Chapter 6 Serena
SERENA
Afew years later
I teach myself not to flinch when the door buzzer rings after dark.
Rome is louder than the places I used to hide, and the city has a way of folding you into its noise until your fears sound like traffic.
I live two floors up from a bakery that starts kneading at four in the morning and a tabaccaio that never seems to close.
The woman downstairs calls me Signorina even though I’m twenty-four and have a four-year-old who can eat his weight in clementines.
My building smells like espresso and hot stone and sometimes rain inside the stairwell.
I like it because the smells are honest.
Marco lies on the rug in the living room with his cars. He lines them up in a perfect row, then whispers to each one before he sends it under the couch. He decides which car is brave and which one is tired. He decides who gets a turn. The brave ones always go last.
“Dinner in ten,” I call, rolling lemon zest into sugar with my knuckles until the grains glow pale yellow and the whole kitchen smells like memory.
I fold the sugar into ricotta and whisk until the mixture loosens and shines.
I don’t have a stand mixer because I don’t have the counter space, so I do everything by hand. It keeps me honest too.
Marco pops his head around the counter and looks at the bowl like it might answer a question for him. “Is that the cloud one?”
“It’s the cloud one,” I say. “But only after you eat your pasta.”
He considers the moral cost of patience, then climbs onto his chair at the small table I found on Via Merulana for forty euros and refinished during a heat wave.
He swings his feet while I plate pasta al limone with ribbons of zucchini and a little pecorino.
I drizzle good oil over both plates. He whistles low like an old man because he knows it makes me laugh.
We eat facing the window. I leave it cracked because the street sounds make me feel less alone. A Vespa coughs by. A couple on the sidewalk argues softly about where they parked. Marco chews thoughtfully and then asks the question he has started asking more and more.
“Mamma, why don’t I have a papa?”
The fork pauses in my hand. I keep my voice gentle because he is four and because I promised myself I would never teach him to be afraid of his own questions. “You have me,” I say, and I push a few extra zucchini ribbons into the sauce like that changes anything. “And you have Nonna on Sundays.”
He takes this in like a scientist. “But where is he?”
“I don’t know,” I say, which is true and not. “Sometimes, people who would be bad at being close choose to stay far away.”
“Bad like when I run in the street?”
“Bad like… not careful with hearts,” I say, and he nods like he understands traffic laws.
He twirls pasta around his fork. “If I had a papa, would he like cloud cream?”
“Of course he would like cloud cream,” I say, and my chest aches for a second in a place I keep quiet. “And if he didn’t, we would teach him.”
He brightens at the idea of training a hypothetical adult.
He eats faster. After dinner, he asks if he can set the “snows” in the freezer—the lemon-sugar ricotta in small cups, because he likes it half-frozen, the edges turning to soft ice.
I let him, because this is our house and our rules and because it matters to let him do small things he can finish.
When I put him to bed, he asks me to tell the story about the fishermen again.
I make it up as I go, like I always do—a boat at dawn, seven nets, a feast promised if the sea is kind.
I don’t say the words I learned four years ago and try to forget every day.
Omertà. Consigliere. Capodecina. I say anchovies and calamari and baccalà, and I say how the boat comes back full, and I tell him the city glows when the feast is ready.
He asks if the fishermen eat with their hands.
I tell him yes, obviously, because some things taste better when you touch them.
He falls asleep with his hand on the stuffed whale I stitched for him the week I decided to stop pretending I was waiting for a knock that would never be kind.
I watch him breathe for a minute longer than I need to.
Then I clean the kitchen, answer two client emails about Christmas menus, and price out Sicilian pistachios with my mouth set in a line because everything costs more this year and I’ve promised myself I’ll move us to a place with one more room by spring.
I’m portioning dough for crostate when my phone rings with a number I don’t know. I let it buzz twice, three times, and then I answer because unknowns used to be dangerous and now they are sometimes rent.
“Pronto?”
“Signorina Serena?” A woman’s voice with a Perugia lilt, brisk and careful.
“My name is Gabriella. I’m the house manager for a private villa in Umbria.
We need emergency catering. Three nights.
