Dolci di Love

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  ‘I’m Francesca,’ the girl answered with a heartbreaking smile, sidling sideways up to the counter. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Lily was taken aback. She brushed at her cheeks to make sure no tears had escaped, pushed back her hair, forced a smile.

  ‘What’s wrong with me? Well, nothing that I can think of. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Usually when people come to stay with the Ferretti sisters they have something wrong with them.’ Francesca said. ‘But they don’t usually work in the store. Or help with the cantucci. Are you going to help with the cantucci? I think it would be good if you did.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m not really staying here,’ Lily said. ‘Not for long anyway and I’m certainly not likely to be helping with the cantucci. That’s this biscotti, right?’

  ‘Biscotti is all cookies, cantucci is what we make here in Tuscany and the Ferrettis make the best.’

  ‘But does anyone buy it?’

  Francesca shrugged. ‘I don’t think they’re allowed. The Ferrettis don’t usually let people in the store. They are too mean. Except if there’s something wrong with you. I only came in because I saw it was you.’

  ‘Me?’ A flush of panic.

  ‘You, not them. They can be scary and they have hands like, like, allora, like Captain Hook.’ She lifted up fingers just like Daniel’s, long with knobby knuckles, and curled them into claws. ‘You know, in Peter Pan.’

  Oh, how that further flamed Lily’s bravely burning embers. Of course Daniel had read his daughter Peter Pan. It had been his favourite book as a child, hers too. They’d bought countless copies for the children of friends and more for their own imaginary children.

  Francesca wasn’t an angel at all.

  ‘You’re Tinker Bell,’ Lily said.

  Francesca looked pleased. ‘They’re not real wings,’ she said. ‘I can’t fly.’

  ‘I love that book,’ Lily told her. ‘I used to read it to my sister when I was about your age and we’d listen to it as well, I guess on the record player. You couldn’t turn the page of the book until Tinker Bell rang her little bell.’

  Lily wondered where those books were, the one she had bought for her own children, if they’d been relegated to the charity store like so much of the other baby paraphernalia she had collected over the years or if they were stashed somewhere in the apartment. Or maybe Daniel had brought them here. Would he do that?

  Francesca came right up to the counter, her nose at fluted cantucci bowl level. She peered in to the bowl then up at Lily.

  ‘I don’t know what is a record player. Have you seen it at the movies?’ she asked. ‘Peter Pan?’

  Those eyes. Daniel’s eyes.

  ‘I don’t think it was on at the movies when I was little.’

  ‘What about now?’ Francesca asked.

  ‘Now I’m grown up, I don’t really go to the movies,’ she said.

  Francesca looked disappointed.

  Please don’t ask me if I have children, Lily begged. She couldn’t bear that question from anyone, let alone…

  ‘But you are American?’ Francesca asked.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Lily answered then, keen to move on: ‘What about you? Are you from here? From Montevedova?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m going to America one day,’ Francesca said, swivelling her slender little hips. ‘And I’m going on my own. I’m going to go to the movies and do hip-hop, and I’m not taking Ernesto with me.’

  ‘Ernesto?’ Lily asked. She couldn’t help herself.

  ‘My little brother,’ Francesca said with a sigh. ‘He is a pain in my ass.’

  ‘You speak wonderful English for a little girl, Francesca,’ Lily told her, ‘but I’m not sure ass is a word you should be using.’

  ‘My papa makes me have lessons, and I am nearly seven,’ Francesca informed her. ‘So that’s not little. Ernesto is little.’

  Nearly seven. Lily turned away and fumbled for an imaginary something in her purse. She did not want Francesca to see her face. Nearly seven. That made her just a year younger than Grace. Grace would be nearly eight now.

  That year after they lost her, that year when her world collapsed yet again, leaving her in pieces she could never put back together, all she’d had to cling to was work. Work and Daniel. Because one stopped her from thinking and the other knew what she thought. And yet, in that year, that same horrendous, hideous year, Daniel had not been thinking what she was thinking at all, not suffering what she was suffering. He had been coming here and creating himself this perfect parallel universe.

