Long Island Iced Tina

by Maria DiRico

  “You did?” Teri sounded girly and breathless. “Awesome. Did he say anything?”

  Mia picked up on the hesitancy in the reporter’s usually confident attitude. “He was excited. He’s looking forward to making some of those recipes.”

  Mia swore she heard Teri jumping up and down. “Oh, that is so cool.”

  “So much for not needing a man to define you.”

  “I don’t. But it’s been a long time since I even had a hook-up. And it’s fun to have a crush.”

  She signed off. Mia spent the rest of the workday checking her email for the pictures from the Tri Trib journalist and plowing through resumes for the retail manager position. All the candidates seemed to possess the necessary qualifications, but no one stood out. She created an online folder where she saved the resumes of the best potential candidates.

  Mia was about to sign off when a pop-up on her screen indicated a message from Teri. Mia opened it. Attached were several photos of a European-model sportscar on its roof at the bottom of a ravine off a narrow two-lane road ringed by mountains which were so tall they had snow on their peaks, despite the fact it was August. Mia studied the photos from every angle. She blew them up and shrunk them. In the end, she gleaned nothing more than what Teri originally told her: Justine Cadeau met her end on a remote road in Switzerland. “Why were you there, Justine?” Mia murmured to the screen. “And where were you going?”

  Mia closed the email and left her office. The silence indicated that she was the last employee still at Belle View, so she locked up the building and unlocked her bike. As she rode home, the photos of Justine’s car accident haunted her. Maybe I’m better off not driving, she thought as she deftly negotiated her way around a large pothole.

  Mia reached home. She dismounted the bike and parked it in the freestanding garage off the alley behind the house. She entered Elisabetta’s kitchen through the back door and headed down the hall to her upstairs apartment. She passed Elisabetta, who was in her bedroom putting on gold earrings. Her grandmother was dressed in black head to toe. “Hi, Nonna. Going to a viewing?”

  “Yes,” Elisabetta said. “Go upstairs and put on a black dress. You’re coming with me.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Mia rubbed her brow and closed her eyes. Then she opened them. “Nonna, I love you beyond words but if you asked me for a list of two million things I’d like to do tonight, attend a stranger’s viewing wouldn’t be on it.”

  “Philip can’t go. He’s working on Ron’s defense in case he needs one. No one else can go either. I went to another viewing this morning and got strange looks because I was alone. Like I was one of those old harpies who goes to funerals for kicks.”

  “No, you’re going to wakes and funerals for a sane reason.”

  “I don’t need sarcasm, nipotina mia.” Elisabetta finished putting on her earrings. “I need company. You know how I’ve been nagging you about going to church? There’ll be a priest there tonight, so I’ll count it as that.”

  “You will?” Mia asked, now intrigued.

  “Yeah. For this week.”

  “And next.”

  “Meh, dammi una pausa!” Elisabetta protested. “Give me a break.”

  “And next,” Mia repeated.

  Elisabetta started to issue another protest, then threw her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Va bene. Next week, too.”

  “Va bene,” Mia said. “So, who died?”

  “Arturo Medaglia. He was ninety-seven and a pisane I knew from the church senior center. He liked the ladies and tried to make time with me once.”

  “Like, recently?” Mia, imagining a nonagenarian hitting on her octogenarian grandmother, couldn’t keep the stupefaction from her voice.

  “Yes, recently,” Elisabetta said, insulted. “Young people like you think everything shuts down when people get old. Let me tell you, once they stuck a coupla stents and a pacemaker into Arturo, he got fresh with a lot of us. I wouldn’t even be going to his visitation except word on the street is that it’s an open casket.”

  “Yippee.” Elisabetta shot her granddaughter a look. “Sorry,” Mia said. “I’ll go change.”

  Mia trudged upstairs. She’d yet to take her black dress to the cleaner, so she had to settle for black pants and a black silk V-neck tee shirt. She pulled her long, dark hair into a high ponytail and freshened her makeup. She headed back downstairs, where Elisabetta, holding a tote bag along with her purse, was waiting for her by the front door. “The cab is here,” Elisabetta said. “Andiamo.”

