Dolci di Love

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  In New York, she had her roots done every three weeks at great expense in a salon on Fifth Avenue where caviar blinis were served with ice-cold Veuve Clicquot.

  This did not look like a blini-and-Veuve Clicquot establishment, but her roots needed attention—she would not let standards slip just because of her current predicament—so she went in and explained to the frumpy woman at reception what she would like. The frumpy woman did not speak English but seemed to understand her anyway, pointing at her own parting, then at a picture in a magazine of a beautiful blonde with perfect highlights.

  ‘Sí, sí.’ Lily smiled and was shown to a seat. The frumpy receptionist then called out something in Italian to whoever was in the room at the back of the salon, said, ‘Uno momento’ to Lily, and shuffled out the front door.

  A scented oil was throwing out a pleasant, grassy aroma in the corner while gentle, classical music played at just the right level. Lily was starting to relax into an Italian fashion magazine when her hairdresser emerged from the curtain behind reception bearing a tray of dye and brushes.

  She sank into her chair as deeply as she could.

  ‘Buongiorno,’ the hairdresser said limply and looked at her in the mirror.

  Take me now, Lily silently pleaded to whatever cosmic ghoul was in charge of punishing her so harshly. Take me now.

  The hairdresser had the thin lips, the mistrustful smile, the same long mane but without the swish. How could Lily have been so stupid? Carlotta was not the woman in the photo, this was the woman. Sisters!

  The hairdresser was curvier than Carlotta and she definitely had hips: they were currently straining the lower buttons of her dress, and her dangerous look—while not in evidence just then as much as it was in the photo—still seemed not far away.

  ‘Mi chiamo Eugenia,’ she said, in a tired voice. ‘My name is Eugenia. You want your roots done, no? Not a cut? Some inches off the bottom?’

  She held Lily’s hair out and made a snipping gesture.

  Lily, the famous problem solver, could not for the life of her figure out the solution for this.

  If Eugenia knew who Lily was, she was in a very vulnerable position. The woman could render her bald with just a few toxic drops in the dye solution or could bring out the shears and give her a mohawk.

  If Eugenia didn’t know who Lily was, she could just get up and leave, which might create a fuss, but still, it was the better option. However, as she started to rise from her chair, she felt the cold tingle of the blonding solution on her scalp.

  ‘Is all right?’ Eugenia asked, confused, the plastic bowl of bleach in her hand.

  Lily waited, but a cold tingle was as bad as it got. She settled stiffly back in the seat. Her hair, for the moment, was safe, and she had no choice but to sit there and watch in the mirror as Eugenia worked slowly and methodically on her roots. Eugenia (not a red-hot seductress name by any stretch) was not the siren she had imagined. She wore little or no makeup, the hem on one side of her dress was falling down, her high heels were worn on the outsides, and she chewed nervously on her lower lip as she applied the solution to Lily’s thick hair in neat sections.

  When Eugenia was about halfway through, her cell phone rang. She snatched it out of her pocket, said, ‘Scusi,’ and hurried into the back room. Lily strained to hear the conversation, but it was over too quickly and Eugenia soon came back, even more dishevelled than before.

  She did not look anything like a happy, confident, husband-stealer. She looked like a wreck.

  She applied more dye to Lily’s roots, which was when Lily noticed that her hands were unsteady.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked carefully.

  Eugenia nodded violently.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Truly, is fine.’

  But she did not seem fine. In fact, she seemed to be unravelling before Lily’s eyes. ‘Really, is nothing,’ she insisted, and applied yet more dye. ‘Is nothing, absolutely nothing,’ she repeated, almost angrily, and plunged the brush she was using back into the bowl, stirring it viciously, so viciously that little bits of blue solution slopped onto the floor, onto her dress, her foot.

  Lily’s shoulders were back up near her ears. Where was this heading? Suddenly, though, Eugenia stopped, her whole body collapsing into a slump, and she shook her unhappy head.

  ‘Is not nothing,’ she said.

  Trapped inside that plastic cape with a scalp full of blonding solution, Lily felt her heart pound, felt the blood thunder through her thighs, her forearms. She was ready to spring to her feet and run.

  ‘My boyfriend…’ Eugenia began.

  Lily’s hands gripped the arms of the chair.

  Her boyfriend.

  This was going to be bad.

  She looked at Eugenia’s image in the mirror, but the wretched woman wasn’t glowering with rage, she was just standing there, hunched over, looking at the floor, shaking slightly. She did not look like she was going to dump all the dye on Lily’s head and throw in a cup of acid for good measure. She did not seem inclined to grab the shears and give her a buzz cut.

  In fact, she collapsed on the chair next to Lily and burst into tears.

  ‘My boyfriend is run away!’ she cried. ‘He is run away from me!’

  Her husband’s mistress clearly needed comforting, but as Lily sat there, her hair standing out Smurf-like from her head, she couldn’t bring herself to do anything but shift uneasily as Eugenia’s weeping drowned out the music.

  ‘You are very upset,’ she eventually said. ‘I’m so sorry, this must be a very difficult time for you, but perhaps we should wash this dye off and I could come back another time?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Eugenia sobbed, her tears falling like the week’s earlier rain. It was impossible to not feel sympathy for her, but she was still the woman who was stealing Lily’s husband, and she just couldn’t sit there and counsel her, even if she had known what to say.

  ‘OK, well, I think I will just start doing it myself if that’s all right with you,’ she said, moving over to the basin and turning the faucets on.

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ Eugenia sobbed even harder as she watched her client rinsing her own hair. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘I’m sure he hasn’t run away,’ Lily said, applying shampoo. ‘He’s probably just gone somewhere on business.’

  ‘One week he is gone,’ Eugenia said. ‘One week he is not wanting to see me.’

  One week, thought Lily, upside down and rinsing as she calculated when she had left home. She’d assumed Daniel was staying longer in Italy because of the mistress and children, but if he wasn’t with them, where the heck was he?

  ‘How long have you had this boyfriend?’ she asked as casually as she could, rubbing conditioner into her hair.

  ‘A long time,’ Eugenia answered. ‘We have a child. We have children. But he is a bad boyfriend. Very, very bad!’ And she was off again, weeping.

  The children! They had all but escaped her mind. This nervous wreck who could barely dye half a head was in charge of Daniel’s children.

  How could he leave her like this? Her Daniel, known for his kindness, his understanding, his lovely character, and endless patience? It was bad enough that he was cheating on Lily and leading a secret life somewhere else, but to be botching that up too? Had he walked in right then she would have mohawked the living daylights out of him.

  But he didn’t. And Eugenia was clearly not expecting him to. The weeping woman reached into her pocket and shook a couple of pills out of a prescription bottle.

  As Lily dried and styled her own hair, Eugenia stayed slumped in her chair, crying.

  ‘My purse,’ Lily said when she was done, pointing to her bag, which lay at Eugenia’s feet.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she wept as she handed it over. ‘You have lovely hair. Come back tomorrow and I give you free blow-dry.’

  It was all Lily could do to mumble an apologetic goodbye and flee, leaving poor Eugenia collapsed in front of the mirror, rocking back and forward, and chewing th
rough the Kleenex.

  Chapter 27

  ‘Are you going to tell me what is going on?’ Luciana asked after Lily left the kitchen. ‘You look as though you’ve been run over by a horse and cart. What did she say?’

  Violetta sat down. Her head was spinning. ‘What was that? With getting her to help make the cantucci? You think anyone can make our cantucci?’ she asked.

  Luciana raised the spindly remains of her eyebrows. ‘You can talk. What was that with getting her to round up the “santamerda”?’

  ‘You know, I’m getting mighty sick of you questioning every single thing I do, Luciana!’

  ‘Well, I’m getting mighty sick of it too. If you’d just answer my questions perhaps we would both be happy!’

  ‘You can’t just let anyone come into our kitchen and make our cantucci. It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘No, it works better! Did you see how she mixed the dough? She was a natural. Those beautiful, strong young hands. Look at these smooth straight logs, Violetta. She did that in no time at all while thinking about something else. What on earth are you so scared of?’

