Passports and Plum Blossoms

by Barbara Oliverio

  What on earth was he thinking?

  China?

  What would I do there? I didn’t speak the language—what was it? Mandarin? Cantonese? I didn’t even know. And where exactly was he thinking of sending me? The country was jillions of miles in area. My head was whirling. Surely he was joking. I love my father, but his sense of humor has always been peculiar, to say the least! That had to be it. He had said it as a joke and had some real project in mind for me, like a marketing project for a Chinese restaurant. Wasn’t one of his Knight brothers the owner of a Chinese restaurant?

  “Oh, Pop, you are so funny.” I hopped up to sit on the counter, and Rory hopped up next to me. “What is it really?”

  “Hold on,” he patted my knee. “I need to tell Frank how to set up the side tables in the social hall. I’ll be right back.”

  He bustled off, and Rory and I stared at each other. She began to say out loud the things I was thinking, but I cut her off, shaking my head.

  “He’s just joking, Rory. This is just his crazy way of telling me he has an opportunity for me to work in the china and glassware department at Kohl’s or something.”

  “I don’t know,” she shook her head. “He’s pretty quirky, but he looked serious there.”

  We swung our legs back and forth in unison, silently contemplating what Pop had in mind.

  “You know ...” Rory started.

  “Stop it,” I shook my head. “I’m not even going to speculate on what he’s thinking until he gets back.”

  “Okay,” she said and switched topics slightly. “I think it’s sweet that your dad has been looking for opportunities for you.”

  “That’s my pop. He’s always been willing to let me make my way, but he’s always had my back. I know that people don’t understand the whole Italian Catholic ‘family comes first’ theory, but that’s how we roll.”

  “Oh, I know. I’ve got the Irish Catholic version going on at my house, remember?”

  We smiled at one another knowingly. As best friends, we had been in and out of each other’s homes enough over the decades and appreciated our families’ values.

  Pop returned to the kitchen with two paper cups brimming with icy cold drinks.

  “Here you go,” he handed one to each of us. Without tasting, we knew they were Shirley Temples, the nonalcoholic treats we had been allowed ever since we were tiny. It brought back fond memories of many Saturday dances when the adults socialized while we children played together in the corner of the Knights’ hall.

  “Thanks, Pop.” I grinned as I pulled the cherry from the drink and dangled it into my upturned mouth. “You know that we do drink alcohol now, right?”

  He shook his finger. “Not while you’re driving around town running errands for your Mama, thank you very much.”

  “Yessir,” Rory and I chorused.

  “Now,” he clapped his hands together, “let me tell you about this trip to China.”

  I stopped slurping and became attentive.

  “I was on the phone with your Aunt Lilliana,” he said, referring to his oldest sister. Auntie Lil was the oldest of the eight children in my father’s family and had never married. She had been a career girl, serving as a secretary to the superintendent of schools a few counties over until her retirement. Auntie Lil had never moved out of our grandparents’ two-story home in Pueblo, Colorado, preferring to stay with Nonni Anna and Poppy Sam until their deaths. Her siblings and the assorted adult grandchildren and cousins wanted Auntie Lil to move into a smart little condo closer to the rest of us in Denver. She held her ground, though, and I loved visiting her because it seemed as if the house was a slice of time preserved and intact.

  Lately, Auntie Lil had been slowing down ever so slightly, after being hospitalized for a minor heart incident. My father and his siblings had begun keeping an even closer watch on her, much to her dismay.

  “Is something wrong?” My face must have shown my worry.

  “No, no,” my father assured me. “Nothing is wrong at all. But here’s the thing. Your aunt has decided that she wants to take a trip.”

  “Auntie goes on trips with her New Life group all the time, Pop,” I said. She was active in a ministry at her parish dedicated to the needs of single, widowed, and divorced senior citizens. They sponsored activities every weekend, from concert trips and luncheons to pilgrimages to churches outside the area. They were amazingly busy for people “of a certain age.”

  “Well, this time she wants to go a bit further than St. Louis,” he said referring to the last New Life bus trip. “She found a group that is going on a trip to China!”

  “Wow! That’s awesome, Pop, but what’s it got to do with me?”

  “Well, she and I discussed the fact that going that far away with her recent health problems might not be a good idea.”

  Rory and I glanced slyly at one another. We knew that when he said “discussed,” he meant that he talked while she tried with great patience to listen before doing what she wanted. Even though he was the youngest of the siblings, being the only son he maintained a big brother mentality in the hierarchy. Huh. Same as my younger brother Nicky and his continual advice for me.

  “Are you listening to me, Annalise?”

  Oops. I must have drifted off.

  “Sorry, Pop,” I grinned. “So ... you and Auntie Lil ... ‘discussed’ ... her trip.”

  “Right. And we think it would be good for her to have a companion who would have her best interests at heart traveling along with her, and we think you might be the perfect person to do that.”

  What! Were we living in a Jane Austen novel? Sending the niece along as a traveling companion?