  As the cab drove through Astoria to the Lugano Funeral Home on Steinway Street, Elisabetta laid out her plan. “We’ll take turns paying our respects. I’ll go first. Gugliemo’s shoes are in here.” She patted the tote bag. “When no one’s looking, I’ll drop one in the casket. Then I’ll pass the bag to you, and you’ll do the same. We need to do it right before they close the casket. We don’t wanna give anyone time to look and go, hey, what are those shoes doing in there?”

  “Honestly, Nonna, I don’t think anyone does much lingering at these things. You kneel, you pray, and you make tracks.”

  “You never know these days. What if someone takes a selfie of themselves with Arturo?”

  “Oh, dear lord,” Mia said, appalled at the thought.

  “They could see the shoes that way. They could be in the picture, like proof. Maybe go . . . what’s it called, when something goes everywhere around the world?”

  “Viral.”

  “Si, viral. It’s a different world now, cara mia.”

  “You’re not wrong there.”

  “We’re almost at Lugano’s. Put on a sad face.”

  The cab pulled up to the front of the Lugano Funeral Home, a nondescript, mid-century brick building wisely located between a flower shop and a home for the elderly. Mia paid the cab driver and helped Elisabetta out of the car. “You look more annoyed than sad,” her grandmother said.

  “Sorry.” Mia made a sad face. “Better?”

  “Now you look like someone grabbed the purse you wanted from the sales table. Think of something that would make you cry.”

  Mia forced herself to imagine Jamie living in Hugo Hartley’s house in Connecticut. She pictured Madison, Jamie’s girlfriend, pulling into the driveway and parking, then reaching into the back to remove an infant from a car seat. A tear rolled down Mia’s cheek as she sank into a sad fantasy of herself alone and sobbing as she wrapped a housewarming gift for the happy family.

  “Perfetto,” Elisabetta said. She rubbed her hands together. “Let’s do this.”

  The two women walked into the funeral home lobby, which was crowded with people paying their respects. The minute they stepped inside, Mia and Elisabetta were assailed by an overwhelming smell. The air wasn’t perfumed with the blend of fragrances produced by Ravello’s lovely floral arrangement. Instead, there was only one note: lilies. “I’ve been to so many funerals lately, and it’s the same at all of them,” Elisabetta said to Mia under her breath. “This is what death smells like to me now. When I go, promise me, no lilies.”

  “I promise.”

  Elisabetta eyeballed the attendees milling around the lobby. “Let’s split up and work the room. You know what, there might be some single young men here.”

  “That would be a great story to tell our children. ‘Mommy, how did you and Daddy meet?’ ‘Oh, honey, it’s such a sweet story. I was at a visitation for an old guy I’d never met so we could send shoes in his casket up to heaven for another old guy I never met, and your great-grandmother told me to troll the room looking for dates.’”

  “Hai una bocca per te, lo sai?”

  “Yeah, I know I got a mouth on me. But only when pushed to it.”

  Mia and Elisabetta circled the lobby from opposite directions, maneuvering around the massive, space-clogging floral displays so prevalent at Italian funerals. Mia’s front as a mourner was helped by the fact that she saw many familiar faces in the crowd. She was welcomed as a fellow Perpetual Anguish p
arishioner. Mia avoided making eye contact with the parish priest, embarrassed that she didn’t remember his name even though Elisabetta had introduced her to him several times. She felt guilty for using Mass as a negotiating tool with her grandmother and vowed to make it to church . . . eventually.

  Her phone pinged a text. Mia checked and saw a message from Elisabetta: It’s go time. She turned toward the room where the viewing was being held and bumped into another woman. “Sorry.”

  The woman turned around and Mia’s heart sank. Standing in front of her was Alicia Medaglia Cohen, leader of her high school’s mean-girl pack. Alicia, sleek-haired, rail-thin, and dressed in a stylish black wrap dress, gasped with baldly faked delight at the sight of Mia. “OMG!” Alicia threw her arms around Mia yet barely touched her, as if it was a mime routine. “I heard you were back in town. It’s so good to see you.”

  “You too, Alicia,” Mia lied. “How’ve you been?”

