Chapter 4 Donna Rosa
I turned around.
She was nothing like the voice. Seventy, maybe, tall and dry and deeply tanned.
A silver bob so smooth it looked ironed.
White linen, wide trousers and a loose shirt, the kind of linen that costs more the plainer it looks.
Thin gold at the ears, a few bracelets, one ring.
Money, taste, and a whole life of being right.
She didn’t look at me. She looked at the man in the jacket and gave him two short, heavy sentences in Italian.
He opened his mouth. She said one word and he shut it.
The papers left the desk and the card terminal went into a drawer.
The young clerk came up straight as a soldier on parade and lost the fight with his grin.
Then she turned to me, and her face went softer.
“We’re not doing this in front of everybody,” she said. The vowels were long and Italian. The words were pure Midwest. “Come along. Bring the little one, she’s cried herself out.”
She had. Maddie’s head was tipped back and she was staring up at the stranger with both eyes, the grievance gone. Curiosity had won.
I took her hand and followed, my sixty-odd euros still lying on the polished wood behind us. I had no idea who this woman was, only that a whole staff had just done what she said.
She walked fast for seventy. In the cool of the hall she dropped a couple of words on a young woman behind the bar and kept walking. Past the guest rooms, through a door, and out.
It wasn’t hotel out here. Wisteria climbed a white wall, and lemon trees stood in tubs. Wicker chairs with linen cushions, pressed. A private room with the walls left off.
After the lobby, the quiet out here took a second to trust. Nobody was watching me. Before we’d sat down, the young woman from the bar came out with a sweating jug of lemonade, glasses and a small plate of cookies, and went back in without a word.
The woman pushed a glass across to Maddie. “Drink that, kiddo.” Then, “What’d you do to your knee?”
Maddie put the knee up on the chair for her, band-aid first. The woman bent over it like a doctor. She turned the knee to the light and pressed the dolphin’s curling edge flat with one finger.
“That’s a serious wound,” she said. “Dolphin was a good call.” Maddie glowed.
“My grandchildren wrecked every knee they owned on these stairs,” the woman said. “They grew up fine.”
She took the chair across from me. Back straight, hands on her knees, the one ring. The hands didn’t move. The chair was hers, and she sat in it that way. Across from hands that still, I let myself halfway believe this would work out somehow. Or at least that nobody was arresting me today.
“I’m Rosa,” she said. “This is my villa. It was my father’s, and his father’s. A hundred years and change in the family.” She looked at the lemon trees, not at me. “So when the man at my front desk threatens a guest with the police in front of a child, that’s my decision to make. Not his.”
The dumbest thing I could have said was the only thing in my head.
“You sound American.”
“Not me. My husband.” She turned the ring once.
“Nick. He came over from Chicago as a young architect and never went back. He stayed for me and for this house. He taught me English before I got him to make a decent cup of coffee. He’s been gone twenty years.
I still talk English with every American who walks in that door, and Como’s never short of Americans.
As long as his language is in the house, he’s only stepped out into the garden. He’ll be back any minute.”
Illinois, in an Italian woman’s mouth. The a in Chicago.
That was what did it. Tears and words at once.
I told her all of it: the anniversary, the water park, Julie in our bed, “an arrangement,” the card shut off this morning, no money for a flight and, honestly, nowhere to fly to.
Rosa listened to the end. No gasp, no shake of the head.
She studied me the way you study a thing you’re deciding about, and there wasn’t an ounce of pity in it.
When I ran dry, a bottle came up from beside her chair, and then a full glass was standing at my elbow. She said nothing about it. I put my hands around it, cold, pulse in my fingers against the glass, and pretended I was listening to the leaves.
“Stronzo,” Rosa said.
I didn’t need that one translated.
“And a coward. A real man doesn’t take petty revenge on his wife. Never on his own child.” She brushed something off her knee. “His bill is going to be paid, and he’s the one paying it. I’ll see to that myself. Don’t be afraid of it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I don’t know how I could ever pay you back.”
She waved that off. “You can’t, and nobody asked you to. You’ll stay a couple of days as my guest, no charge, and I’m not hearing no. Get your feet under you. Think about what’s next with a clear head. Decisions you make in tears and on the run are bad decisions.”
“I have to go home.”
Home. My mother’s one-bedroom in Berwyn and the pull-out couch. Pity from now until whenever. Brandon’s mother in Naperville, who’d introduced me for four years as “Brandon’s wife, she stays home.” Chicago wasn’t going to be any better than here. The bottom was the same on both sides of the ocean.
Rosa shook her head once. “At home they’ll pounce.
Pity, questions, advice. Here there’s summer, and there’s work, and there’s a roof.
” She ticked it off like a grocery list. “My maid went off to have a baby. It’s high season and I’m short of hands.
You stay, you help, you look around. We’ll sort out something for the little one so she’s not underfoot.
The planes aren’t going anywhere. You want to fly, you fly. But first you catch your breath.”
Maddie had slid off her chair. She was walking the row of tubs, touching the glossy lemon leaves one at a time. She was fine here. You can’t fool a three-year-old about that.
I looked at this calm stranger in expensive linen who’d done more for us in half an hour than my husband had all week. Right here, on this terrace, I was about to decide something by myself for the first time, with nobody to check it against. A small decision, a shaky one, and mine.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll stay. Not for long.”
Rosa nodded as if nothing else had been on the table.
“I’m Kate,” I said. “This is Maddie.”
“I know,” she said. “The walls in this house hear everything.” She stood up and smiled. “Welcome to Villa Camelia, Kate. Now we’ll see what you turn out to be.”