Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
GIOVANNI
THE CAFIERO FAMILY CHAT
Enzo: Dammit, Giovanni. You had one job. [LINK]
Aria: To have the best damn abs in the whole family?
I can hear the door creaking open downstairs, which suggests it needs to be oiled and also that Theo and the nonnas have returned. No doubt they’re already in foul moods that will get worse the second Bianca tells them about Eva St. Claire.
I should go down there.
But I’m feeling too fucked up. I don’t know what to do with myself, whether I want to go or stay. Even though I’m annoyed with Bianca, I do want to help. I promised Miles I would, and my word matters to me. Besides, this farm is important to me too.
I hear a few raised voices, one of them Bianca’s, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like everyone’s arguing—they’re just being themselves. So I ignore the loud chatter and click the Instagram link Enzo sent, already knowing what I’ll find: a photo of Eva St. Claire with her arm draped around me.
I look like a deer caught in the headlights.
The caption beneath the photo reads:
I FOUND The Shirtless Chef! Giovanni Cafiero is working at a rinky-dink farm in Apple Ridge, North Carolina.
I know that sounds impossible, but IT’S HIM.
It’s confirmed, even though he was wearing a name tag that said John.
I don’t know if he lost his memory or what, but the woman who owns this place is straight-up nuts, and he seems to be under her thumb.
She tried to steal my phone to erase the evidence, but Giovanni stopped her.
#liberateGiovanni. #savetheShirtlessChef
I choke on a laugh, positive Bianca will like that. She was quite something earlier, defending me and my chest.
But the laughter dries up pretty quickly when I realize Eva St. Claire isn’t just a strange lady who’s trigger-happy with her phone camera.
She’s a lifestyle coach with nearly five hundred thousand followers.
My mood sours more when I see there are already thousands of comments.
I start reading through them, clenching my jaw.
Blink twice if you’re being held against your will, Giovanni.
Um. I’m going to Apple Ridge. TOMORROW.
Road trip, anyone?! [Jeep emoji]
I bury my head in my hands, feeling half panicked. It won’t be long until everyone sees it.
It’s hard to believe all of this started to innocently, driven by my wish to save my family business and my need to prove myself after Janine burned me.
I came up with the idea for the Shirtless Chef after watching a bunch of YouTube videos during a slow period. One guy had a channel called Shitty Cooking, where he prepared so-so meals from canned and frozen food. And I’ll be damned, the man had almost a million followers. Plenty of sponsors, too.
Plenty of money.
So when Nico and I sat down in my office to discuss strategies to save the business that didn’t involve our big brother stepping in to rescue our asses, I floated the idea of starting our own channel. “We know Italian food,” I told him. “People like Italian food. And women like Italian men.”
“They also like abs,” he replied, laughing, and paused to swig the bottle of grappa we were passing back and forth.
Our nonno had loved it, and Nonna insisted on keeping it in stock to honor his memory, although almost no one ever bought it because it tasted like jet fuel.
“Why don’t you just record your abs every day and set the footage to music? ”
I turned toward him, feeling fired up. “What if we combined the two?”
“Your abs are gonna make Italian food?” He smirked. “I can see Nonna now—Madonn’, what a miracle!”
I laughed. “Basically, yes. I figure we can cut off the head—”
“Off with the head,” he cackled.
“—so only the torso is showing,” I continued over Nico’s drunken laughter. “But you’ll have to be the one showing off your abs. You’re the cook in the family. I’m not as bad as Enzo, but I’m not much better than Aria.”
Our little sister has always preferred adventure to the kitchen.
Nonna has never been known for her modern beliefs, but she’d been surprisingly okay with our little sister’s disinterest in domesticity—right up until Aria had moved to Greece to work at a vacation resort.
It was one thing to be adventurous, and quite another thing to move across the ocean.
Maybe it would have been different if she’d chosen Italy, but we’ll never know.
Nico was already shaking his head. “No way. I don’t like being on camera. Besides, you just got done telling me about the Shitty Cooking guy. You can cook better than that. And I’ll help you. I’ll bet you can get more followers than him by January.”
“How much will you bet me?”
“How ’bout this. I’ll give you a bottle of grappa.”
“I thought you wanted to motivate me?”
It had felt like a joke, but when I got in the next day with a vicious hangover, the first thing Nico said to me was, “I say we start small. Spaghetti al pomodoro. We’ll make it at your house this weekend.