  Alicia made the universal sign for crazy, twirling both fingers at the sides of her impeccably made-up face. “Pazzo. My husband’s in finance in the city, so he works like a dog, poor man. Which leaves only me and the nanny with the twins. Luckily, she’s a live-in—legal, of course, I think—so that helps. But with our babies starting private school this fall, and the boards I’m on and the boards he’s on, it was like our lives were on steroids, so we splurged on a weekend place on the Vineyard. The Hamptons are so last millennium.”

  Mia knew whatever she said in response to this hum-blebrag would come out fully loaded, so she simply said, “Mm hm.”

  “Thank you for coming tonight.” Done with lamenting about the trials and tribulations of her one-percent life, Alicia brought the conversation back to the vigil. “It means a lot to us.”

  Mia panicked. Alicia’s “us” meant she was related to the deceased, but Mia had zero idea how. “I couldn’t not come,” she tap-danced. “Arturo was such a wonderful man. So beloved in the community.” Somebody help me out here.

  “Yes.” Alicia extricated a tissue from a small black purse that Mia recognized as a top-of-the-line item from her obscenely expensive former Florida employer, Korri Designs. Alicia dabbed at her dry eyes. “Losing the patriarch of our family has been brutal.”

  Grandfather, that’s it! But different last names. Must be on her mother’s side.

  “At least I got to say good-bye before he passed. A dio, Prozio Arturo.”

  Great-uncle, not grandfather. Thank God I kept my trap shut. “Heaven is a better place for Arturo’s arrival there,” Mia said. She inwardly cringed at this ham-fisted response, but Alicia seemed to appreciate it, rewarding her with another faux hug.

  “Thank you. So . . .” Alicia’s tone did a one-eighty from lamenting to avaricious gossip. “I heard about all your troubles. Your husband disappearing in Florida, the murders at the place where you work . . .” Alicia placed a hand on Mia’s arm. She made a tsk tsk sound and shook her head, doing her best to look sympathetic—and failing. “How are you holding up with all that?”

  Mia made a fist and did a small air pump, mostly to remove her arm from Alicia’s touch. “I’m doing so good. It hasn’t been easy getting over my husband’s presumed death.” I will never let her know that I hated the cheating S.O.B. “And my dad and I did hit a rough patch at Belle View, but that’s behind us now.”

  Alicia inhaled through her teeth, then blew out a breath. “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Oh, I know so. Belle View is rocking it.”

  “That’s wonderful.” Alicia put a modicum of effort into sounding supportive but couldn’t keep a patronizing inflection from her voice. “We’re having a memorial for prozio Arturo and thought about holding it at your place. But with all the drama there, we thought we’d better go with Versailles on the Park.”

  “Good choice. To be honest, we’re so booked up we probably couldn’t have fit you onto the schedule,” Mia lied again. Her phone dinged. Elisabetta had texted a series of exclamation marks. “It’s been great catching up, but I haven’t paid my respects to Arturo yet.”

  “Go, go.” Alicia made a shoo-ing gesture with her hands, then checked her smart watch. “This thing’s almost done, thank God.”

  Mia made her escape from Alicia’s company into the room where Arturo lay. Fortunately for her and Elisabetta, the room was empty save for a bored funeral director who Mia noticed was playing a game on his cell phone. Her grandmother approached Arturo. She kneeled, crossed herself, and mumbled a prayer. Then she stood up and surreptitiously glanced around the room. She made eye contact with Mia, nodded, pulled a men’s shoe out of her tote bag, and dropped it into the coffin. Mia walked down the aisle between folding chairs. As she and Elisabetta passed each other, Elisabetta handed off the tote bag. Mia followed her grandmother’s actions, kneeling, praying, standing, and dropping the second shoe in with Arturo. She completed this just as people began filling the room for the vigil’s final prayer. The funeral director snapped to attention, guiding the family to the front rooms and indicating everyone else take a seat behind them. He motioned to the priest. “Father Joseph, if you will lead us in the prayers.”

  Mia repeated the priest’s name in her head, hoping to finally memorize it. Elisabetta pulled a rosary out of her purse. Father Joseph took center stage in front of the coffin and began the service. Mia followed along with the prayer’s call and response, but her mind drifted. Alicia’s mention of Versailles brought to mind the image of the laundry bins. They might be handy for local illicit transportation, but not beyond those geographic parameters.

