Chapter 8
“You’ve got to be kidding.” The fork slips from my hand and clatters to the floor. I bend to pick it up, sure I’ve misheard my mother. She can’t possibly have just suggested that.
“You want me to take Alex to Italy for the summer? To stay with Bruna?” I stare at her in astonishment.
She nods, sipping her martini and looking satisfied. “Exactly,” she says, as though it’s the most reasonable thing in the world. “Ted and I think it could help Alessandra.”
I seriously doubt Ted thinks anything of the sort. This feels like classic Lisa. “Help her how?” I ask cautiously, cutting another rope of dough into bite-sized, pillowy gnocchi.
“It would be so good for Alessandra to have some time in the homeland. You and Aurora always seemed to enjoy your visits, at least until your father…you know.” Lisa sips her martini.
“I can’t just up and go to Italy for two months,” I protest. “I have a life here, a job, a show.” Okay, maybe not a show anymore. Or much of a life, come to think of it. But still…I balk at the idea. I can’t go to Italy. End of discussion.
“But it would be so good for Alessandra to get in touch with her roots, to spend time with family,” Lisa urges me. Her tone is overly bright and sparkly. She’s trying hard to sell me on this idea.
“She could spend time with you, her actual parents,” I point out dryly. “Besides, Alex isn’t even Italian. Nonna isn’t related to her at all.”
Nonna Bruna is my dad’s mother, so she shares no blood with Alex.
To the best of my knowledge, Nonna and Alex have never even spoken to each other.
Lisa ignores this observation entirely. She seems determined to convince me that this is a marvelous idea.
She really must be desperate because she and Nonna Bruna loathe each other.
Nonna apparently made no bones about the fact that she thought her only son made a poor choice when he married Lisa after she got pregnant with Aurora just a few months into dating.
And Lisa has never forgiven her former mother-in-law for it.
“It’s been so long since you saw your grandmother,” Lisa presses a little harder.
“She’s not getting any younger, you know.
This could be your last chance.” She gives me as meaningful a look as she can through the Botox.
That part is true. I wince. Nonna Bruna is eighty-two now.
We don’t talk often on the phone, but I send her cards on her birthday and at Christmas, and she sends me letters a few times a year, written in a mixture of Italian and English.
In the past few years I’ve noticed her handwriting has gotten a little frail looking, though; spindly where it used to be bold.
She sounds as feisty as ever in her letters, but the reality is that she is getting older. She can’t live forever. I hesitate.
“That’s a low blow.” I grab my mortar and pestle and throw in one clove of garlic and two handfuls of pine nuts, pounding them with a little more force than is strictly necessary.
I haven’t been back to Italy since I was fifteen.
Not since that terrible, fateful summer.
After the accident, when Lisa flew in to take me back to New York to live with her and Ted and finish high school, she insisted I not go back to Italy until after I graduated.
She said it would be too traumatic for me to go back, but I suspect she just wanted to get me away from Nonna’s influence since they dislike each other so much.
Whatever the reason, I didn’t go back to Italy the next summer, and in some way I felt relieved.
After graduation, I moved back to Seattle for college, and every year there was a new good reason not to return to Italy.
A summer internship for my marketing degree, a job that wouldn’t give me time off.
Then after graduation I struggled to find my footing in an expensive city.
There was never enough time, never enough money; at least that’s what I told myself.
Next summer, I’d promise myself. But next summer somehow never came. I planned each year to return but never actually bought the ticket. And now here I am, fifteen years later, and I have yet to set foot in what used to be my favorite place in the world.
I don’t quite know how it happened that all these years slipped by. I think I was reluctant to return to a place that held such painful memories for me. I lost the two great loves of my life in one terrible summer, and now Italy holds the best and the worst memories for me.
“I can’t go to Italy,” I growl, throwing a bunch of fragrant basil into the mortar and grinding a touch savagely.
“I have things to do here this summer.” Which is a lie.
My summer is going to consist of trying to recall fuzzy family recipes while avoiding my opinionated new roommates and their temperamental cat. Ugh.
“Just consider it,” Lisa urges breezily. She moves across the room to the bar and motions for another martini. “Ted and I would pay for everything—your tickets, all expenses, and even throw in a stipend to make up for the time you’d take off work.”
They must really be in a pinch if they’re sweetening the deal like this.
I add a generous heap of grated aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and grind it into the mix.
The aroma of the pesto is heavenly. In Italian cooking, there is a correct way to pair ingredients and types of pasta, and this is a very traditional dish for good reason. It’s absolutely delicious.
“I think this could be so good for you both,” Lisa says confidently, picking up the toothpick from her martini and sliding an olive into her mouth with her teeth.
“You and Alessandra can get to know each other better, have a little sister bonding, and spend some time with your grandmother. You could teach Alessandra to cook, just like Bruna taught you.”
I close my eyes briefly and I’m suddenly transported back into the warm kitchen of the old farmhouse with its barrel-vaulted ceiling with dark wood beams, the whitewashed walls and deep stone fireplace, the scarred dark olive wood table.