  “Pop.” I wanted to be as delicate as possible. “You can’t be serious. I can’t imagine that Auntie Lil actually wants a companion, first of all.”

  “No,” he bobbed his head energetically, “she was the one who brought up the idea!”

  Hmm. I doubted that.

  “Come on, Pop. I can’t believe Auntie Lil—my Auntie Lil, who has been whitewater rafting, who has climbed Mt. Evans, and, oh, I don’t know, could probably outrun our marathon runner Rory here—”

  “Hey!” Rory stopped slurping her Shirley Temple.

  “Ssh. I’m trying to make a point,” I waved her off. “Anyway, Auntie Lil is not a wilting flower. I can’t see her requesting a ‘companion.’”

  I hopped off the counter and started to pace. I stopped and whirled around.

  “Or did she come up with that idea as some sort of compromise because you were insisting that she not go at all! Ha! That was it. You and the rest of the aunts didn’t want her to go, so she came up with this to keep you off her back.”

  “Annalise Margaret!”

  Uh-oh. My father had used my full name. He was a genial bear of a man, but my brother and I had always known not to push him into “two-naming” us.

  “Your aunt is traveling across the world to a country where she doesn’t speak the language,” he began calmly. “Even though she’ll be with a tour group, she won’t be with anyone she knows. This isn’t with New Life. This is a tour she found out about in the Catholic Register, and none of her friends are really interested in going. Plus, it hasn’t been that long since she was in the hospital, so we feel—yes, even SHE feels—it would be good to have someone with her from Denver and back.”

  My father was really good at speaking in bullet points. It was one of the reasons he was such a successful insurance salesman, actually. He could lay out logical reasons like nobody’s business.

  “Finally, we think it would be good for you to go on this trip. You’re between jobs, and frankly you need a project to kick-start your life.”

  I looked to Rory for help.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Annalise, it sounds like a great opportunity, if you ask me.”

  Traitor.

  “But, Rory, we just talked about me moving out to Manhattan to stay with you and job hunt.”

  “Manhattan will still b
e there after you get back,” she said with practicality. “This is an opportunity to travel the world.”

  I bit my lip.

  “But Pop,” I said finally, “who is footing the bill for this little jaunt? I don’t have any money, as you might know since I moved back into my childhood bedroom and am depending on tips from my glamorous part-time job waiting tables to contribute to the household finances.”

  “Your aunt wants to treat this as a job for you and consider your pay as the cost of the ticket and incidentals.”

  “No! That’s too much! I can’t take advantage of her like that.”

  “She is going to take a paid companion whether it’s you or someone else, so why not you?”

  “A paid vacation? Come on.”

  “If it makes you feel better, you can write a book about your trip,” Pop suggested. “You can call it ‘Travels with My Aunt’ or something.”

  “Graham Greene already did that back in the forties,” I said absentmindedly. “Remember? The protagonist in that book got involved in all sorts of crime and high jinks.”

  “Well, with your Auntie Lil, that probably won’t be too far from the truth for you either,” teased Rory.

  “Ha.”

  “Look, sweetheart, I have a lot to do here, so we need to postpone this discussion until I get home tonight.” He took my hands in his and looked into my eyes. “I would never make you do anything you didn’t want to do, but I think this is a great opportunity for you. And it would be doing something nice for your aunt.”

  He hustled us out of the kitchen and returned to his tasks, and we made our way to the parking lot to continue ours. As we walked toward the car, Nicky pulled up in his car. We stopped to say hello.

  “Hey, bro, what are you doing here so early?”

  He was also in the Knights organization, having joined the minute he was eligible. Pop had been very proud to be one of the three-generation families until Poppy Sam died.

  “I’m setting up the sound system.”

  “DJ? Isn’t this a guys-only event? Who’s dancing?”

  “Just for the announcements and things,” he gave me a punch in the shoulder. “It’s really good to see you out of your room. I just dropped Amanda off with Ma. Rory, you came in town in time for a night of chick flicks.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Rory said. “Although with your Ma, that means at least one Dean Martin movie.”

  “Of course.”

  “So,” he said, leaning back on the hood of his car, “are you ready for your trip with Auntie Lil?”

  “And just how did you know about this before me?”

  “I just told you, I stopped at Ma’s,” he grinned. “You don’t think she told me?”

  Of course she did. Because why should I be the first to hear of a project that would involve me?

  “What do you think, Nick? Doesn’t this all seem a little Downton Abbey to you?”

  “Well, Auntie Lil certainly is as imposing as the Dowager,” he said, referring to the grand character portrayed by Maggie Smith in one of my favorite PBS series. “But you have to admit Lil is a lot more spry. You know you’d have a lot of fun traveling with her.”

  “That’s true,” added Rory. “Auntie Lil has always been a kick. This isn’t going to be a trip where you have to assist her in and out of restaurants and things.”

  “No, probably just the opposite,” teased Nicky.

  “Har-har,” I nudged his calf with my toe.

