Double Pop

by Jamie Bennett

  I walked over to Luca and smiled. He was a really nice, really thoughtful, really sweet guy, and I felt like he was my friend already.

  Chapter 5

  The guest bedroom had a bed in it, but while we walked through the house, I noticed again that the other rooms were almost empty. Huge and empty. We went through the living room with only one streamlined chair, and into the kitchen, which had a few more seats at the gleaming, stainless steel counter, but no knickknacks, no towels, only one glass in the sink. But the room was beautiful. It looked so cool, like an industrial kitchen, almost.

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee?” he asked me.

  I nodded, because yes, I was still hungry after my half of the hamburger that Nola and I had shared. “Do you mind? I’m so sorry to drop in on you like this.”

  “I don’t feel like this situation was something you planned.” He started messing with a shiny coffee machine built into the wall.

  “No, but I shouldn’t have parked under a broken streetlight, and I should have made sure I had a jack that worked and a reasonable spare tire, and this is the second time you’ve helped me out, a lot. I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.” He gave me a little baby-sized cup, and when I stared at it, he said, “Espresso.”

  “Oh, right.” I took a tiny sip, and it was so bitter that my mouth puckered.

  “Um, just a moment.” He pulled the cup back over and poured the contents into a mug, then added milk and sugar. “This may be better.”

  It was. Heavenly. “Thank you,” I told him. And then he put out a plate of fruit and some little, sweet biscuits, just in case I was hungry, which I most definitely was. “I have to figure out my car problem,” I said, sighing into the coffee. Although it would have been lovely to just sit in Luca’s big kitchen and eat delicious fruit and tiny cookies, and sip his adulterated espresso, and not think about anything but that.

  “I did.”

  “Huh?”

  “I called for a tow while you were in the bathroom. They should be picking it up soon.”

  “Oh, but…” I had been planning to get another spare and jack and come back in the light of day to do it myself. What was a tow going to cost?

  “The dispatcher said that it won’t be ready until tomorrow afternoon.”

  Right. I started to try to figure out how I was going to get us back to the city to get the car from whatever garage it was hauled off to. It would probably involve the ferry and a lot of buses, and I would have to dip into the money I had been setting aside (that I had sworn I wouldn’t touch) in order to pay for the tire and towing. God damn Ty. I rubbed my forehead. “Thank you,” I repeated. “Thanks for taking care of that for me. Um, do you have any pain relievers? Aspirin, that kind of thing?”

  “I don’t take anything like that. Sorry.”

  This was going to be ok, I assured myself. They would probably be able to fix the tire instead of replacing it, and how much could it cost to tow a car as small as mine? I tried to will my headache away. “If you already did that, then Nola and I should head back home. I can get a car for us. You don’t have to drive all that way.”

  “It’s not very late,” he said. “You could hang out here for a while.”

  Because despite it feeling like midnight to me, he was right. Most people my age were awake right now and out with their friends, enjoying their youth. Not giving away their hard-earned money to idiots and then getting sexually harassed on sidewalks, worrying about ancient tires and tow fees. “Sure, that’s a good idea,” I said rebelliously, pissed at the whole situation, pissed at myself. “I can hang out for a while.”

  Luca smiled. “I had been sitting here before you called, wondering what other people were doing tonight. In Milan, we would be at dinner right now.”

  See? Reveling in his youth. I got madder, but it was all at myself. “Were you sorry to leave there?”

  He looked down at the counter. “My father is sick. I wanted to come home.”

  “Right, I knew that. Sorry.”

  Now Luca glanced up at me, obviously wondering how I had known about his dad, and admitting that I had looked him up in the Starhurst alumni bulletins seemed like a bad idea. “What should we do?” I asked quickly. “Knock over a liquor store? Hit some raves?”

  “That all sounds good to me. That’s your usual itinerary for a Monday night?”

