Chapter 6 The Red Convertible
There’s a kind of man who comes into the world already owed. It’s in the walk, and in how he enters a room as if the room had been keeping his seat. Brandon was one. In the weeks I’d been here I’d learned to pick the breed out from across a terrace and to be somewhere else by the time it arrived.
I’d told Rosa yes on the third day after the wedding and hadn’t had a free hour since.
I knew the villa by now better than I’d ever known the townhouse in Lincoln Park, which had been his anyway.
Days were the guests and the books. Evenings were Pietro’s kitchen and ten new words from Chiara, and in between came the papers, an Italian bank account I was still learning to read, and Maddie’s half-day summer program in town.
I held on to all of it with both hands. The minute I let go, Brandon came up in me with his sentence from that last morning in the suite. That I was the home.
That morning the breed drove up in person.
I heard it first, from the shore road, before there was anything to see: an expensive engine, lazy, with a growl under it that didn’t hurry for anybody.
Then a red convertible swept into the forecourt on a fan of gravel and stopped at the foot of the steps.
The one spot on the property where nobody parks.
The man who got out was tanned and dark-haired, in a linen shirt open at the chest and crumpled as linen gets when nobody has ever asked you to iron it, the careless kind of expensive you inherit.
He stretched, looked the yard over, took me in as part of the yard, then took off his sunglasses.
He was handsome. I put that away fast, because handsome and sure of himself had already cost me more than I could pay.
“So there’s a new one,” he said, from a height, the way you speak to whoever’s holding the jug. A slow smile, the kind you give the help. “And pretty. Grandma’s getting old, but she hasn’t lost her taste in servants.”
Six weeks ago I’d have gone red and said sorry for something I hadn’t done. I set the jug down on the table and came down the steps and looked him in the eye.
“You can’t leave the car there. Guest parking’s outside the gate.”
“I’m not a guest.” He tossed his keys and caught them. Tossed them again. He liked that I was watching. “Bags inside. Tell Grandma the prodigal grandson is back.” He waited for me to enjoy that. “And a coffee. A ristretto, not the pale water you pour for the tourists.”
I’d carried for a man and poured for him and read what he wanted off his face before he knew it himself, and it had ended at a front desk with a bill I couldn’t pay. In these weeks I’d learned the difference between working and serving, and I wasn’t going to serve another man.
“Your bags are in the trunk, and you’ve got hands,” I said. “The coffee’s for guests. You’re not one.”
Nothing. Then he laughed, head back, loud, and there was none of the swagger in it.
“Peperoncino,” he said.
He leaned back against the hood and looked at me again, as if I’d turned out to be somebody. I didn’t know the word. From how he drew it out, it was something hot with a bite to it.
“So what’s your real name, peperoncino?”
“Katherine. I work here. I don’t entertain visitors.”
“Alessandro.” He turned a hand over, hunting for the word. “I’m around. Sometimes.”
I went to walk past him. He swayed sideways into my path, playing. It was all a game to him. The yard, the car, and now me.
“Grandma picked somebody up again, huh?” He said it with fondness, from a long way up. “She does that. She loves it. A lame dog off the mountain, an American girl with a suitcase. Don’t take it personally. Her strays don’t usually last.”
Picked up. That went in deeper than servants had, and then he had a word for people like me. Strays.
I drew a breath. I had a line for him, in his own light register, and it had the word prodigal in it.
Rosa came out onto the terrace above us, and the line stayed where it was.
“Alex!”
One word from the top of the steps, and not Alessandro. What followed was Italian, fast, but that one was English, in a voice Rosa didn’t use for anything else. An American’s name for a boy. Only one person could have said it to him like that, and he’d been dead twenty years.
Her face went young all at once. She came down and got hold of him and kissed both cheeks more times than I could count, talking the whole while. Out of the rattle I caught one word I knew. Finalmente. Finally.
She turned to me, and something behind her eyes was having a very good time.
“I see you two have met. This is my grandson, Alessandro. The one who gets all this mess when I’m gone, God help it. And my main headache.”
In English, to me, with him standing right there.
I looked from one of them to the other. Heir. The man I’d just sent to carry his own bags wasn’t a guest. He was the owner’s blood. A fine start.
“Heir,” he said. “Sounds more solid.”
The corner of his mouth went.
“An heir,” Rosa said, the way a doctor reads you the chart, “who in five years hasn’t lived here five weeks in a row. Racing, yachts, pretty girls. Nobody beats him at those. Ask him to put a shoulder to anything and it’s later, nonna. Later.” She did the last part in his voice.
“Nonna.” Still smiling. “Not in front of the staff.”
The smile stayed, but something else was holding it up now. That had landed harder than he’d show. Or I wanted it to have.
“The staff here is family now,” Rosa said, pleased with herself no end. “Get used to it.” Then, to me: “Alex stays through the end of the season. It’s high time he found out whose skinny little shoulders this place is riding on. Show him around.”
“Me? Him?” It came out higher than I wanted.
“Who else.” She was already walking. “You know every corner. He doesn’t know one.”
He looked at me, arms crossed. The smirk was back at the corners. He told me to go on. Show him the place, peperoncino.
I took him across the yard, braced to keep a rich man from getting bored, the red car still on its spot behind us. At the old olive he stopped without warning and put his palm flat on the cracked bark.
“Does it still bear anything?” The swagger was gone out of it. “Grandpa planted it. The year he married nonna.”
I didn’t know. What I did see, all at once, was that under the tan and the nerve there was somebody I hadn’t made out yet. And I wanted to make him out, which I could have done without.