Chapter 7 The Kitten
For three days I walked Alessandro through the back of his own house, as ordered. The linen room, the kitchen at six in the morning, the delivery van, the rooms in turnover. I kept waiting for his company to turn into a weight. It never did. It got easy, and that was the part that scared me.
He was impossible, and charming exactly enough to get away with it. A standing offer to drop my rags and come see “the real Como,” and forever in the one doorway I needed.
The other half I kept catching. He had every housemaid’s name by the first afternoon.
He talked a delivery man down over a crate of tomatoes until Pietro, at the stove, grunted, and in Pietro a grunt is a medal.
He knew the north corner of the roof leaked in a storm, and why nonna wouldn’t rent the blue room.
I was angry at myself. A rich, vain, idle man is a cartoon, and a cartoon can’t hurt you. A real one can.
Day four the lake was a white haze and the guests had gone to ground in the shade. Pietro gave up and turned off the stove. I’d been on my feet since six every day that week, and to my surprise I liked it. Somebody needed me again. All that was missing was a minute to myself.
At lunch my phone rang. Brandon, the second time that week.
“Katie.” He’d put the warm voice on. “Enough of this. Come home. I’ll forgive the whole thing, I’ll pay for the flights.”
“No.”
“You signed up as a maid?” Same breath, and the warmth was gone. “You’ll go far with a mop, Katie.”
I hung up and set the phone face-down on the table. Then I folded the napkin, unfolded it, folded it again. The call was over long before my hands were.
Maddie went down for her nap. I took the gap and went down through the garden to the boathouse. Checking the lower gate, if anybody asked. The old planks were hot through my flats, nobody could see me from the house, and I waited for his voice to wear off.
The squeak came from under the boards, right at the waterline. Thin and frantic. I got down on my knees and leaned over the edge.
An orange kitten the size of my fist was clamped to the last piling, a hand above the lake.
It had climbed as far as the piling went, run out of piling, and was too scared to jump.
A motorboat passed, and its wake ran up the stone a little higher than the one before, and the kitten pulled itself up a quarter inch it didn’t have.
I kicked off my flats, sat on the wet planks and reached down.
“Come here, little guy. Come on.”
It hissed at me and swiped, and hung on.
“Peperoncino. Can you see what you’re doing down there?”
From above and behind me. I didn’t turn around. The hands would be in his pockets and the grin the width of his face.
“Because if you go in, I’ll have to fish out both of you.”
“Help,” I said, “or go enjoy the view somewhere else.”
Next would come one more line and then his back going up the steps. Instead his loafers hit the boards. I turned my head. He was pulling his shirt off over his head, linen that cost a week of groceries, as if he actually meant to go into the lake after a stray cat.
What was it to him.
“Move back,” he said. “You’re going to fall in.”
I was nearly at the piling already, and two people in the water was no better than one.
“Then hold me. I’m closer.”
He weighed that, and knelt behind me, got one arm around my middle, pulled me back against him and braced his other hand on the dock post. The grip was solid, and I could hang out over the water without thinking about the stone at the foot of the pilings.
The trouble was his bare chest against my back, and what that did to my balance had nothing to do with the lake.
I stretched for the piling. The kitten flinched and lost its hold, and I gasped and lunged after it, and his arm clamped and stopped me going in behind it. A wave ran over my wrist.
“Easy.” Low, into the top of my head, the voice you’d use on a horse. “I’ve got you. Little more.”
I twisted, reached past where my arm should have gone, and got a wet, scraped scrap of cat in my hand. It thanked me by sinking every claw it owned into my finger.
He hauled me back in one pull, and in the same second the boat’s wake came over the edge and took us both, head to foot.
We went over backward onto the hot boards, soaked and filthy.
The kitten couldn’t tell rescuer from enemy and raked me first and then him, and Alessandro hissed back at it exactly like a cat, and neither of us could stop laughing, with the rescued animal yowling at full volume between us.
The laughing ran out slowly. We lay on the warm planks getting our breath back, his shoulder still warm against mine, and I was in no hurry to move.
He turned his head. I turned mine. His face was very close, and none of the lazy mockery he’d driven in with was on it.
He was looking at me like a man who’d just found out who he was talking to, and hadn’t expected it.
Something in me turned over.
“You’ve got water on your lashes,” he said.
“You’ve got blood on your hand.”
I looked away first. I was not going to fall again for a handsome man who’d had everything in life handed to him.
He sat up, set the shivering kitten on his knee and wiped its face with the edge of his wet shirt, one careful stroke at a time. The animal that a minute ago would rather have drowned than be touched pushed its nose into his palm.
He studied the fresh scratches on his hand.
“That’s how it goes,” he said, half to himself. “You climb down to save something, and you’re the one who gets torn up for it.” A sideways look at me. “Familiar story, peperoncino. Isn’t it.”
There was no game in the look, and I had no answer.
“Mom! Mom, the kitty!”
Maddie came down the path at a run, Chiara behind her flapping her hands, and by the time she reached the boards the orange bandit was hers and nobody argued.
She pressed the wet cat to her chest.
“His name is Romeo.”
Alessandro clutched his heart like a man in an opera. “This mangy bandit? Casanova, at best. Romeo is love and balconies. Romeo doesn’t drown under somebody else’s dock.”
“Romeo,” Maddie said, and gave him a look.
He put both palms up. “Romeo it is. I’ve already figured out there’s no arguing with the women of this family.”
This family. He said it in passing, about the two of us, and didn’t hear himself, and it jolted through me.
Rosa came down the path and took in the whole wet company: the cat, Maddie laughing, her grandson half naked and covered in orange fur.
She smiled at some thought of her own and went back up, and my face went hot at her back, for no reason I was going to give.
From that day Romeo owned the villa. He slept on the polished wood of the reception desk, stole Pietro’s fish, and out of the whole household recognized two people: Maddie, and the man Maddie had started calling Alex.
Each time the orange thief wound himself around his leg, I heard him again: you climb down to save something, and you’re the one who gets torn up.
And I didn’t know what to do with myself.
That evening I washed the cat hair off Maddie and got her into bed, and the whole time his shoulder was still warm against mine, like sun. I reached for the light and caught myself in a thought, and this was the one that actually scared me.
Four days. I didn’t want the summer to end, and I knew exactly how stupid that was. Because when it ended, Alessandro would go, as he always had. And every day there was less of it left.