Chapter 12
I wake up a few days later to incessant banging on my door. I pull the covers over my head, thinking maybe if I ignore it, the banging will stop. But unfortunately nothing can deter whoever has decided to make my door their personal pinata.
I get up and throw on a pair of pants. I swing the door open and am momentarily stunned by the tiny, bangled whirlwind standing in front of me.
“Anita?!”
“Surprise!”
“I thought you weren’t coming until next week?” My half-asleep brain is still trying to catch up.
“I never get to be one step ahead of you,” she teases with a mischievous smile and a pinch to my cheeks.
I can’t stop myself from pulling her into a tight hug.
As much as she knows I hate surprises—as anyone normally tasked with keeping an expensive ship upright every night would—I’m so grateful to have my favorite challenging pain in the ass in front of me.
Maybe she and I don’t swap family stories as much as Nico would’ve expected, but she’s there for me in every way that matters.
She brightens my rough edges. She always reminds me of that Rolling Stones line—Anita comes in color everywhere.
And she knows that if I’d been aware of her arrival, I probably would’ve fussed and prepped and gone out of my way.
I’ve got to hand it to her for playing chess when I wasn’t even aware the game had started.
She loosens her grip, kisses me on the cheek, and then automatically wanders into my apartment, making herself at home. She grabs water from the tap and curls up onto my couch.
“How do you look so put together after sleeping on a plane, when I’m a mess after a normal night?” I muse as I sit next to her.
“I showered at Nonna’s,” she says with a shrug. “And she had a double espresso waiting for me on arrival.”
“Oh okay, so everyone knew you were coming except for me,” I pout.
That smile is back. She’s so damn pleased with herself. “I didn’t want you to go to any trouble,” she says, confirming my earlier suspicions. “I don’t need you to do anything for me. I’m here to visit and not get in the way.”
“So does that mean you won’t be hovering around the kitchen tonight?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“Of course not,” she shoots back. “I grew up on those tables, watching Nonna. Now I get to harass you too? I can’t think of anything better.”
I grumble and stand, having noticed it’s time for me to get moving anyway. But Anita’s not letting me stay grumpy. “I brought you something,” she says, handing over a box.
“Oh my god, Nosh Sticks!” I practically hop up and down with glee over seeing my favorite American snack food.
“Happy with my surprise now?” she laughs.
“A thousand percent,” I say, already ripping open the box to eat one. “I’m getting dressed, and then I’m making you come with me for the rest of my morning routine.”
“I love that you have a morning routine here!” she says.
“Manciano has really become a little oasis from home for you, huh?” Her eyes practically have hearts in them for how sappy she seems over her master plan working.
I want to push back, the way I always do.
But something in her expression makes me unable to burst her bubble.
“It has,” I admit.
After a quick cold shower to wake myself up and a change into clean clothes, I’m much more able to bask in Anita’s sudden presence.
We walk arm in arm on my usual route, only this time instead of being alone with my thoughts, I’m getting color commentary from my best friend.
Houses I’ve walked past every day suddenly get a story attached about Anita’s childhood antics, small strings tethering me more to the history of this little town.
We climb up the steps until we reach my morning summit. There’s a misty haze hanging in the distance, and it’s covering the ocean from showing up on the horizon.
“You come up here every morning?” Anita asks, and we plop down on the bench, its black steel always a strange contrast to the ancient knobbly sand-colored stones of the walls surrounding it.
The square in front of us is still empty.
It’s lovely always seeing the town from above when it’s so quiet in the morning; the old marble fountain hasn’t even had its water turned on yet.
To the right, a person waves from a deck chair on their balcony.
I wonder if they slept there or came up with the sun.
“It’s peaceful,” I reply, not knowing otherwise how to put into words the serenity of my daily ritual of staring out from town to farmland to distant ocean.
“It’s very peaceful,” Anita agrees. “Although I can’t believe you’ve become a person who can imagine yourself outside the four walls of a restaurant.”
I scoff. “That’s a very narrow version of my life in New York.”
Anita just shrugs with a mischievous smile, the implication clear. I ruffle her hair and take her hand.
“But I admit it’s not completely inaccurate.” I pause, staring out at the mist as it slowly burns off from the sun getting higher. “When I’m cooking with Gia, I can easily slip back into that.”
“So what stopped you from slipping into it completely?”
“The damn woman insists on days and mornings off,” I say with a smirk, and Anita chuckles.
“So you’ve been nudged into not only learning the vast superiority of pasta, but also into finding yourself outside the kitchen?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I say, pursing my lips as I consider it. “I guess . . . with these mornings . . . I’ve at least realized that when I go home, I should probably widen my world a little bit,” I admit. “I hadn’t realized how insular I’d become.”
She gives my hand a squeeze, and we sit, staring out into the distance a bit longer, letting that admission make its way out of my mouth and into the open air.
In typical Anita fashion, she doesn’t make me dwell once she’s shucked me open. “I don’t think I’ve ever sat up here,” she says, allowing a subject change. I happily take the out.