  Everything she ever wanted, but without her.

  The flames of her missing anger lunged up inside her, licking at her, burning her. They required immediate dousing.

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetie,’ she said to Francesca. ‘I have to get going now. Do you have somewhere to be? School, maybe?’

  ‘It’s summer,’ Francesca said, her pretty smile gone. ‘There is no school.’

  She reluctantly followed Lily to the door and waited until Lily waved her through it, but as she passed in front that blur of colour—a group of girls about the same age as she, it turned out—came clattering back up the lane.

  As soon as she saw them, Francesca stepped back into the shop, pressing herself, and her fairy wings, hard into Lily’s empty body.

  Lily saw the look that rippled through the gang of girls, felt Francesca shrink away from them. One girl snickered, and the others followed suit—that same shrill cacophony—then they broke into a run and scattered, calling out what, Lily did not know, but Francesca stayed pressed into her.

  The wings, up close, had a series of little holes in them, as if the fairy wearing them had long ago been gunned down. Her dress, Lily realised, was not as clean as it could have been. A thin crescent of dirt fringed each fingernail. Her hair had not been brushed recently. Who was looking after her?

  When the slap of the girls’ sandals had completely faded, Francesca relaxed and stepped out into the street as if nothing had happened.

  She turned around and in the split second that Lily saw her pull her expression together, Lily realised she had been too quick to identify confidence in the child.

  She showed it all right, but it wasn’t quite the natural resource Lily had originally assumed. In front of those other girls, it had crumbled. How she wanted to hold that brave little body, to kiss her face, soothe her, tell her that everything would be all right, that she was worth more than a hundred of those girls, a thousand, a million.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ Lily asked, as casually as she could.

  ‘Will you be here tomorrow?’ Francesca asked, swivelling again.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lily said. ‘But if I am I hope I see you again.’

  ‘OK,’ Francesca said.

  ‘It was a pleasure to meet you, Tinker Bell,’ Lily said. ‘A real pleasure.’ And before she could disgrace herself and embarrass the child by releasing what felt like a lifetime of unshed tears, she turned and headed down the hill.

  ‘Ciao, ciao,’ Francesca called after her. ‘A domani.’

  Until tomorrow.

  Chapter 17

  Daniel woke up on the tiny couch in his cramped hotel room, fully clothed and with an appalling hangover.

  His neck hurt, his head hurt, his back hurt, and the cloying scent of expensive perfume in the air led him to believe the blonde woman he’d met at the café was not far away.

  He could not remember her name or how she came to be in his hotel room.

  Daniel was not in the habit of picking up women and bringing them home. He, of all people, knew the peril in that, and he couldn’t believe he would do something so loathsome now, when he was already in such a mess.

  Bones creaking, he got to his feet and snuck a look at the woman, lying on her back in his bed, the sheet wrapped loosely around her, one arm curled around her head. She was sound asleep also mostly clothed, and he saw that she was older than he’d originally thought, older than him. She’d not taken care of her body
as well as Lily had; she’d spent too much time in the sun, perhaps, her neck showing the telltale signs nothing but a turtle neck could ever cover up. But she looked happy, even when she was sleeping.

  He turned away from her and slipped out onto the little balcony, pulling the door shut behind him and lighting a cigarette as he watched a drugged-up zombie couple stagger down the cobbled road below. They zigzagged unnecessarily around the straight line of parked motor scooters that framed the curb and finally collapsed on the steps of the church opposite the hotel, like two deflating balloons.