  ‘I’m scared of what little we have left going straight down the drain and taking us with it,’ Violetta argued, but that wasn’t the truth.

  ‘I know my memory’s going but I’m sure you used to be more fun than this,’ Luciana retorted.

  ‘And you used to be six foot tall,’ her sister barked back.

  ‘Well, if I was six foot tall now, I would pick you up and throw you out the window.’

  ‘And I would roll down the hill and not stop until I hit the coast where I would set up another pasticceria in competition with your one and squash you like a tiny little cockroach.’

  ‘A tiny little six foot tall cockroach. Good luck with that!’

  They bickered like this for a couple more hours as they baked Lily’s dough and grumpily made more of their own in nowhere near the time or fashion.

  Then the widow Ciacci’s head poked up at the window.

  ‘I have a report to make,’ she trilled. ‘No need for a meeting as it’s only an update.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ snapped Violetta.

  ‘Burn the cantucci again, did we?’ the widow Ciacci asked cheerfully. ‘Honestly, there isn’t a molar left among the lot of us, you may as well try your hand at marshmallow.’

  ‘I said get on with it!’

  ‘Well, I’ve just been to the bank to—oooh!’ She disappeared from the window. ‘Allora! Not again,’ they heard her say from the street below. Her chair had seen better days, that was for sure.

  Luciana poked her head out the window but her neck was too stiff to look downward.

  ‘I’m OK,’ the widow Ciacci called up, and eventually there she was again. ‘Serves me right for using flour and water instead of going to the alimentare for glue. Anyway, as I was saying, I had to go to the bank to get money out because I lost thirteen euro playing pachesi with my sister-in-law. She’s quite the whiz, could make a fortune in the back streets of Palermo, let me tell you. But anyway, when she came to meet me to pick up the cash—first time she’s ever turned up anywhere on the dot as far as I know—she told me that she’d nipped away from her job at the salon on Via Ricci while a “pretty blonde American”, that would be our calzino’s amore, was having her roots done. Fancy that! Her roots! Do you know what this means?’

  ‘The salon on Via Ricci?’ asked Violetta.

  ‘She’s not a natural blonde!’ crowed the widow Ciacci.

  ‘I don’t think anyone is a natural blonde,’ said Luciana.

  ‘Did you say the salon on Via Ricci?’ Violetta asked again.

  ‘Yes, yes, Via Ricci.’

  Violetta turned to her sister. ‘Didn’t you tell her to tell the widow Ercolani to recommend any salon other than the one on Via Ricci?’

  Luciana looked puzzled. ‘I think I did, although you didn’t bother to tell me why. Or did I?’

  ‘Yes, yes, you did,’ assured the widow Ciacci. ‘but she didn’t go to the tourist office in the end. The widow Pacini saw her cutting across, just up the hill here. She found the salon on Via Ricci all on her own, but I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you, Violetta. Eugenia Barbarini may have her problems, but she’s a very good hairdresser, according to my sister-in-law, as long as she remembers to take her pills. Or is it if she doesn’t take her pills?’

  ‘Eugenia Barbarini,’ Violetta echoed.

  ‘Yes, Eugenia Barbarini, you know—strumpet daughter of the late loony Maria, sister of crazy Carlotta, mother of the peculiar kid who was in your store yesterday.’

  ‘I know who she is,’ Violetta said, her mind whirring as the widow Ciacci’s chair gave way a second time. ‘Allora!’ they heard again, then Violetta poked her head out the window.

  ‘Get the town perimeter covered and when you find Lily try to keep her contained. Don’t ask why, just do it. And get widow Del Grasso to head straight to Poliziano and tell her to use the restroom first this time. If Lily turns up and stays for more than two glasses of wine, I want to hear about it, pronto.’ Then she shut the window and pulled the curtain.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ Luciana asked her. ‘You look like the same horse and cart has come back and run you over a second time.’

  Chapter 28

  Whatever Lily had thought she might achieve by coming to Tuscany, she felt a long, long way away from it.

  In the space of forty-eight hours she had been talked to by a tiramisu, berated by her GPS, sought refuge from a total stranger, and nearly relieved of her crowning glory by the unhinged mother of her husband’s secret love children.