The air is redolent with the aromas of uncooked flour and egg from freshly made pasta and the rich unctuousness of basil and garlic frying in olive oil.
And there is Nonna, handing me her ancient book of family recipes, letting me carefully open it at random.
Whatever recipe it opened to was the one we made together.
I loved the surprise of it every time. Every recipe somehow seemed like the perfect one, exactly what I wanted without even knowing it.
It felt like magic in that kitchen every day.
Suddenly, I am struck with a flash of inspiration that hits me with blinding clarity.
That’s it! The recipe book! Nonna’s thick book of family recipes, passed down from generation to generation.
Recipes with a story, a sense of place, recipes that I have grown up making.
Recipes that I could use for my own cookbook, recipes that could perhaps make it possible for me to meet my September deadline…
My eyes pop open. Is there really a way I could still finish this cookbook in time?
If I went to Italy, could I make it happen?
I glance up to find Lisa watching me narrowly. She can smell my resolve weakening.
“I’ll think about it,” I concede, dumping the uncooked gnocchi into a waiting pot of boiling salted water and giving the little pillows a stir.
I don’t want to agree too hastily. I have to consider this carefully before I commit.
The thought of actually going back to Italy is weighty for a lot of reasons.
But then I remember Solomon and Sandra and Ophelia.
If I went to Italy for the summer, I would not have to share the apartment with them.
A definite bonus. They’re moving in tomorrow as soon as Drew leaves. I waffle for a moment.
“Of course,” Lisa says with a satisfied smile, like she’s already gotten what she wanted.
Around her flow the glitterati of Upper Manhattan, chicly thin women dressed as lion tamers and trapeze artists.
A man in a leopard-print unitard holding a giant fake barbell wanders by.
The band is really swinging now. “But don’t take too long,” she warns.
“You’ll need to fly here to pick up Alessandra in the next week or so, as soon as school is out. We’ll need to make arrangements.”
“I said I’ll think about it,” I tell her again, firmly, as I fish the gnocchi out of the water with a big metal ladle when they bob to the surface.
They glisten on the ladle, plump and delicious looking.
I hang up with Lisa and heap the gnocchi into a bowl.
As I spoon the fresh pesto over the bowl, I can’t stop thinking about the invitation to go to Italy for the summer.
I think of Sandra saging our refrigerator.
I think of all those delicious family recipes waiting for me in Italy.
Maybe being there will jog my memory, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a whole book of time-tested family recipes I can consult.
A cheat sheet of sorts. It’s so tempting, so very, very tempting to say yes.
But it makes my heart race to even consider returning to Italy.
Fifteen years ago my entire world fell apart on the shores of Lake Garda.
In some ways I’ve never recovered. Now here I am, with an urgent reason to return, but I am deeply torn.
There is a swell of longing in my chest when I think of going back, and yet, and yet.
I remember the utter devastation of that still, hot afternoon.
The pebbled lakeshore, the big-boned figure splayed on the damp grass.
His swarthy skin was too pale, his thinning dark hair plastered wet across his forehead like duckweed, those kind eyes closed forever.
The day my father drowned in Lake Garda ripped my world apart.
Little by little, I’ve been trying to stitch it back together again ever since.
But that was not the only loss I suffered that summer. My heart broke twice.
When I close my eyes, I see his face. Nicolo.
Those beautiful dark eyes with their sooty lashes.
His earnest, tender expression. When he gazed at me, I felt the warmth of his adoration like the sun.
In his eyes I was the most beautiful girl in the world.
Meraviglia , he called me. La mia stellina , he’d whisper when he pressed his eager mouth to the pulse point of my neck.
My little star, the one who shone so brightly.
I was fifteen and he was sixteen, young and foolish and as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet.
No one has ever looked at me like that since.
Nicolo. I haven’t thought of him in years.
I let out a sharp breath. I’ve been holding it without realizing it, as though I’m underwater with these memories.
If I’m honest, I’m scared to go back. Plain and simple.
I’m scared I’ll find it nothing like I remember it, scared I’ll feel like a stranger in the only place I’ve ever really felt at home.
But I already feel like a stranger, cut adrift on an unfamiliar sea.
I’ve felt that way in every place I’ve ever lived since that fateful summer.
Maybe it would be different if I returned.
What if Italy still feels like home? My heart constricts painfully at the thought.
I can taste my longing for a place to belong, bittersweet as the candied lemon rinds Nonna simmers long and slow each Christmas. I want it so badly.
I think of all the reasons to go to Italy.
I think of all the reasons to stay. For a long while I waver.
I never thought I’d actually return, but now going back may be the only way to save my dream and my career.
Am I really brave enough to board a plane to Italy?
Closing my eyes, I offer up a little prayer to Saint Sebastian, patron saint of courage, strength, and perseverance, then cross myself and kiss my thumb for luck.
Feeling as though I am breaking through the surface, coming up for air after a long deep dive, I text Lisa.
Okay. I’ll go.