  I pondered for a moment and then countered with an idea.

  “What about visas and shots and things?”

  “No special shots,” Nicky shook his head. “You will need a visa, but if we start the paperwork for that, all you have to do is send it with your passport through to the Chinese Embassy, and it takes about a week—”

  He stopped when he realized that he’d said too much.

  “Wait ...” My eyes became slits. “You guys have all talked about this already, haven’t you?” I kicked him again, harder.

  “Ow!”

  He put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Honestly, Pop called me to use my legal skills to do research for Auntie Lil after they originally spoke about her going on the trip. But I didn’t know anything about them asking you to join her before this morning. And stop trying to ‘read me,’ Annalise. You and I both know you don’t have that superpower.”

  I continued staring into his eyes. He hadn’t passed the bar yet, but he was an aspiring lawyer. My ongoing joke was that if I could tell if he was bending the truth—which I’ve been able to do ever since we were kids—then a judge and jury certainly could.

  “You don’t know that,” I sniffed as I removed his hands from my shoulders and moved to lean on my car next to Rory. She was watching this scene play out as she had done so often before.

  “Aaaanyway,” he continued his previous line of discussion, “the paperwork is minimal. It’s not like you need to request vacation from a job. And Auntie Lil is going to pay you.”

  He had inherited that ability to lay out bullet points from Pop, all right. A talent handy for a lawyer.

  I felt Nicky’s and Rory’s eyes staring at me.

  “I can’t come up with any other reasons to not do this. As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun.”

  “Great!” Rory clapped her hands.

  “Awesome!” agreed Nicky.

  My father came outside at that moment to wipe his brow from his hard work and, seeing the three of us apparently loitering, put his hands on hips.

  “I think we need you inside, Nicholas Samuel. And Annalise Margaret and Rory Elizabeth—”

  “Oh, Pop,” I went to him to give him a tight hug and a kiss, “don’t be mad at him. He and Rory were just making me see the benefits of this trip with Auntie Lil. I think I’ll go, okay?”

  A broad grin spread across his face.

  “Wonderful! We’ll have her over for dinner Sunday to make the plans.”

  “Sunday?” said Rory. “We need to plan starting now!”

  She grabbed me by the arm and pushed me into the car. We backed out of the lot, laughing and waving to my father and brother, then turned to one another.

  “Wow!” said Rory, “I bet when you woke up this morning, you never thought you’d be planning a trip across the world?”

  “Nope,” I said, sobering. “I didn’t even think I’d be planning this trip across town.”

  Chapter Five

  “You cut your hair?” Rory’s voice rose in so many decibels that I had to pull the phone away from my ear quickly in order to avoid permanent damage to my eardrums. I could hear the next questions clearly even at arm’s length:

  “When? Why? How? Where?”

  “Rory ... Rory ...” I returned the phone to the side of my head and attempted to catch her attention. Completing preparations for my trip while she was so many miles away had been a difficult proposition since we always loved to bounce ideas off one another. This last decision of mine without her there was certainly a big one.

  “Rory!” I finally caught her. “I decided that it would just be so much easier to manage on the trip, that’s all. I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

  “No big deal?” Her voice was incredulous. “Annalise, your hair has been the envy of everyone we’ve known forever.”

  “C’mon, Rory, you exaggerate just a bit.”

  But she was not too far off. I had been voted “Girl with the Prettiest Hair” in high school. It was a dubious honor, but I suppose it beat out “Girl Who Could Whistle Loudest.” Hey, we attended a small school, and the senior class had traditions that had carried down for decades.

  My chestnut locks had fallen down to about the middle of my back for years, and I was lucky enough that they were shiny and thick. There were a lot of times that I toyed with the idea of chopping them off, but I never had the courage.

  “I don’t know, Rory, I guess I just needed a change.”

  “How could you just throw this information out
casually during the course of a phone call? How could you not FaceTime me with it the moment after you did it?” she demanded.

  “Because I knew I would get this reaction, basically.”

  “I’m hanging up and FaceTiming you immediately.” The line cut off.

  I waited patiently for the ring, then held my phone up and struck an ingénue pose.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  My new ’do was a choppy bob, layered through the sides and back and flicked out at the chin. The bangs flipped to the side and were flirty and fun.

  She paused, and for a moment I thought she didn’t like it.

  “Rory ... What do you think?”

  “It is so cute!”

  Whew. One of the things about being best friends was the brutal honesty that we each shared, with no filter.

  “But, seriously, Annalise, I’ve been trying to get you to just get bangs for a million years and you wouldn’t even consider it, and here you go and chop all of your hair off.”

  “I know, I know. But it wasn’t an easy decision. You know, not everyone can pull off hair as short as yours.”

  Rory’s own auburn hair was an edgy head-hugging crop that never looked the same two days in a row and that she liked to call “controlled chaos.” And face it, no matter how adorable her hair was, it was difficult for me to take hairstyle advice from someone who got their hair cut by elderly Mr. