by Peggy Jaeger
Frustration and nerves got the better of me. “Gesu! Stupid tape,” I said before I could stop myself.
In the next nanosecond, my cheeks burned with fire. My head snapped up to see Santini watching me struggle, his hunky arms crossed in front of his chest, a closed-mouth grin lurking on his lips.
“I’m so sorry,” I said on a gasp, my hands practically crushing the box between them.
Great way to make an impression on the new priest, Gia. Take the Lord’s name in vain.
“Forgive me, please, I—”
“You’re forgiven. Give it over.” He put a hand out for the box.
My hand visibly shook as he took it from me.
He pulled a Swiss Army knife from the back pocket of his trousers, and with one flick to open it and another to slice the tape, the problem was solved.
“How many of these do you have?” He opened the flap and pulled out the plastic container housing the crammed rows of light strings.
“A hundred and fifty boxes.” I swallowed. Hard.
“Did you get them all at the same store?”
He handed the tray to me and picked up another box of lights, slicing and dicing it as he had the first one.
“My mother got them, and I don’t think she went to a store. My uncle, um, well, he…knows a guy…you know…who kind of gave her a…um…deal.”
Nothing like confessing to your new spiritual advisor your family communes with shady people who get you things that fell off a truck to make you feel even more unworthy and destined for hell.
For some reason, Santini didn’t appear to think this was an issue. He didn’t even bat an eyelash, just kept on cutting open boxes.
“Do you know how you want to string them up?” he asked as he worked.
“Along the top of each hut and then down the sides, to illuminate the frames. Extension cords will connect each individual strand together, forming one long electrical strip per hut.”
“Good idea.” He stopped slicing and graced me with a bountiful smile. “You won’t need a bunch of adaptors for every booth, then.”
I nodded. “That’s what my mama was thinking.”
I swear his smile could have paved the way to heaven through the darkness with its sheen and brilliance.
“Here,” he said when he’d gotten the first five or so boxes opened. “Why don’t I hand them up, and you string them? You’re way smaller and lighter than I am. Your ladder”—he pointed his chin at it—“doesn’t look like it would hold me.”
I nodded and climbed up. Even though I was almost on the top rung, I still wasn’t taller than he was.
But we were eye to eye, and when I tell you how amazing it was to be level with his handsome face, believe me, it was. I could make out the actual color of his eyes now. I’d thought they were dark from far away, but seeing them face to face, I spotted little flecks of yellow and slivery shards of gold mixed into the center and surrounded by a ring of deep, rich mink.
If his voice was warm and soothing, his eyes were hot enough to singe, and mama mia, I wanted to be burned.
I had to give myself a mental reminder about why I was standing here. It was so I could string lights, not stare with unbridled pleasure at a guy who was the physical embodiment of the term “eye candy.”
But, mio Dio, did I want to do just that.
Chapter Two
We hammered out a good rhythm between us, with Santini passing the lights up and me attaching them to the wooden frame of the hut and then connecting each string to the next one to form one continuous light strand.
Since the bazaar was open twelve hours a day for the twelve days preceding Christmas and we were now ensconced in full-fledged standard time, where we’d turned the clocks back an hour so it wouldn’t be as dark as death when we all got up in the morning and the kids didn’t have to wait at the bus stop with flashlights, night routinely descended around four every afternoon. The parking lot lights were all on automatic timers to save the diocese money and didn’t click on until almost seven, so that meant three hours of the daily festival would be celebrated in the dark unless we lit the huts.
The diocese lawyers, always afraid of a slip-and-fall negligence lawsuit, had demanded that if we put up huts, we put up lights to go with them.
So here we were.
“This is quite a volunteer turnout,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
“The St. Rita’s Christmas Festival is a neighborhood favorite,” I told him as I secured the first string around the plastic holder along the top of the hut. “People from all over the parish and the neighborhood come and sell stuff, donating a portion of their sales back to the church.”
He asked me a bunch of questions about how volunteers were procured, who was in charge of the event, how we did takedown when it was over. All things he would need to know since he was now second in command of the parish.
Santini was very easy to talk to, something I guess in his profession was an asset, and once I got over how unbelievably good-looking he was, I found myself relaxing and answering all his questions minus the nerves.
At one point he asked, “Where are the extension cords you need?”
The second the words left his lips, a horn honked from the lot entrance, and a big-ass classic model Caddy zipped in, a car I knew belonged to my aunt Gracie, Mama’s older sister.
The car pulled to a metal-scraping halt, just missing the concrete parking divider. The chassis ping-ponged front, then back, twice, from the force of the brake, and the metallic grating sound of the gear shifter being thrown into the park position before the car completely stopped was audible from where I stood fifty feet away. I said a silent prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, to protect the aunts from harm while driving.
And to protect all other drivers from my aunts.
Aunt Gracie alighted from the car, an electronic cigarette dangling from her Cherries in the Snow lipstick-covered mouth, and adjusted her bra strap. She tugged from an area almost waist level, and I watched in horror (as I had ever since the first time I’d been scarred for life by seeing her do this at the age of seven) as she hauled her bowling-ball-sized breasts back into place on her chest. With a final shove up of each mound from under her ribcage, she waved to us and went to the passenger door to help Mama’s other sister, Nicoletta, my aunt Nicci, out.
