Chapter 14 The Booking
The first drop hit the tablecloth between the main course and the toasts.
A flat sound on the linen an inch from Signora Ferretti’s hand, then the dark spot spreading in the starch.
A minute earlier everything had been exactly where I’d put it: eighty guests at the long tables, the candles in their glasses, Lorenzo’s band into the waltz, and the two of them at the head table, fifty years married, holding hands while the tables laughed.
Then the cold came down off the mountains and the lake went black, and I looked up.
Last June I would have stood there and watched it rain. Now I was already moving, and the fear hadn’t caught up with me yet.
“Chiara. Every housekeeper to the orangery. Tables in a U, the way we do for the tasting.” I was walking.
“Pietro, hold the main five minutes. The cake goes in the cold. Marco, everyone through the gallery. Umbrellas at the door, the old people first.” Lorenzo had seen my face.
“Don’t stop,” I told him. “You play in the rain, you play walking. Not one second of silence.”
And they did it. That was the strange part, and I kept it off my face. Marco was already turning the crowd toward the gallery with one arm. Chiara was gone. Pietro covered his sauces without a word. The whole house answered like an instrument somebody had finally tuned.
The sky opened the instant the last guest was under the roof.
Rain came down like a wall on the empty terrace where dinner had stood a minute before.
In the orangery, warm and gold with the candles, the band finished the waltz as if nothing had happened, and Signora Ferretti, seventy years old, danced with her husband between the shoved-together tables.
Not one guest ever found out how close it came.
One problem was mine alone. The north corner. The bucket was out of the storeroom and under it before the first trickle found the old plaster, and nobody at the party knew the house had a north corner.
In the middle of the dancing old Signor Ferretti found me and took both my hands in his.
They were dry and warm. He said something fast, in Italian, and had to stop partway.
Fifty years they had waited for this evening, signora, and I had saved it for them.
Behind him Marco was looking off to one side, and I caught his nod. Short. Against his will.
For Marco, I figured, that was the same as getting down on his knees.
When the storm had blown itself out and the last guests had gone up, I went out onto the terrace to breathe, and he was there.
Alessandro sat on an upturned crate under the awning with his shirt soaked through, wiping somebody’s knocked-over candlestick with a rag.
Rain still came off the canvas above him.
He’d carried tables with the waiters the whole time it poured and hadn’t made one joke.
Six months away had changed him, whatever he said.
He’d left the morning after the bridge. Packed the car and told Rosa, not me, that he was going so he wouldn’t get in the way of my deciding.
In March the red convertible had come back into the forecourt on a spray of gravel and stopped on the one spot where nobody was allowed to park, and in the three months since, this was the first time he’d said more than ten words to me that weren’t about a hinge.
“You saved everybody again, peperoncino.” He didn’t look up from the candlestick. “And you’re acting like it was nothing. Again.”
I wrung out the hem of my dress and didn’t look at him either. “It’s the job. Thanks for helping with the tables.”
He set the candlestick down and looked at me. “Kate. How much longer are we going to talk about tables?”
“As long as it takes.”
He stood and came a step closer, and his voice dropped.
“I didn’t come back to play games. I honestly tried to forget you.
Six months of it. Other cities, the old crowd, everything that used to work on me.
None of it worked. I missed you and Maddie every day of it.
I found out I don’t need the old life. Not an ounce of it.
And I didn’t want to promise you that. I went and tested it.
Because you don’t take anybody’s word for anything. ”
Every word of it got in, so I reached for the one piece of armor I had left.
“I’ve carried this place and my daughter for a year. I can’t afford to be wrong again. Not for anyone. This is my whole life now.”
“You’re not wrong.” No anger in it, which was what made it worse. “You’re hiding. Before, it was behind a husband. Now it’s behind a villa. What’s the difference?”
I had nothing.
“Mom!” Maddie came out of the gallery at full volume, a year taller, with Romeo in her arms, fat and brazen now and pouring out of them. She saw the other one. “Alex! It’s June! You said May, you said it twice. You promised to teach me to skip stones!”
He crouched in front of her, and the weight went out of his face all at once. He whispered something in her ear, and she doubled over laughing, cat and all.
I watched the two of them, Alex and my daughter, how easy they were, how right, and the armor gave where I had patched it hardest. Her hair in her face, his head bent to hers, the cat wedged between them, and none of the three looking at me.
I sent myself to bed after midnight and lay there. Then I gave up and went down to the desk to build next week’s arrivals. The busiest week so far was starting. Mid-June, the first full house of the year, and almost a year to the day since the June that had turned my life over on this lake.
The rain started up again on the window while I scrolled. A German family. Newlyweds from Florence. A party of Brits. Then an American booking, and my fingers stopped on the key.
Bella Vista suite. Seven nights. Check-in on the anniversary. Two guests. Keller, Brandon. Plus one: Julie.
I read it three times, as if the letters might move around. They didn’t. My husband, my ex-husband, and his mistress were coming on vacation. As a couple. On our anniversary. To the hotel where a year ago he’d left me with a child and a bill he hadn’t paid.
Then the rest of it got to me. He’d picked this villa on purpose. He was bringing Julie here to celebrate, sure he’d find the same beaten-down help he’d left, and could point out to her one more time where that help belonged.
“Someone you know?”
Rosa was behind me without a sound, in her silk robe, the storm’s worry still on her face. She followed my eyes to the screen and drew herself up.
“He’s coming here,” I said. “With her. On the anniversary. Into my home.”
Rosa looked at the two names a long moment. Then she smiled, and I was glad it wasn’t at me.
“Well.” Steel had come into her English. “The gentleman left something here unpaid when he ran. People on this lake don’t forget a thing like that. Debts don’t get forgiven here. They wait their hour, kiddo.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, not then. I looked at the two names and the date, the anniversary he meant to celebrate with somebody else, and waited for the fear. It didn’t come.
A year ago, at this desk, the bill was put in front of me. This time the move was mine.