Chapter 9
“You’re going where? ” My older sister Aurora stares at me through the phone screen, her mouth a perfect pink O of astonishment.
It’s just past eight a.m. in Seattle, but in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Aurora’s six kids are already hours into their daily chores around the historic manor house and hobby farm Aurora and her husband Will run together.
Today she’s in the henhouse, and she’s propped me up in an empty nesting box while she gathers fresh eggs with two of my nieces.
All around them I can hear the soft clucking of the brood as she and the girls gather eggs and gently tuck them into a basket she wove by hand.
She’s dressed in a flowing muslin peasant dress that looks vaguely like a Jane Austen–era nightgown.
On her it looks strangely amazing, though.
Everything does. She even somehow manages to rock the elaborate ruffle around the neck.
Her flaxen hair is in two braids wrapped around her head like a crown, Heidi-style.
The girls are wearing matching ruffled pinafores and pigtails. They look darling.
“I’m going to Italy for two months with Alex,” I confirm.
“We leave in a week.” I wedge the refrigerator door open with my hip and grab the entire bowl of leftover Sunshine Salad.
Sometimes you just need the whole bowl. Drew left before dawn this morning for his flight to LA, and the apartment feels empty and lonely without him.
Solomon and Sandra are moving in this afternoon.
Hence the Jell-O salad. Breakfast of champions.
I imagine what Sandra would say if she could see the Jell-O salad in all its jiggling, processed glory. I grab a spoon. Today is…a lot.
“How are you feeling about going back?” Aurora asks, watching me carefully.
We text each other every day or two, so I’ve already filled her in on the disastrous meeting with Keith, the Solomon and Sandra debacle, Drew leaving, and the cookbook conundrum.
However, my conversation with Lisa last night and my snap decision to go to Italy have caught her by surprise.
“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “I’m really torn.”
Older by three years, Aurora has always been something of a substitute mother to me, filling the gaps when Lisa left our family to marry Ted.
Even after she went away to college, Aurora cared for me as best she could from out of state.
I had always secretly hoped she’d come back to Seattle, but after getting her degree in business at the University of Virginia, she surprised everyone by marrying Will, a gentle giant of a man who’d made a fortune selling a game app when he was twenty-three.
After making millions on the sale, Will promptly renounced technology and entered an apprenticeship to train as a blacksmith.
Who knew that was even a profession anymore?
Apparently it is, and Will seems very happy.
After the wedding, Aurora and Will purchased and spent five years renovating a historic manor house in the mountains of Virginia and now live there with their flock of six children, homeschooling, churning their own butter, and generally living a slow pace of life like they’ve time traveled back to 1890.
It is a somewhat mystifying life that seems deeply satisfying for them.
I’m glad for my sister, but every time I visit or call and she is rendering her own tallow (I’m still not entirely sure what tallow is or what you do with it) or the children are learning to falcon hunt or hammering their own leather quivers for their handmade arrows for archery, I am reminded of how different our lives are turning out to be.
I’m not envious of her. No part of me wants to homeschool a brood of children and hand dip candles, but I find myself sometimes longing for the stability and sense of purpose and place she’s found, the serenity of knowing you are exactly where you belong.
I haven’t had that in so long. I’d give anything to have it again.
The only place I feel that sense of purpose is when I’m filming the show.
It has become my safe place. That’s why I’ll do anything to save it.
“I’m nervous to go back to Italy,” I admit.
I head out the apartment door, bowl of Jell-O and spoon in hand, and climb up the few flights of stairs to the rooftop deck of our building, settling into a rickety vinyl lounger with a view over Capitol Hill.
It’s sunny today, and seagulls wheel and cry above me on the cool breeze.
I have the entire rooftop to myself, a luxury.
I take a big bite of Jell-O salad, instantly soothed by its sweet creaminess.
On the video call, Aurora has moved out of the henhouse to the barn where the children are taking turns milking their placid Jersey cow Sadie.
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Aurora announces as she shows her youngest daughter Meadow how to firmly grab the cow’s teat and pull and squirt.