The reason Nicci needed help getting out of the car was a bit of a family mystery. She was the youngest of the sisters at just fifty-eight, but whenever I asked my mother why her sister couldn’t get out of a car on her own or go up or down stairs without holding someone’s hand, I was always met with Mama quickly crossing herself and mumbling something about black cats, birth defects, and il Diavolo.
Crazy family, much?
How to be a good Italian, Lesson Two:
Don’t ask and never tell. Ever.
Have you ever wanted the ground to open up and just swallow you whole? Then you can sympathize with the flood of embarrassment washing through me at that moment.
“Ah”—I felt my face turn sixteen shades of boiled-tomato red—“there they are now. Those are two of my aunts, and they’ve got the cords with them.”
“You stay,” he said when I started to come down the ladder. “I’ll go get them.”
Truthfully, I didn’t want him anywhere near those two, but for such a big guy, he moved like a lightning flash.
From my vantage point, I watched while he smiled at them and then took a box Aunt Gracie pulled out of her trunk. With a quick wave over his shoulder, he came back to me, and the aunts went off, most likely in search of my mother.
“Thanks,” I said when he took the connected string I’d made and attached it to one of the cords.
“Your aunts remind me of my own,” he said, a tiny, knowing smile tripping across his lips.
“Oh? Are they loud and inappropriate like mine are?”
I swear, his laugh could make the minions of hell smile.
“Something like that,” he s
aid after we’d finished the nun hut and moved on to the next one. “So, Gia San Valentino, have you been a parishioner of St. Rita’s for long?”
“Life-long member,” I said. “I was baptized, communed, confirmed, and reconciled here. All by Fr. Mario.”
“Four sacraments in one church. That’s impressive. All you’re missing are holy orders, marriage, and extreme unction for the ultimate win in the Catholicism sweepstakes.”
I laughed.
“I was even the baby Jesus once during the parish Christmas vigil,” I told him.
I explained that every year the festival culminated in a Christmas Eve vigil at the church with a program of Mary and Joseph’s trek into Bethlehem acted by local parish kids. I’d been the baby Jesus one year since there hadn’t been any infant boys available.
Fr. Mario had been a tad, shall we say, pissed at a girl playing the role of our Lord and Savior. He had to suck it up, though, because the next youngest boy baby in the parish had been Luca Provincioni, who was two and half, a lover of all things pasta, and already tipped the scales at forty-eight pounds. There was no way the parishioners would buy having a toddler—and one almost as large as the Virgin Mary-playing kid—portray the baby Jesus. So Mama had volunteered me for the role.
Daddy keeps a picture of me swaddled and looking angelic in his wallet to this day.
A low whistle blew from Santini’s downright marvelous mouth, and for half a second, I stopped stringing just to bask in it. When it lifted into a grin just too divine and mischievous to be considered proper for a priest, he added, “The ultimate starring role.”
I grinned at the laughter in his voice.
“My acting debut and my final curtain call all in one night,” I said.
“A brilliant, but short-lived career. The entertainment world doesn’t know what it missed.”
I was charmed and utterly bedazzled by him. He was so— Normal is the only word I can think of. Not like the stuffy, grumpy old priest I’d been exposed to my entire life. Fr. Mario would never, ever, have made a joke about our religion—even a simple, innocuous one.
“So, what about those remaining sacraments?” he asked.
“Well…” I came down the ladder to move it to the next spot I needed to string. “I’m not knocking at death’s door, so last rites aren’t in order, and I have no intention of becoming a nun, much to my nonna’s every-waking-hour regret.”
He laughed again, and the sound settled in my stomach like warm amaretto custard.
“So that just leaves marriage,” he said.
I adjusted the ladder where I wanted it and turned to look up at him, hearing a strange chord in his voice.
Something on his face, in his eyes, caused my insides to go a little wonky, like the feeling I’d had after my first-ever glass of champagne at my brother Gianni’s wedding where I was the flower girl. A little fluttery, a little tingly, a little unexpected shot of warmth all competing for domination.
“So”—his eyes focused on mine, a glimmer of what looked to me like expectation in them—“any plans for that one? Anyone you’re presently planning to commit to for eternity?”
If I didn’t know he was almost a priest, a man of the cloth, a soldier of God Almighty, I would have sworn on a boulder stacked high with Bibles he was flirting with me.
But he was a priest, so there was no way he was. He was just being friendly and priest-nosy. After all, weddings and funerals are his bread and butter.
“If that’s your way of asking if I’m engaged, the answer is no.” I climbed back up the ladder. “No boyfriend at present, no plans to marry in the near future. I’ve been busy with school. Not much time for anything else. In fact, I should be home studying right now, but my mother…well. When you get to know her, you’ll see. No one says no to her when she asks you to do something. Probably because she doesn’t ask. She tells.”
I reached down to take the string of lights he was handing up.
“But someday, right?” he asked. “You’ll want to get married? Have children?”