  Daniel blew a lazy smoke ring into the early morning air and thought about another body back in Montevedova; a perfect body really, if you liked that sort of thing, which he obviously did, if fleetingly. Now, in hindsight, he thought what he had mostly liked about that body was the ease in which the woman who inhabited it did so. She liked it herself and not in an obsessive way, but in a way that was just good to be around. She ate pasta and bread and pizza like it was going out of fashion and gorged herself on cheeses and salamis and all the things Lily didn’t go near because they had added preservatives or hormones or were really dolphins or some other B.S. the green police had brainwashed her into. He suspected for Lily that it was mainly all about not getting fat. Italian women didn’t seem to care about getting fat. They thought curves made them sexier, and they were right, although it was the not-caring-what-anyone-else-thought that Daniel had originally found so sexy.

  He stubbed out his cigarette. How could he have been so stupid? No, worse than that, so ordinary? That set of sexy curves and devil-may-care attitude had gotten his attention, sure, when he was at his lowest ebb. But to get so much more? It was such a cliché it made him sick. He was such a cliché it made him sick.

  ‘Hey, Danny?’ he heard the blonde woman call huskily from inside. Ingrid, her name, came tumbling back into his consciousness along with the embarrassing memory of telling her too much. They had done nothing but talk, and it had been him doing most of the talking. And most of the drinking. God, he was such a sap. A self-obsessed, boring, stupid sap. He tried to remember Ingrid’s story, what she had told him. She was married, he thought, to someone who was at a convention in Rome—or was it Milan?—and she’d always wanted to see Florence so had come here alone while her husband was convening.

  ‘Oh, there you are.’ She smiled when she found him on the balcony.

  She was wearing a fluffy white hotel bathrobe and she’d fixed her hair. He had no idea how she was going to be this morning, how he was going to be. He dreaded whatever was about to happen, felt the tension knot harder in his aching back and shoulders.

  ‘Shall I call room service?’ she said, and it was such an uncomplicated suggestion he nearly wept. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m desperate for coffee.’

  He started to shake his head but actually, when he thought about it, he was hungry. And he wasn’t sure if he felt like being with Ingrid, but he also wasn’t sure if he felt like being alone. He started to say that perhaps eggs were in order, and maybe a bloody Mary, but when he opened his mouth, something else entirely came tumbling out.

  He was out of his depth, not just here in this hotel room but everywhere. In his life. He was drowning in his life and he had no one to blame but himself, and no hope of being rescued.

  What he wanted to tell this woman, this Ingrid with the easy charm and the warm smile, was that breakfast was a great idea, but what he did instead was start to weep, desperately and uncontrollably, like a child. Like a baby.

  Ingrid was not altogether taken aback. She had a good instinct for people and thought he wasn’t a bad one. She was worried about him. And the weeping didn’t bother her that much either; she was used to seeing grown men cry. She had three sons, now all in their twenties and all tending toward the ‘sensitive’ side of the spectrum.

  She reached for Daniel, led him back inside the room, sat him on the couch, wrapped her arms around him, and pretended he was one of them. It was what she would want someone to do for any of her boys if they were this unhappy.

  Chapter 18

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ Luciana asked as she stood behind Violetta, whose ear was currently pressed against the door into the pasticceria. ‘Can you hear what Lily is saying to the little girl?’

  ‘No, I can’t. Not with you booming like a foghorn behind me,’ complained Violetta. ‘These ears are nearly a hundred years old. They’re tired, give them a break.’

  ‘Well, you could afford one of those thingamajigs that pick up even the smallest sound if you would just consider what I was saying about the cantucci.’

  ‘Pick up even the smallest sound?’ Violetta spun around, furious. ‘Why would I want to do that? I barely want to hear the biggest sounds, especially when most of them involve you heckling me about our family business or that young whippersnapper Fiorella Fiorucci challenging my authority and asking lame-brained questions!’

  ‘She’s hardly a whippersnapper, Violetta: she’s eighty-five. And she was only suggesting—’

  ‘I’ll tell you what Fiorella Fiorucci can do with her suggestions!’ Violetta exploded. ‘She can put them where the monkey put the peanuts! She is trouble, that woman—short, fat, and practically-legally-blind-by-the-look-of-those-glasses trouble. We need to get rid of her, and soon. She’s feeding conspiracies to the widow Ercolani like peppermints. She has the widow Mazzetti checking the rule book every five minutes on one trumped up charge or another. She is not one of us, Luciana. She is not!’