“Well, when I first arrived, I would just read all morning, since there’s so many books I haven’t caught up on,” I try to explain. “But time stretched a little too much. I had to find some semblance of a routine so I wouldn’t get twitchy.”
I can see from her dubious expression that Anita knows I’m minimizing, but she doesn’t push it. “Well, it’s a good routine,” she says. “You found a good spot for morning thoughts.”
She pats my knee, and I put my head on her shoulder. I shouldn’t have worried so much about letting Anita see that this place has been good for me. I shouldn’t always shy away from letting anyone see that there’s some tenderness in me too.
I notice the poem carved into the wall once again and sit back up.
“I’ve been wondering what that poem’s all about,” I say, gesturing to it. “My translation didn’t make any sense.”
Anita looks over and smiles. “I find that with English, too—poetry is always the hardest medium to translate, because when we convey emotion through lyrical language, there’s always something lost when it has to be explained.”
She stands up and goes closer, lightly touching the marble that the words sit on, examining the words through feel as much as language.
“‘Ti Amo Maremma. Fin Dove al Mar Ti Sposi e Ti Vesti di Tramonti,’” she repeats quietly, the melody of her mother tongue making the words sound even more poetic.
“It’s quite beautiful, actually. That second sentence is hard to translate, but it’s roughly like, ‘where you marry the sea and clothe yourself in sunsets.’ I’d interpret it as people’s love for this region is so strong that it’s as boundless as the sea, while as beautiful as the sunset.
I sort of adore that it’s set in stone here because, to me, it’s meant to be about enduring love. A connection to a place.”
Her fingers are still dancing across each indent where the letters have been made. I wonder how much she misses it here when she’s gone. I wonder if she looks out of New York Harbor and thinks of the Atlantic connecting her all the way back to Maremma. I wonder why I’ve never asked.
But I’m doing a lot of things lately that I never have before.
“Why didn’t you want to come back here after culinary school and your internships?”
She turns back around to face me, a small smile in the curve of her lips. “Because I fell in love with Eddie,” she says simply. It pains me how much her happy story echoes Nico’s heartbreaking one.
I think of her now-husband, as connected to the Bronx as she is to Maremma, and I realize these must’ve been hard conversations for the two of them. But again, I never asked.
“He couldn’t build a full life here,” she explains, sensing all my questions.
“He doesn’t speak any Italian. And I was already in New York.
Once we were together, there wasn’t really a question of where we should live.
I miss it, of course I do, but you can have more than one home.
New York and Maremma are both home for me. ”
“I’m sorry I never really knew what a sacrifice you’d made,” I reply, the truth so obvious now.
But she shrugs it off. “It’s not what you and I do, you know? That’s how I know we’re both New Yorkers first and foremost now. We don’t dwell; we keep moving. And we both know the other person always has our back. If I’d needed to get emotional about it, I would’ve told you.”
“I’m glad I understand it better now,” I say quietly.
“Me too.”
She sits back down on the bench, and now it’s her turn to rest her head on my shoulder.
“I checked in on your restaurant before I left,” she mentions.
I scoff. “You wanted some latent barbecue smells?” I have to joke about it so my compartmentalizing can keep potential sadness out.
“They’ve actually gotten a fair amount of work done.” She sits up to look me in the eyes, so I can see she’s serious. “You haven’t talked to John about what they’re doing?”
“Have I talked to John?” I ask, incredulous that she’d assume I’d been in contact with her least favorite person and my current least favorite ex.
“I just mean about the restaurant, obviously. He’s gotten a crew in pretty quickly. They’ve already cleared all the debris out, and the permitting is getting fast-tracked.”
“What?” Now I’m really confused. “All I’ve heard from one of the other partners is that they’re working on it and felt optimistic about the end of summer.”
“Well . . . yeah, I think because John’s made it his personal mission,” she says, her face now scrunched in that adorable way she does when she’s processing something. “I assumed he had some motive and would’ve told you.”
“Money is his only motive,” I say dismissively. “He probably just wants to get things moving as quickly as possible again so his investment doesn’t sit empty.”
Anita still has that dubious look on her face, and I’m curious what part of this seems so off to her.
“He told me to tell you hello. When I was there. He was overseeing whatever they were doing, and he started chatting to me like nothing was wrong. My instinct was to punch him, but I didn’t think you’d like that. ”
I chuckle. “No, I don’t think any punching is necessary.”
“I just don’t like that he’s got something up his sleeve that he hasn’t told you about.”
“Let it go, Anita,” I sigh. “The man dumped me. There’s nothing he wants from me other than to get me cooking again. Being friendly to you is his way to help him sweep it all under the rug.”
Anita harrumphs next to me but doesn’t say anything else about it. Instead she hops up and holds her hand out to me.
“All right, enough of this sentimentality. I want to go to Belpagna,” she says cheerily.
I gladly let her pull me up, and we walk down the stone steps, away from the poetry of words and landscapes and toward the poetry of pastry.