“Sure. Isn’t marriage and motherhood the hope and dream of every little Italian girl?” I secured the lights around the plastic holder. “And their mothers?” I glanced down at him. “And grandmothers?”
His laugh was quick and free and punched me in the stomach like a cheap shot. I stopped stringing just to stare at his holy hotness. And I mean that in the best ecclesiastical sense.
“And their aunts and sisters?” he added, squinting up at me, the sun in his face, a smile across it. “Uncles and brothers?”
“First cousins and best friends?” I laughed along with him. This was more fun than I’d had in a while, or in my entire life of dealing with Fr. Mario. This is the way a priest should be. Outgoing, fun, and friendly. Not stuffy, sanctimonious, and self-righteous.
Happy, enthusiastic, and sweet.
And good-looking. Good-looking didn’t hurt at all. The kind of guy you’d love to date, have pay you attention, make out with.
Reality washed through me in that instant. The same blinding paralysis I’d suffered earlier sluiced down my body, making movement impossible.
All the blood shunted to my brain.
Holy Mary, Mother of God!
Of all the people in the world to think about making out with, I had to pick my new pastor.
Nonna’s voice barked in my head. Muto, Gia. Dumb. Stupido ragazza! Stupid girl.
I was stupid. Not to mention if my mother ever found out I was having carnal—okay, mildly carnal, not full-fledged—thoughts about a man of the cloth, she would pinch my ears between her fingers, drag me straight to St. Rita’s convent, sign me in, and under my name list the word puttana. Whore.
He must have noticed I wasn’t moving because Santini reached over and laid a hand on my upper arm. “Gia? You okay?”
The heat seeping through his hand, through my jacket, through my skin, pulled me out of my immobility.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“You went somewhere else for a second.”
Before thinking I was about to commit a sin to a man of God, mortification got the better of me and I lied. “I’m just hungry. I didn’t have a chance to eat this morning before we got here.”
If he’d known my mother personally, he would have known this for the bald-faced lie it was. Not one of her children, grandchildren, relatives, or friends ever left Francesca San Valentino’s house hungry.
Ever.
For a moment, I got lost in the way he was staring at me and in how good his hand felt, still on my arm. Something passed in his eyes as he looked at me, like he’d had a deep, mind-blowing epiphany.
I stood, mesmerized, as the darker circles around his irises widened, dilating so much the lighter colors broke free. His tongue ran across his lips in an unconscious trail—Holy mother of God, save me!—and his neck bobbled up and down as he swallowed a few times.
I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at quite the way he was looking at me. Equal parts of confusion and puzzlement mated with heat and, God forgive me, passion.
At least I think it was passion. It could have been repulsion, for all I knew. Or gas.
He was still holding my arm, his thumb rubbing in little circular motions over the sleeve of my shirt. The breeze billowing off the East River picked up, and the fringe on top of his head blew forward across his forehead. It took every ounce of willpower I still had inside me not to reach out and push those hairs back in place. For a millisecond, the image of Barbara Streisand doing that to Robert Redford in The Way We Were (Mama’s favorite movie) shot across my eyes.
Little electrical flashes burst along my insides, and I pressed my thighs together when they started to shake, a totally insane move since the heat erupting in that region was scorching.
I think I moaned.
Gesu, Gia. Get a grip.
Santini licked his delicious-looking lips again, his eyes staying glued to mine, and said, “Look, why don’t we—” before he was cut off by th
e sound of a ringtone.
He let go of my arm and reached around to his back pants pocket to pull out a cell phone. A quick glance at the display screen caused a groove to pop up on his forehead, his kissable lips bending downward at the corners.
His thumbs hit the keypad a few times, and then he turned his attention back to me.
I was still standing, rooted to the ladder.
“Gia, I’m sorry. I’ve got a work crisis. I’ve gotta go.”
“No worries,” I said automatically. “You have a lot of responsibility in your position.”
The groove across his brow deepened. “I…” He stopped short again, the confusion on his face growing. “It was great meeting you. Talking with you.”
“Likewise.” I tried to summon a smile.
I think it came out looking more like the face Nonna makes when she needs a laxative.
He nodded, reached out, and squeezed my upper arm again.
“See you around.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed the bocce ball in my throat. “See you in church.”
He squinted at me for half a second, then nodded and walked to the other side of the parking lot, so packed with volunteers I lost sight of him almost at once.
What in the name of God and family was wrong with me?
My hands started to tremble, the light strand in them jiggling underneath my quaking. I was afraid I’d topple off the ladder since my knees had turned to powder, so I grabbed hold of the sidebars and carefully made my way down to the ground again, one slow rung at a time.
My breathing was a little shallow, a little fast, a little unsteady.
And my mind was a whole lot of confused.
Chapter Three
“You’re not eating, bambina,” Mama said. “What’s wrong?”
We were all seated, and by we I mean the whole family—my brothers, their wives and kids; my sister, her husband, son, and my new baby niece; Mama, Daddy, Nonna; Uncle Sonny and his wife, Aunt Ursula; Aunts Gracie and Nicci and their husbands—all around our huge dining-room table, having dinner later that night.