She pauses and gazes at me speculatively.
That look makes me nervous, like she’s planning my life for me.
“Italy could be good for you,” she muses, leaning down to adjust Meadow’s grip on Sadie’s teat.
“And I think it’s a good idea for one of us to check on Nonna.
The last time I talked to her she seemed… ” She hesitates.
“Seemed what?” I ask, instantly alert to anything amiss. Is something wrong with Nonna? We haven’t exchanged letters in a few months. Has something happened?
Aurora purses her lips and frowns. “It’s probably nothing.
Just a comment she made about the farm, about not being sure how much longer she could keep going.
I’m sure she’s fine, but she sounded…tired.
She’s getting older, you know. It is probably good to have one of us see her in person, just to make sure she’s okay. ”
I nod in agreement. All this time I’ve imagined Nonna and the farm existing in some sort of stasis, frozen peacefully in time until I return.
But I realize now how foolish I’ve been.
Nonna is in her eighties now. I have been gone a long time.
I have no idea about her health or the condition of the farm.
How is she managing to keep up the workload of running it as she ages?
The thought of something going wrong instantly twists my stomach into a knot of anxiety.
I need to see with my own eyes that everything is okay.
“And who knows, you might see Nicolo!” Aurora exclaims, clasping her hands in delight at the thought. I scoff but my heart skips a beat unexpectedly. How strange that I am thinking of him again, now twice in two days. It’s been years since I thought of him more than in passing.
“That sweet boy was so head over heels for you,” Aurora muses. “As soon as he laid eyes on you. Do you remember how you two used to write each other sonnets and hide them in that old olive tree?”
I wince at the memory. We would leave each other secret love notes in the cleft of the oldest olive tree on the farm.
I still have one somewhere, crumpled and cringy, but sweet.
I’d fancied us a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, destined to be together but torn apart by fate and cruel circumstances.
More accurately, we were two headstrong, hormonal teenagers who got carried away in the intoxication of first love.
When Nonna Bruna and her next-door neighbor, Nicolo’s grandmother Violetta, discovered our secret romance, they promptly put an end to it.
Nothing can stand up to two stubborn old Italian women who have been locked in a feud for fifty years, not even the strength of young love.
“What a dreamboat he was,” Aurora says with a wistful little sigh.
“I wonder what ever happened to him?” Like me, Aurora spent her summers in Italy, at least until she went to college.
It was our summer tradition every year. Dad was a teacher, and as soon as school was out, we three promptly headed it back to Italy and spent the entire summer basking in the sun, stuffing ourselves with Nonna’s cooking, swimming, and eating gelato. It was heaven.
“Nicolo’s probably fat and bald and married with a dozen kids by now,” I grouse uncharitably, mainly because I’m not feeling so hot about my life and don’t want to think of my first love driving around Italy in a red Ferrari with a gorgeous olive-skinned Italian goddess by his side. I take a big bite of Sunshine Salad.
Aurora shakes her head, patting Sadie’s flank. “No, Italian men just seem to get more handsome as they age,” she says. “And Nicolo was always handsome, even as a skinny teenager. Plus, the Fiore family is wealthy. I bet he’s doing just fine.”
I think of Nicolo the first time we saw him.
It was the summer I was twelve and he was thirteen.
All of a sudden there he was that first morning of our annual visit.
He was sitting on the wall separating our two properties, looking like he’d been waiting for us all his life.
His pants were too short and his hair a little too long, curling at the ends, and his eyes were melancholy and beautiful.
He’d picked oranges for us, and he offered one to me, warm from his hand.
I took it, fingers brushing, and our eyes met.
I felt a shiver run through me. It seemed like destiny.
Within a week it was like we had always known him.
Every chance he got, Nicolo would slip away after his chores were done to come spend time with us.
Nonna would stuff him with biscotti and sweets.
We would play board games and hide-and-seek.
Dad would take us swimming in the lake. Simple things, but he seemed to soak in the joy of family life like a dry sponge.