’s like running a light that you thought was still yellow yet has distinctly turned red but it’s too late to stop. I hadn’t even considered asking him.
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, want to move to New York with me?’” I ask, trying to sound incredulous but really testing how the words taste.
“In an ideal world, is that what you’d want?”
The thought stops me in my tracks. I see his smile in front of me so clearly I can practically grab it. I see that little freckle above his top lip. I see his hand pushing through his messy hair. His eyes dipping to take me in.
“Probably,” I sigh. “I just want him to be where I am.” I say it so quietly, but I can see that Anita’s heard me. Her expression is some mix of heart eyes and sadness.
“You have to tell him that,” she says.
“He would’ve suggested it if that’s what he wanted,” I dismiss.
But she shakes her head, not letting me off the hook.
“The ball was always in your court, Kit. He couldn’t ask you to stay because, come on, as you rightly observed, you never could stay there.
But he could come here. Hell, he basically only has to be there in October.
And he travels around a lot of the rest of the year anyway, meeting suppliers and chefs and showcasing the oil.
He could be based anywhere. He could make that work, if you wanted. ”
“Again, you’re assuming that’s what he wanted,” I say forcefully, pushing away from a too-easy solution that clearly could never be.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” she responds.
“I’ve known you for almost my entire adult life, and you’ve never shown up at my house distressed.
Not when work got hard, not when your family was driving you nuts.
And I like this new version of you that seems open to us actually delving into real shit more—I’m proud of you.
But even in that scenario, the idea of you being bent out of shape over a man has never crossed my mind. ”
“Thanks for reminding me how pitiful my current state is.”
She shakes her head at me, although her expression makes it clear she’d rather be shaking me.
“I’m saying . . . this isn’t a thing we’re resolving over BECs.
This isn’t just missing someone. If you’re this miserable, he’s probably this miserable too.
Either way, we’re debating what he wants or wanted without actually asking him. ”
“You want me to just pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, Nico, wanna give up your whole life for me?’”
She cringes. “How bad are you at romance?”
I lean over and ruffle my hair in frustration. “Obviously extremely bad! This shit is hard!”
“Nah,” she says, and from her sly smirk I already know what she’s going to say. “The hard is what makes it great.” I groan and she laughs. “But I know what you need to do. I’ve got a plan.”