  Luciana picked nonchalantly at the hem of her dress. ‘I think she is just what the doctor ordered,’ she said. ‘And she’s fun.’

  ‘What the doctor ordered? Fun? Pah! What in the name of Santa Ana di Chisa has got into you?’ She nudged her sister in the shoulder with her curled hand. ‘I can usually rely on you to back me up, but ever since that mouthy young trout showed up, you seem to have hitched your wagon to her caboose.’

  Luciana nudged her right back. ‘She only turned up yesterday and my wagon is hitched to your caboose, Violetta,’ she said. ‘It will be forever, but if I can stop your caboose from going off the rails and plunging down a deep ravine, taking me with it, I will.’

  The pain in Violetta’s chest tightened its grip.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked her sister.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Turning against me!’

  ‘I am not turning against you, Violetta. I am trying to help you. Same as always.’

  ‘Same as always means you agree with me.’

  ‘Same as always means I say that I agree with you. It doesn’t mean I actually do.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘Then why say that you do?’

  ‘Because I believe in you…that’s what sisters do. And because it usually doesn’t matter. But this is different. This time, you need to hear the truth.’

  ‘And what would the truth be?’

  ‘That we can’t go on the way we are, with the cantucci or, for that matter, with the League. We are old, Violetta. We are very old and getting older, we need to let some new light shine in or we could be snuffed out forever.’

  ‘We’re not candles!’

  ‘No, but if we were, we would be melted down to ugly little stubs and our wicks would only just be flickering.’

  ‘Nonsense! I could still burn down the whole of Montevedova if I wanted to.’

  ‘You could do it by mistake the way things are going.’

  ‘You’re either with me or against me,’ Violetta said, the unsteady beat of her ancient heart clattering in her ears.

  Luciana snorted. ‘Funny that. Mussolini said the same thing. And anyway, you know I’m with you. You’ve known that since…’

  They both looked over at the pictures of their late husbands on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I was right,’ Violetta said gruffly. ‘The thing is, I was right. It worked out. I knew.’

  ‘Yes, that’s my point. You we
re right, and I was with you then and I’ve been with you ever since, so you should listen to me when I say that this time I am not so sure.’

  They were quiet for a moment, Violetta cursing the wretchedness of having her sister lose faith in her just when she had lost faith in herself. She could not go on without her. Not today. She would have to deal with this another time.

  ‘Burn down Montevedova by mistake? Nonsense!’ she said, attempting a halfhearted kick in the direction of her sister’s shin.

  ‘With me or against me indeed!’ snorted Luciana, attempting the same manoeuvre.

  ‘Watch out or you’ll topple over and I won’t be able to get you back up again, you silly old woman,’ warned Violetta.

  ‘Well, watch out or I’ll topple over and not want to get back up again,’ came the retort.

  The sound of the bell above the door ringing in the bakeshop brought their quarrelling to a halt. Lily was leaving the premises.

  ‘Quick, wave your scarf at Ciacci. We need Del Grasso to stall her until someone remembers where Alessandro is this morning.’

  Chapter 19

  Lily was hurrying past the Hotel Adesso when the little grey-haired woman she had seen hollering down the hall the day before scurried out of the doorway and grabbed at her arm.

  ‘You want stay in lovely four-star hotel?’ the old woman asked her.

  ‘I tried to yesterday,’ Lily said, gently extracting her arm from the vice-like grip. ‘But there was a problem with the plumbing.’

  ‘Problem? There is no problem.’

  ‘The drains were blocked. There was a huge fuss.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ the woman said. ‘False alarm.’

  ‘False alarm? I could smell the drains from here in the doorway.’

  ‘There is no problem,’ the woman insisted, tugging at her arm. ‘I promise. You stay here. Is very nice. Four stars.’

  ‘The lady at the tourist office said it had no stars,’ Lily informed her.