32. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
The village was carved into a hillside above the sea, and it smelled like lemons and salt and a couple of thousand years of people getting on with it.
We came up the last stretch in a car too small and too old to belong to a Ferraro, which I understood immediately was the point.
Giovanni had wanted, for once in his life, to arrive somewhere with none of the weight of the name pressing down ahead of him.
Lemon trees crowded the terraces in green and gold.
Feral cats held the low stone walls like a standing garrison, unbothered, unimpressed.
A church bell somewhere above us tolled an hour that didn’t seem to correspond to any clock I owned, and Nico pressed both palms to the window and shrieked, joyously and at length, at a pair of goats.
Two men stood where the road narrowed at the last bend. Not doing anything. Just there, one with a newspaper he wasn’t reading, one leaning on the wall with a clean sightline down the whole approach.
I clocked them before I chose to. Old habit, the one I’d told Giovanni I hated, the one he’d said meant he never had to worry about me. And I felt the familiar drop in my stomach, the reflex that whispered the life found us even here, even now, even at the far edge of the world.
Then Giovanni’s hand found mine on the seat.
“Even the honeymoon has a perimeter,” he said quietly, watching my face.
“Two weeks. That’s all it is. I couldn’t make it none - I tried, and I couldn’t, not honestly, not with the two of you in the car.
So I made it as small as it goes. Two men and a newspaper.
They’ll fade by tomorrow. You won’t see them again unless you go looking. ”
I looked at the two men, who nodded to us like neighbors waving in a car full of relatives, and instead of pulling my hand away I laced my fingers through his.
Because I’d married the whole of him, with my eyes wide open, in a theater, in front of everyone.
The perimeter was part of him. And he’d shrunk the entire apparatus of the most dangerous life in America down to two bored men and a folded newspaper, for me, so that I could pick basil in the sun without flinching.
“Okay,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Okay.” I squeezed. “Take me to the sauce.”
***
Nonna Peppina was ninety years old and four foot eleven of undiluted judgment, and she came out of a doorway hung with drying peppers to inspect us the way a general inspects troops she strongly suspects of desertion.
She looked at Giovanni and said something short and stern in a dialect so old and so fast that it made her grandson, the don of New York, a man who had faced down federal courts without a flicker, stand up straighter and drop his eyes like a scolded boy.
She looked at me for a long, evaluating, genuinely terrifying moment.
Then she looked at Nico. And Nico, who had opinions about everything and volume settings for none of them, went abruptly, completely silent, staring up at this tiny ancient woman with the honest awe of a baby who has recognized, on some cellular level, an authority greater than his own.
He reached out and closed one fat fist around her gnarled finger.
Peppina barked three sentences, laughed once like a door slamming, and turned and walked back into the house, leaving the three of us standing on the step in the lemon-light.
“What did she say?” I asked.
Giovanni’s ears had gone red, the tell I’d fallen for across a betrothal dinner a lifetime ago, the one thing about him that had never once learned to lie. “She says you’re too pretty for me, and the baby got your brains.” He cleared his throat. “She’s keeping you both.”
***
The village adopted us inside a day.
I don’t know how else to say it. By the second morning there were no strangers, only women who pressed warm bread into my hands and wouldn’t hear a word about it, old men who argued with Giovanni about the sea and the government and each other, children who spirited Nico off to a shaded courtyard and returned him hours later filthy and beaming and smelling of oranges and somebody’s grandmother’s cooking.
The two men on the road dissolved into the scenery so completely that by the third day I’d forgotten to keep track of them, which I think was the whole gift Giovanni had been trying to give me.
And there was the kitchen.
The kitchen. The one where it all started, where a woman had taught a boy to tear basil instead of cutting it, because the knife bruises the leaves and they have to feel wanted, and where that boy had grown into a man who tried to teach me the same thing on a Sunday morning in a Brooklyn brownstone before we lost it, and then found it again, and then lost the recipe to a woman in my apron, and then earned it back inch by inch over a year of small quiet repairs.
Peppina let me in. That was the honor of the trip, and I understood it as one, bigger than the church, bigger than the sea.
She taught me the step the card leaves out.
There’s always a step the card leaves out, it turns out; a thing that lives only in the hands and can’t survive being written down.