  “I’d like to invite Arturo’s family to pay their last respects,” Father Joseph said.

  Elisabetta clutched Mia’s arm. “If anyone sees the shoes,” she whispered. “We don’t know anything.”

  The women waited, hearts thumping, while a seemingly endless line of the late man’s relatives passed by the coffin, stopping to kneel and pray. Elisabetta fingered her rosary like it was a chain of worry beads. “What a blessing that we Catholics kneel,” Elisabetta whispered. “If this was one of those religions where you stand and pray, we’d be doomed.” The line of mourners finally ended, and the women exhaled their relief.

  Father Joseph led the room in the Lord’s Prayer. The funeral director made his way up the aisle. “That’s a fancy-shmancy casket,” Elisabetta said to Mia under her breath. “Very roomy. Too bad Annette didn’t know. We could’ve fit a coupla pair of shoes in there for Gugliemo. Maybe even some slippers.”

  The funeral director reached Arturo. He made the sign of the cross, then pulled down the lid of the coffin, which rested on a gurney, and secured it. He and several men Mia assumed were Arturo’s relatives slowly pushed the coffin down the center aisle toward the door toward the limo that would carry it to church for the morning’s funeral service. Mia had a sudden vision. The stolen paintings and Tina’s position as a flight attendant melded together into one clear picture in her mind with such force that it propelled her out of her seat.

  “I know how they did it!”

  CHAPTER 18

  There was no way to explain Mia’s outburst to the stunned mourners, so she and Elisabetta left the funeral home as fast as possible. “Marone mia, che notte.” Elisabetta blotted her forehead with the edge of her sweater. “What a night. You almost gave me a heart attack with that crazy scream of yours. They could’ve dropped me right into that casket with Arturo.”

  “Mi dispiace, Nonna, but I had a brainstorm about the Miller Collection paintings.” Mia pulled out her cell phone and speed-dialed her father, who answered on the first ring. “Dad, hi, I know it’s late, but can you see if Donny is free? I need to talk to you both.”

  “You want to talk to Donny?” Ravello sounded concerned about his daughter’s sudden need to confab with the Family’s capo di tutti capi.

  “Yes. Don’t worry, I just want to run something by you. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Trust me on this.”

  “Okay, I’ll check with him. It’s only a li
ttle before eight. Donny’s a night owl. Gimme a minute.” The phone went silent. Mia held on. A moment later, Ravello came back on the line. “He’s free. Have the cab drop you at my house. We’ll drive out to his place. But first, you have to stop at La Guli and pick up a cookie platter.”

  “Meh, of course,” Mia said, insulted. “Arrive empty-handed? What kind of Italian do you think I am?”

  “You spent a lotta time in Florida, figlia mia,” Ravello said with a chuckle. “I don’t know how Italians do things there.”

  “It’s not the same as here, for sure, but they know enough never to show up at a friend’s house without a hostess gift.”

  Mia ended the call and directed the cab to the Family’s favorite pastry shop. They arrived at the decades-old establishment moments before it closed for the evening. “Look who’s here, two of my favorite people,” Julie, the zaftig saleswoman behind the burnished wood counter, said. “What can I get ya?”

  “I need a cookie platter,” Mia said. “We’re taking it out to the Island to Donny.”

  “Donny Boldano?” Julie said, impressed. “I better make it extra special.”

  Five minutes later, Mia and Elisabetta emerged with a massive pastry arrangement, plus a bag of free treats they shared with their happy cab driver.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is, be careful,” Elisabetta said as the cab dropped Mia off in front of Ravello’s home, the house where she grew up that was only blocks from her grandmother.

  “I always am, Nonna.”

  The cab drove off. Mia scurried up the front steps with the cookie assortment in her arms. Like her place, her father’s was an unassuming two-family home. When she was a kid, Mia and Posi lived upstairs while their parents lived downstairs. Mia didn’t mind the separation. It dimmed the noise from Ravello and Gia’s operatic arguments. Since his annulment years prior, Ravello had lived alone. Mia wondered if there was a time in the future when her father would share the home with his girlfriend, Lin Yeung.