Epilogue
Weddings at Camelia were booked two summers out.
That morning the terrace over the water was dressed for another one.
A magazine that four years ago wouldn’t have looked at us had just called ours the most beautiful weddings on Como.
I stood in the middle of the white, the rose arch and the long tables running down to the water, and checked it as I had every wedding morning for four years.
One rose in the arch had a browned outer petal, which I pinched off and put in my pocket.
“Mom. Romeo’s asleep in the flowers again.”
Maddie, seven and brown from a summer on the lake, hauled the cat out of the arch by his middle. He’d grown to the size of a small cushion and lost all shame. He hung from her arms like a king who’d been insulted.
“He crushed the whole veil,” she said. “It’s flat.”
“Tell him he only thinks he owns the place.”
She snorted. It was my snort exactly.
She dumped the cat on a chair and went straight to the bride, who had the look they all had by now.
Maddie shook out the train, got a glass of lemon water into the girl’s hand and stood there until she drank, as if she’d done it all her life.
It was the gift I had too. It had nearly wrecked my life, because a woman who sees what everyone needs is easy to keep for the home, and then it had saved it: one wedding my first week here, then this house.
In Maddie it was coming up on its own, with no fear in it and nothing to earn.
Alex came around the oleander tubs with our son on his shoulders. The boy was two, round in the cheeks, with my eyes and his father’s temper, and he had both fists in Alex’s dark curls.
“Papà, run!”
Alex ran. Nobody at this villa refused that particular commander.
The word sent me back once, not for long.
Maddie had said it first the summer we married, in passing, over nothing, the way you say a word that has always been there.
Alex went out into the yard and stood a while with his back to us.
When he turned around his eyes were suspiciously bright, and he blamed the pollen.
Rosa watched from her wicker chair in the shade, older, the same straight back, the same pearls. She’d signed the papers at our wedding. The villa passed to Alex and me, “my children,” she said, dabbing under her eyes with a lace handkerchief.
Signor Conti, who’d once buttoned his jacket and stood up from a table in the middle of somebody else’s disgrace, came every month and brought half of Milan with him.
Brides from everywhere wanted this altar.
I bargained with florists hard enough that old Pietro grunted, and I could tell a sauce had caught from two rooms away.
The house answered my hand. I knew it better than I’d known my old self.
The rich heir from the yachts and the racing had turned out to have a carpenter in him.
He’d restored the east wing, the project his grandfather Nick had talked about all Alex’s childhood and never gotten to.
Evenings, once the guests had gone in, he was out in the yard planing a warped window frame or carving the little one a wooden horse, the twin of the one he’d once mended for Maddie in the courtyard.
Nobody waited anymore for him to get bored and drive off to a race. Least of all Alex.
Mornings he brought me coffee in the office, stronger than I’d learned to make it in four years, set the cup down on my papers, kissed me, and was gone to the children and the day. My life was made of these nothings now. I wouldn’t have traded it for the old one, which was beautiful and empty.
Later, under the old olive Nick had planted the summer of his own wedding, the boy was building something out of pebbles that only he understood, and Romeo lay nearby pretending to stand guard from the coolest patch of shade.
The tree still bore. Rosa pressed oil from it every autumn and swore it was the sweetest on the lake, and I’d stopped arguing years ago.
News from the far side of that summer reached me rarely and sideways.
Brandon never recovered after Como: the deal died, then everything else went, and I chose not to learn what a year of Italian courts had cost him.
Julie flew off after a richer yacht and, as far as anyone knew, was still hunting.
His mother sent one restrained, almost polite letter from Naperville, and I didn’t answer it.
There was nothing left to avenge and nobody to avenge it on.
I’d lived on the other shore for a long time.
By evening somebody else’s wedding was over, and the newlyweds had gone off across the water in a boat done up with ribbons, into a pink dusk. I was behind the desk with the day’s last papers when somebody stopped at the polished wood. One suitcase came into view before the face did.
A young American, with a face I’d worn four summers back, in a mirror. She was gripping her phone hard enough to hurt, and whatever was on it, she’d read more than once.
“I’m sorry. Do you have a room? Any room. The least expensive one you have.” Every sentence finished and set down with care, the English of somebody who’d cry the second she stopped controlling it. “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
The vowels were flat. Midwest.
I knew that grip on the phone. She didn’t know yet that she’d come to the right desk.
Rosa and I looked at each other. She smiled, barely, the smile she’d once picked me up off this floor with.
“Welcome to Camelia,” I said, in the vowels she’d grown up hearing, and she flinched. “Put the suitcase down. We’ll find you a room.”
I didn’t ask what she’d left behind. That story, and whoever one day cut his engine at the foot of our steps, would be her own summer. It began exactly the way mine had.
Alex came up behind me and turned me toward the open doors, the sleeping boy on his shoulder folded into the same hold, and the three of us watched the sun go down over the water, in the direction of the old stone bridge where he’d first kissed me.
“Tired, peperoncino?” he said into my temple.
“Not a bit.”
It was the plain truth.
I wasn’t anybody’s home base. I was home.