She taught it to me at her own worn table while she banished her grandson to the terrace to pick lemons with Nico strapped to his chest in a length of cloth she’d wound herself, expertly, in about four seconds, tutting the whole time.
“Men,” she informed me, in careful, hard-won English, watching Giovanni through the window with a basket and a baby and an expression of total, uncomplicated contentment, “ruin the salt.”
“He’d argue with that.”
“He argues with everything. This is why he needed a wife who argues back.” She pressed my hands down into the dough, correcting my pressure without ceremony.
“I told his mother, years ago. Nobody listens to the old woman. And then she is proven right, and still - “a magnificent shrug-”still, nobody thanks her.”
***
That night, in the old stone house with the shutters thrown open to the sea, I took my time with him.
There was no clock. No crisis on the other side of the door.
No wall of grief or fear between us for the first time in longer than I could stand to count.
The moon came up off the water in a long silver road and laid itself across his skin, across the recipe inked over his ribs, the flat plane of his stomach, the cut of his hip where the sheet had slid away.
I let myself look at all of it, greedy and unhurried and entirely without shame, and then I put my mouth on the tattoo over his heart and felt him go still under me.
“Kylie.” A warning. Or a prayer. His hands came to my hips and I took them off and pinned them to the mattress instead.
“My honeymoon,” I said. “My rules. Hands stay where I put them.”
His pupils blew wide. His hands twitched where I’d pinned them. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Eventually.”
I took him apart on purpose, slow and merciless, kissing down the ink and the muscle, learning which sounds I could drag out of him when I lingered and which ones when I moved on, telling him in plain filthy words exactly what I meant to do to him and in what order.
The most controlled man I’d ever known came undone an inch at a time because I’d decided he would, and I told him that too.
“You should see yourself,” I said against his stomach. “The don of New York, about to beg.”
“I’m not begging.”
“You will be.”
He was, inside a minute, hoarse and undone and gorgeous with it, hips chasing nothing because I wouldn’t let him have it yet.
When I finally rose over him and sank down, taking all of him in one slow stretch that punched the air out of both of us, he swore in two languages, and I made him watch me do it.
“Hands where I left them,” I reminded him, and rolled my hips, and watched his jaw work.
“Kylie-”
“In English.”
“I love you. God, I love you, now please-”
I laced my fingers through his and rode him exactly as slow as I wanted, right up until slow stopped being possible for either of us, and then I took us both over, clenching around him while he lost the last of his control on a broken sound against my mouth.
Sun-drunk. Salt-skinned. For the first time in the whole long history of us, not one tear in it.
Just heat. Just want. Just two people who had finally, finally stopped bracing for the fall.
Afterward we lay tangled in linen that smelled of lavender and salt, his mouth against my shoulder, his heart still hammering under my palm, and he said something in Italian that I understood now without needing it turned over into English first.
***
On our last night, Peppina put the book in my hands.
Not a copy. The book, the real one, the ancient stained ledger of recipes in a hand older even than hers, the source of the card that Giovanni had needled permanently into his own body because he was so afraid of losing it.
She pressed it into my open palms and folded my fingers closed over it and fixed me with eyes that had watched the better part of a century go by and found most of it wanting.
“It only feeds people you love,” she said.
“That is the secret. Everyone comes to me and asks the secret ingredient, all these years, and this is it, and no one believes me because it’s too simple to sell.
” She leaned in close, conspiratorial, and winked.
“Don’t tell him there isn’t one. Let him think there’s a spice. It keeps him humble.”
***
I figured out the rest on the plane home.
The breakfast cart came rattling down the aisle, and the smell of the coffee hit me sideways, deeply, immediately, comprehensively wrong, and I sat very still with the back of my hand pressed to my mouth until it passed, and then, because I am my mother’s daughter and I do not panic, I did the math.
The wedding. Two weeks in Sicily with no clock and a man making up for lost time with the focus he brings to everything that matters.
I counted the days on my fingers. Twice. Got the same terrifying, impossible, wonderful answer both times.
Beside me, Giovanni slept with Nico drooling contentedly on his shoulder, both of them peaceful, both of them entirely unaware that our family had just quietly grown by one somewhere on a hillside above the sea.
“Oh no,” I whispered, to no one, to the window, to the clouds. “His timing is genetic.”