  “Well, I’m also very active in the bar scene on Mondays, me and Nola together. When she turned three, I figured she was old enough.” But talking about the bar scene was leading us back to memories of the sad night with Stoney and the hospital, so I tried to head away from there. “What would you rather have been doing tonight? That is, other than lying on a filthy sidewalk to try to get a jack under my little car.”

  “What do you mean? That’s exactly what I like to do after work,” he told me, and I laughed.

  “I’m imagining you as the San Francisco superhero of car problems, running around the city with your jack and your cape,” I said.

  He posed a little, hands on his hips, chest out, and damn. He could have been a superhero, with his looks. His jaw, his eyes, his pecs under his shirt…all those padded-up actors could eat their hearts out. And I bet that none of them had ever rolled around on the sidewalk to help out a woman they barely knew.

  “How is it that you’re blonde and Italian? With blue eyes?” I asked him.

  “I’m from the north. It’s more common there.” He shrugged. “I look like my mother. My father is very dark.”

  “I don’t look like anyone in my family,” I confessed. “All my brothers and sisters are tall, with straight hair, dark eyes.” I tugged on one of my chocolate-colored curls. “I ended up with this.”

  Luca leaned forward and looked into my face. “Your eyes are a beautiful color. Like amaretto.”

  I blinked and sat back, doing the weird, quick breathing again. “Well, thank you. I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s a drink, from Lombardy, in Italy. Near where I was born.” He got up and took a bottle out of his cupboard. “Try it. I find it very sweet, so you may like it.” He poured a little of the drink into a glass for me, then more into a glass for himself.

  I took a cautious sip. “I do like it.” So he poured more. “Tell me how to say it again.”

  He did, then we went around the room and I pointed to things and he told me how to say them in Italian: il caffè, il lavello, i bicipiti (he laughed, but that was an important one for me to know). It turned out that Luca spoke not only Italian and English, but several other languages too: French, Spanish, some Portuguese, and some German. In fact, where he was from in Italy also had its own, separate language that he had used to speak with his great-grandparents as a kid. He seemed so worldly to me, so smart.

  “I took Spanish in high school, but I can’t say anything anymore except gracias. I guess that word comes in handy. I want Nola to speak other languages. I want everything for her,” I admitted, and Luca smiled.

  “I’ll speak Italian to her,” he said. “Little kids learn fast.”

  “Like how you learned English,” I suggested, and he nodded, and poured more of the amber-brown liquid into my glass.

  “Exactly. After only a little time, I sounded just like an American.”

  Except sometimes, I thought. When he had gotten mad the other night, about me being with Stoney, it had sounded different to me, and sometimes the way he put words together wasn’t how I thought a native speaker would have done it. But I had to listen carefully to my students for language issues, so that was why I noticed. Not that I was hanging on his every word.

  I found that I wanted to know more about him, more than the sketchy details in the alumni magazines. “Where I grew up, out in the boondocks, we played the question game to kill time,” I mentioned. “Want to play?”

  “Is this a truth or dare thing?”

  “Not at all. You just have to answer stupid questions, like, if you had to choose between eating only chees
e or only bacon for the rest of your life, which would it be?”

  Luca winced. “Those are my two options? And this was a game you played on purpose?”

  “Cheese or bacon. And yes, we didn’t have a lot of entertainment on the farm.”

  He thought for a minute. “Cheese, I guess. But I feel like it wouldn’t be a very long life, with only that in my diet. You grew up on a farm?”

  “Is that your question for me? Yes, it was a marijuana farm before that kind of thing was legal.” His eyebrows shot up. “It wasn’t what you’d call ‘conventional.’ We had kind of a commune situation, living with a lot of people besides my immediate family. Do you use drugs? Smoke pot?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’m not interested. But growing up on a pot farm…”

  “No, that made me go the other way, like arrow-straight. Except for this. It’s delicious,” I said, taking a sip from my glass of amaretto. “Do you have another question for me?”

  “If you had to choose between reading or listening to music, which would it be?” he asked.