Feast of the Seven Fishes on the first. Christmas-adjacent—tonight’s four days off the date, but the Signore is particular.
We heard you handle seafood cleanly and that your lemon pastry melts like memory. ”
I close my eyes. The streetlight flickers. “Who gave you my name?”
“Your client from Trastevere. The pop-up under the sycamores—she said your fritto misto didn’t taste heavy after an hour.”
I exhale slowly. “Menu, guest count, and site kitchen?”
“Guest count twenty-four for the first night, eighteen for the remaining two. There’s a full kitchen. We can send photos. Remote location. You would sleep on site. Triple rate.”
Triple rate is the kind of number that makes my hands shake, which is how I know I shouldn’t say yes right away. My eyes go to the doorway of Marco’s room, to the half-lit whale on the quilt. “I don’t travel alone,” I say. “I have a child.”
“How old?”
“Four. He’s well-behaved. He plays with cars and he eats more fruit than is reasonable.”
“We can accommodate,” Gabriella says without missing a beat, which means the villa has staff and rooms and a budget. “One double room for you both. Ground floor if you prefer.”
“What about security?” The word comes out before I can smooth it. It’s the only time I let my voice go sharp.
There’s a breath on the other end that tells me the villa is used to talking around things. “We’re remote,” she says. “There’s a gate and a caretaker. It’s calm.”
Calm means nothing and everything. Calm means they want me to come.
Calm means I’ve learned enough not to ask for the kind of details that don’t matter once you’re already there.
I look at Marco’s door again. I do the math in my head.
Triple rate covers two months’ rent and the higher deposit on a better school, more if I keep my costs down and don’t buy new knives.
“I’ll come,” I say and write down the address with a pen that’s running out of ink.
“I’ll bring my own fishmonger’s contacts in Rome.
If your local supplier has good baccalà, I’ll take it.
If not, I’ll soak my own. I need citrus.
A lot of it. And ice. And a pot big enough to bathe a medium-sized dog. ”
Gabriella laughs like she appreciates cooks who tell the truth. “Send your list. There’s a driver if you need one. Or you can bring a van and we’ll open the service gate.”
“I’ll drive,” I say, because control is cheaper than fear.
After I hang up, I stand still in my small kitchen while the city moves outside my window and feel two opposite things at once, relief big enough to make me sway and a thread of dread that runs from my throat to my ribs.
Umbria is vineyards and light on the hills and lakes that look like waiting.
It is also country that sometimes keeps its guests a little too quiet.
I close my eyes and count backward from twenty-four, the way I taught myself on nights when I needed to fall asleep without dreaming.
In the morning I tell Marco we’re going on an adventure.
He claps like seals do and asks if adventures include gelato even when it’s cold.
I explain that gelato is a year-round obligation, not a treat.
He puts Lightning McQueen, his favorite little red car, in his small backpack along with a book about fish we got at the Sunday market for one euro.
He chooses two cars to ride in his pockets and plans surgeries for the others when we’re back.
He stands on his chair while I pack the crates—lemons, blood oranges, bergamots, parsley and mint and fennel fronds, garlic with skins as thin as paper, anchovies packed in salt, tins of olive oil I would marry if laws were different, sea salt that crunches between your teeth if you don’t respect it, flour, semolina, capers in brine, canned San Marzano tomatoes for comfort, a jar of chilies that make me honest. I leave space for fish because I’ll pick that up last.
We swing by the market at dawn. My fishmonger, Carlo, pushes a crate toward me without my asking. “For your seven,” he says, proud. “Tell whoever hired you that they’re lucky. Take extra vongole. They sing louder than mussels if you treat them right.”
“I always treat them right,” I say, and he kisses the air by my ear.
The drive out of Rome is a slow lesson in patience and then a mercy once the ring road falls behind us.
The highway opens into hills, the olive trees shivering tightly in their rows like a choir.
Marco counts tunnels. He counts cows. He asks me to play the fishermen story but the real one, not the one with talking boats.
I give him the clean version, seven dishes because the sea is generous, anchovies because they are brave, shrimp because they are sweet, calamari because they can be tender if you are.
“Like people,” he says from the back, already sleepy.
“Like people,” I agree.