I ordered one of those ring lights, but you should probably get a real camera if you’re gonna do this seriously. ”
It took a few seconds for his words to compute. “We’re really doing this?”
He laughed. “Enzo’s making some noise about coming home to ‘fix’ the business. If we want to beat him to it, we’d better get started.”
We didn’t beat him to it.
Enzo came home, saved Hidden Italy with a few of his patented brilliant ideas, and fell in love with a great girl, who was about to become my sister-in-law.
I continued to film the videos even after the urgency passed and Nico lost interest. It gave me a sense of purpose—a job that hadn’t been passed down or assigned to me.
And people really liked the videos. They seemed to appreciate the way I talked through the recipes in steps, telling stories about my family. Plus, they liked that the recipes weren’t too complicated—I was still learning and growing as a cook too.
The first video went viral earlier this year, and others followed.
Viewers started speculating about the identity of the Shirtless Chef.
Someone even made a joke about my secret identity on a major late-night comedy show, which resulted in a massive wave of interest. It wasn’t long before interview requests began to stream into my inbox from major news outlets.
I turned them down, of course, without a second thought. I liked the anonymity. I preferred to maintain a separation between my two selves.
There was me, Giovanni Cafiero, and there was him, the Shirtless Chef. I could become him whenever I wanted to, and the rest of the time I could pretend he didn’t exist.
Now, not so much.
The voices filtering up from downstairs suddenly grow louder, Nonna’s chief among them.
Time to face the music.
I leave the room but make a stop in the hall bathroom to splash water on my face. Before I leave the bathroom, I roll my shoulders a few times as if I’m about to step into a battle.
When I walk onto the landing, Bianca is cresting the top of the steps.
Her dark hair is loose over her shoulders now, and her cheeks are pink. Probably from all the bickering I overheard. She’s wearing a pair of slip-on shoes.
“Going to try to push me down again?” I ask as she comes to a stop.
A smile flits across her face, but she shakes her head.
“No, I’m here to liberate you.” Uncertainty fills her eyes.
“Only if you want me to, of course. I feel bad about what I said earlier. I was out of line. Obviously, it’s not your fault the farm is doing badly, and it’s not your responsibility to fix it. ”
I scuff my foot against the carpet. “We showed up and claimed your hospitality. It probably is my responsibility to help.”
“Thank you for saying so, but no. Look…I thought maybe we could go for a walk downtown, before…”
“Before everyone finds out you kidnapped me and erased my memory?”
“So you saw her post too. Hashtag ‘savetheShirtlessChef.’” She smiles, tipping her head toward me. “I think we’ll be okay. But you should know, I’m prepared to defend you with my life. A woman doesn’t go to the trouble of kidnapping an amnesiac only to hand him over to some other psychopath.”
I smile back, still a little annoyed with her but starved enough for social contact that I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. “I certainly wouldn’t cross you.”
I glance past her at the staircase. “Speaking of women I don’t want to cross, I take it the nonnas are back?”
“Yes, and I should tell you…your grandmother knows,” Bianca says softly. “We were discussing it downstairs just now, after they finished calling the wagon guy a dozen different Italian swears.”
My throat suddenly feels tight. I’m not afraid of my grandmother, but I hate letting her down. One of my biggest fears is that my whole family will see me the way Janine did—a waste of life. A good-times guy. A nobody.
“Are they eating dinner?” I ask.
“Yes. We can join them if you’d like. The eggplant parmigiana is delicious, by the way, and way better than the energy bars I stole from the kitchen for you.
” She lifts the handle of the tote bag she has slung over her arm.
“But I thought you might like to sneak out of the house for a little while.”
I nod slowly. I’ll have to talk to Nonna Francesca, obviously, but a lifetime of experience has taught me it’s a good idea to give her time to cool off. We can have a conversation tomorrow as easily as today. “Okay. But where are we going?”
“You think you can still climb out of a window?”
“You’ve seen my abs. I’m in perfect shape.”
She gives a surprised laugh and swats my arm.
Some of my darkness slips away, as if she’s tugging it off me.
It strikes me that Bianca must make a great nurse. She’d be all tough love one moment and conciliatory caretaking the next. I wonder if any of the people she’s taken care of have wanted to stay sick just so they could be around her longer.