  “Hm. Well, we usually listen to terrible kids’ music or, just recently, since we met a neighbor with musical taste that goes back a ways, we rock to Nola’s new favorite singer, Brenda Lee.”

  “Really? Brenda Lee?”

  I nodded. “So I’d have to choose reading. I don’t have a lot of time to do it, though. Wait, that’s not true, and you have to be truthful in the question game, that’s a rule. I have time, at night, but mostly I just stare vacantly at old movies.” Or I amused myself with my vibrator and thoughts of him, but the rule was that you had to be truthful, not bare your soul.

  “You’re blushing. What kind of movies are these?”

  “Not what you’re thinking!” But I could feel my embarrassment in my face. “My turn for a question. It’s an easy one, ready? Chocolate or vanilla?”

  “Chocolate,” he said promptly, then added, “Dark chocolate, the darker, the better.”

  Yuck. Well, at least we wouldn’t have to fight over desserts, if we were ever in some kind of food-sharing situation.

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have, the ones you don’t look like?” Luca asked me.

  “Five, all younger. I grew up with my mom and my stepdad and four younger siblings, and my mom had another little girl a year before I had Nola. A surprise baby. I have a ton of cousins, kind of cousins, too. Mostly we’re not really related, but we lived together on the farm so they feel like family to me.”

  “A lot of relatives.”

  I nodded. “It was a madhouse, kids and animals everywhere, most of the adults pretty much idiots, stoned a lot of the time. But right when I started high school, my stepdad got injured and couldn’t work anymore. Not that he’d ever really been putting his nose to the grindstone…anyway, we moved into a one-bedroom in town. Seven of us, stuffed in there.”

  “With only one bedroom?” He whistled.

  “Right?” I looked around Luca’s kitchen, which was larger than our whole apartment had been. “You could probably fit a big crowd in here. Hundreds.”

  Now we both surveyed his roomy, empty house. “I haven’t really had many people over since I bought this place,” Luca said. “I’m not very social, I guess.”

  “Do you have family around here besides your parents? Or are they all in Italy?”

  He shook his head. “I’m an only child, and neither of my parents had siblings, so no cousins like you, or even your ‘kind of cousins.’ No marijuana farm, either. I have a great-aunt who lives in my family’s villa in Brescia in Italy.”

  “That must have been so awesome,” I told him, and I meant all of what he had said, from not growing up working a farm, to the Italian villa. “It must have been nice, not having brothers and sisters.”

  He glanced up at me. “Why?”

  “Speaking from my experience, they’re annoying as hell. I helped raise my siblings and I must have sucked at it, because none of them can hold a job, keep a relationship, or even answer the phone.” Which reminded me of the note stuck to my desk, and the other on my car’s dashboard: “Call Mom NOW!!!!!” I still hadn’t talked to her and if I didn’t soon, I was going to ask the neighbors to knock on their door and check on the situation. I rubbed my forehead again and drank up the amaretto. I was going to do a better job with Nola than I had with my sibs.

  “I don’t know about that,” Luca argued. “I know a lot of families that get along well. I always wished for brothers and sisters. It was all about me,” he said, and he got the same odd look I’d noticed on his face before when we had coffee: kind of angry, kind of sad.

  “Well, it must be hard, now. I mean, with your dad being sick, and you must have to take care of him, alone.” But even with all the people in my family, no one was doing much for my own mom right now. I pushed that thought out of my mind.

  Luca shook his head. “I’m not alone taking care of him. My mom is very involved, and he has many nurses. He doesn’t let me help very much.” Again, the same look. “I’m driving over to their house in the morning to see him.” He poured more amaretto. “You guys can stay here tonight so you don’t have to wake up Nola, and come with me back to Marin tomorrow.”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that.” But I was feeling very sleepy, and also, very content in my chair. I thought those feelings related to the glass with the drink in it.