  The truth was, she thought, after half an hour of being lost in the back alleyways between Eugenia’s salon and the pasticceria, she felt a long, long way from anything.

  But when she finally emerged back onto the Corso, she found herself in a familiar spot, right beside the little gelateria she had seen the day before when Carlotta was out in the street being fired.

  The same handsome man was standing in the doorway and lavished her with a beautiful smile. ‘Signora,’ he said, ‘can I interest you in a gelato?’

  He was short, shorter than she was, but had the most gorgeous big, brown eyes. Italian men really knew what to do with that unusually seductive part of their anatomy. If Alessandro’s eyes were deep pools of sadness into which, nonetheless, a person still felt like diving, the gelato man’s eyeswere a bubbling Jacuzzi: just as inviting but fizzing with energy.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not much of a gelato fan,’ Lily said, smiling back at him.

  ‘No!’ he cried, holding up his hands in mock horror. ‘There is no such thing I think as “not much of a gelato fan”. You obviously haven’t tasted my gelato. Come on, come on, just try some. Just a little bit?’

  She shook her head, but before she could scuttle away, he walked over to her, holding out his hand.

  ‘Mario Cappelli,’ he said as she shook it. ‘Come on in, I’ll give you one on the house. I will not be able to rest thinking there is such a beautiful woman right here in Montevedova who is not much of a gelato fan.’

  Up close he looked almost edible. His skin was like slightly burnt caramel, and those eyes so chocolatey they made her feel hungry. Although a glass of wine would be nice, she thought, as she allowed him to lead her to the glass-front freezer where his gelati were glistening.

  There were a dozen or so flavours, but it was the three different sorts of chocolate, at varying levels of decadence, that caught her attention.

  Three glasses of wine would be even better, Lily thought, eyeing up the triple chocolate.

  ‘If you are going to go cioccolata, you are barking up the right alley,’ Mario said. ‘This is my own favourite: chocolate gelato with chocolate drops and chocolate crema. My grandmother and I make it all right here, fatto a mano. The best in the whole town, if not all of Toscana.’

  It was wrong, Lily thought, to be looking at triplicare di cioccolata but to be wanting wine inst
ead. It was wrong to want to drink wine at all after disgracing herself so horribly in Pienza. The thought of what had happened there still made her skin crawl and conjured up a picture of her mother asleep at the dining table while Lily and Rose chomped silently through burnt macaroni and cheese.

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll have the triple chocolate,’ she said suddenly. It had been years since she’d eaten ice cream, but she didn’t particularly have any place else to be, only places she particularly didn’t, and this wasn’t one of them, so why the heck not.

  She sat at the one table in the window of the store while Mario scooped out a huge helping of the delectably glossy gelati and put it in front of her. She was just lifting the first spoonful to her lips when Francesca, still wearing her tatty wings, poked her head in the door.

  Lily’s heart jumped—she had so much of Daniel in her! It was truly extraordinary. It wasn’t just the eyes, the cheekbones, the chin; there was a slight reticence that was uncommon in good-looking people, the opposite of arrogance. It made the likes of Francesca and her father all the more appealing.

  The little girl’s face lit up, but Lily wasn’t sure if it was at the sight of her or the gelato.

  ‘This is really too much for one person,’ she said to Mario. ‘I don’t suppose you would have a second spoon?’

  She waved Francesca over and she flew to the seat opposite, fizzing with excitement.

  ‘Why aren’t you at home?’ Lily asked when they’d made a decent inroad into the ice cream.

  ‘My mamma came home from work,’ Francesca said. ‘She need quiet in our house.’

  ‘Where’s Ernesto?’ Mario asked from behind the counter.

  ‘With Aunt Carlotta,’ Francesca told him. ‘Forever, I hope.’

  ‘You don’t like having a little brother?’ Lily asked.

  ‘Sometimes it’s OK but mostly he likes it with Carlotta,’ Francesca explained matter-of-factly. ‘At home, my mamma cries, he cries, everybody cries, and it is very loud.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Lily said. She looked over at Mario, who gave a noncommittal shrug.