Chapter 150
AS WE CROSSED THE PIAZZA comando, I described Laura’s symptoms to Francesca.
“The receptionist is right. It probably is gas,” she said.
I laughed. “I won’t tell Laura you said that.”
We were making our way up the Via Principe Amedeo when I finally got around to asking her about Teo.
She glanced over at me. “I saw him early this morning.”
“So he’s still here? On the island?”
“He should be. He’s got a long list of people he’s trying to talk to.”
“If you see him,” I said, “will you tell him something?”
“Eileen,” she said, slowly, “I don’t want to be your messenger.”
“Is this about what I said at the harbor?” I asked. “Because I really am sorry.”
I was starting to get emotional. For the entirety of Paul’s tour, I had thought of Francesca as a second mother.
I’d certainly spent more time with her than my own mother over the last two years.
But I needed to remember that the relationship, for all it had meant to me, was never an equal one.
I had been paying for her time, and in return, she had been kind to me. Now, the arrangement was over.
“If you think I’m going to hold a grudge against you for something that silly, you don’t know me very well.”
“So why are you holding a grudge?”
She sighed. “Is it not obvious?”
“Teo?”
“I wish you had told me you were seeing him.”
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t think—”
“Think I had eyes? Ears? A brain?”
“No, it’s not that, I just—”
“It was very obvious that you cared about him. And if my windows were open, I could sometimes hear the two of you carrying on.” She raised an eyebrow at me, and I blushed. “You have a very distinct laugh.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I want to die.”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
I looked at her.
“You are young. You should be with someone who makes you laugh like that.”
I could picture the bedroom in that fourth-floor apartment perfectly. Its windows flung open, the curtains blowing in the breeze. To be back there would be such a pleasure.
“What went wrong?” Francesca asked.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“The most we could get out of him was that you were giving each other some space.”
I felt sick, hearing it put that way. “He was tired of all the secrecy, and he wanted me to tell Paul.”
“And did you?”
I nodded.
“Does Teo know that?”
I shook my head.
She gave me a small smile, like she knew something I didn’t. “We have an expression in Italy… ‘L’amore non è bello se non è litigarello.’ ”
“ ‘Love is not beautiful if it is not a quarrel’?”
“That’s it, exactly,” she said. “But there’s a second part to the saying. It goes, ‘Amor senza baruffa, fa la muffa,’ which means something like ‘Love without a quarrel, it grows mold.’ ”
“You’re saying Teo and I needed something to fight about?”
“I’m saying that sometimes, when you fight, you find out that the love is real.”