  “It’s not a problem. Stay,” he told me. “We’ll go early so you can get dressed at home and take Nola to school. Does she go to school? Preschool?”

  I nodded. “She does. But are you sure?” Because somehow it was so cozy here, in this bare, industrial kitchen, that this was sounding like a wonderful plan to me. But it was a huge imposition on him. “It’s ok?”

  “I wouldn’t have said it unless it was ok. It will be nice to have company.”

  He was lonely. I felt a rush of sympathy. “Nola will be an only child, like you,” I said. “I hope she doesn’t feel the same way, that she missed out by not having siblings.” I hoped she wouldn’t be lonely, too. “I don’t want her to have to take care of me, either, not in any way. I want her to be able to live her own life, free of responsibilities.”

  “It sounds selfish.”

  I flared up. “No, it doesn’t! She won’t be selfish. Don’t say that.”

  He patted my fist on the countertop and left his hand there. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to insult your little girl. I meant, everyone has responsibilities. We can’t escape all the ties that bind us to other people, and I don’t think we should. You don’t want her to go off and forget you. Oh, no. Jolie! Please, don’t cry.” He looked horrified. He squeezed my hand and then let go and took a step away.

  “I’m not,” I said, then messed it up by admitting, “It’s just been an emotional evening. And what you just said reminds me of my neighbor’s daughter. She moved far away, all the way across the world, and she never visits her mother, and it’s so sad to me.” I rubbed my fingers under my eyes and fortified myself with another pour of the drink. “You don’t do well with crying, huh?”

  “Not at all,” he admitted.

  I wiped my eyes again and cleared my throat. “Ok, I’m done, so you can relax. Let’s get back to the business at hand. We’re asking questions, remember?”

  “Yes, more questions, no crying,” he agreed.

  “Since you want siblings, would you rather have ten brothers, or ten sisters?”

  “Don’t be offended, but I would take the brothers.”

  “You’re worried there would be a lot of tears?” I asked.

  “That, all the…emotions, and the time that women take in the bathroom to get ready…” He stopped. “I hope I’m not offending you.”

  “I’m not offended by your disgusting, insulting stereotypes,” I told him, and he laughed. “It takes a lot to get under my skin. Today, one of my students commented that his mom doesn’t jiggle like I do.” I swept my hand over my body to demonstrate the jiggling that I meant. “I didn
’t care at all. Well, not too much.”

  “How old was this kid? Old enough to have some manners?”

  “Old enough to know better,” I admitted. “He just said it to be a little shit. But he was absolutely correct, you could bounce quarters off his mother’s ass, if you wanted to spend your nights doing something other than the question game.” Although, with the state of my finances, I would probably use pennies.

  Luca laughed again and looked at me for a moment. “I’m glad you came over, Jolie. Even though the questions are bad.”

  “How else would I have learned that you have terrible taste in chocolate?” I reasoned.

  “What was the correct answer, vanilla?”

  “No, of course not! Milk chocolate is the best,” I explained, and he made a face.

  “For children.”

  “For deliciousness,” I corrected, and then caught a yawn before he could see it. What a weird evening it had been. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here, with you, in your kitchen in San Francisco,” I said aloud as I thought about it.

  “What were you doing in the city, anyway?”

  “We drove in to see my ex-boyfriend. Nola’s father. But he took off before dinner, and—” And I didn’t need to tell Luca that I had stupidly given him money, that Ty was in gambling debt, nope. No need to go into the details.

  Luca started messing with something in the refrigerator. “He lives here?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “He lives…around. We’re from north of here, and when he left our hometown, I think he went to Reno, then Las Vegas, maybe. I guess he’s here for a while.”

  Luca made a non-committal noise and stirred whatever was in the chilled bowl he had removed from the fridge. “We don’t have much to do with Ty, my ex,” I explained. "I hear about him when I go home, if I run into his family, but Nola and I haven’t seen him for almost two years. She doesn’t remember him or know him at all.” And, so much for not going into it.