Chapter 125
MY MOTHER AND I DID wind up going to the live nativity, per Mary Lou’s suggestion.
Over the preceding days, a three-sided stable had been built in front of the church, and now it was stuffed with straw and populated with well-groomed farm animals.
My mother pointed out a pink pig, shiny as the day it was born, sitting in a corner.
In the middle of the stable sat a manger, and in the manger sat a deliciously fat baby wrapped in a white blanket.
He was maybe nine months old, a little too old to play Baby Jesus, but the upside was that he could hold his own bottle.
Staring adoringly at him were two townspeople dressed as Mary and Joseph, and over the course of about a quarter of an hour, we watched them receive first the shepherds, trailed by several bleating goats, and then the magi, who presented them with gifts.
I could have kept watching, but my mother’s hip was bothering her, so I suggested we get a glass of wine somewhere, and she happily agreed.
It was while we were winding our way through the crowd that Teo called my name. He was a few feet away, carrying a bag of groceries.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, “hi.”
“Salve,” he said, then gave me one of his shy smiles, which was so distracting, I forgot to introduce him to my mother.
“I’m Frances,” she offered. “Eileen’s mom.”
“Where’s Nina?” I asked after we’d gotten through the pleasantries.
“At home with her family. In Milan.”
“You didn’t want to go with her?”
He gave an uncomfortable laugh. “I think it’s too soon for that.”
I was relieved to hear him say so, although, of course, it shouldn’t have mattered to me.
“Besides,” he said, “my parents and my brother Arturo decided to come here.”
“Is this the brother with the little girl?”
His eyes brightened. “Yes, Violetta.”
“You’re not giving her another marionette?”
He laughed. “Her mother still hasn’t forgiven me for the last one.”
I realized we’d been ignoring my mother, so I explained that I had first met Teo in the stationer’s shop, where he’d been buying a marionette for his niece.
“We were going to get a glass of wine,” she said to him, “if you’d like to join us.”
He seemed tempted, like he very much wanted to be in two places at once. But finally, he held up the bag in his hand. “My mother’s cooking a big dinner, and she asked me to pick up the pabassinas. I’m already late delivering them.”
I could picture Teo in his parents’ apartment, eating sweet treats and playing Tombola.
His mother and father would press him for details about the mysterious Milanese girlfriend, and his brother would tell them to lay off.
Meanwhile, Francesca and Bernardo, who had already met Nina, would enjoy holding this over everyone’s heads.
“Give them our best,” I said, but what I wanted to ask was whether, in an alternate universe where I was not married to Paul and Teo had never started dating Nina, I’d have been invited to eat pabassinas with the Mancas.
After we’d said our goodbyes, my mother watched Teo slip back into the crowd. “He seems very nice.”
“He is,” I said.
“And like he’s completely in love with you.”
“Mom!” I said.
“What?” she said, defensively. “I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“He’s with Nina.”
“Oh, please.”
“They’re pretty serious, actually,” I said.
“Not serious enough to spend Christmas together.”
She had a point.
We continued to move in the direction of the Piazza Rossa, where I hoped we might nab two seats at Café Gargiulo if we were willing to sit outside under a heat lamp.
“Remember Shirley?” my mother asked.
“Of course I remember her,” I said. Lenny had dated Shirley for close to two years, but he’d broken up with her shortly before shipping out. “Did she ever marry the Hutchinson kid?”
“She did.”
“Poor girl.”
“There wasn’t a thing wrong with her,” said my mother. “But I could have told you from the very start that she and your brother were never going to work out.”
“How did you know?”
She shrugged. “Lenny would go days not seeing her. He might take her out on a Saturday night, then not think to call her until the following Thursday, when it was time to make plans for the weekend. Shirley used to call the house looking for him, and half the time, I had to make something up because I felt so bad for her.”
We had arrived in the piazza, but my pace had slowed to a crawl. I’d never heard my mother talk about Lenny’s relationship like this.
“When they broke up, I was relieved, you know?”
This surprised me. “You were?”
“Definitely,” she said. “I wanted Lenny to have a great love, and I figured the sooner he ended things with Shirley, the better.”
“I wish he’d gotten the chance to find what he was looking for.”
She reached for my hand. “Me, too.”
I suspected, standing there in front of Café Gargiulo, that we weren’t just talking about Lenny. And if I needed confirmation, I got it a moment later, when my mother asked, “Is everything okay with you and Paul?”
I stiffened. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You seem a little less like yourself when he’s around. And this invitation, the way it came out of nowhere, made me wonder if something was wrong.”
“We got in a big fight,” I admitted.
“Over what?”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the whole story, so I gave her an abbreviated version. “I told him I don’t want to have a baby over here.”
“Really?” My mother sounded surprised.
“It was a little more complicated than that, but yeah.”
“He’s got to understand that it takes two people—”
“I think maybe I’m scared of having kids,” I blurted out.
“Why?”
I hesitated. “Lots of reasons, I guess. But a big thing is I don’t want to lose one.”
“Oh, honey,” she said in a whisper.
“I saw what you went through with Lenny.”
She nodded once, then took me by the shoulders. “I want you to hear me on this. I’d choose to be Lenny’s mom a thousand times over, even knowing how it all ends.”
A tear rolled down my cheek, and then we were both crying.
“Come here,” she said, and hugged me.
We held on to each other for a long time. When I pulled away, I said, “There’s something else.”
She looked at me, and I swear she knew what I was going to say before I said it.
“I kissed Teo.”
“I wondered about that,” she said softly.
“It was just once,” I said, then corrected myself. “Twice.”
“Recently?”
I wiped my eyes. “Last spring.”
“Did you tell Paul?”
“God, no,” I said. “But he knows something’s wrong.”
“Oh, Eileen,” said my mother as she linked arms with me and led me toward an empty table.
“What do I do?”
“I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that marriages have recovered from worse.”
“You think I can fix this?”
“I do,” she said. “But you’ve got to want to.”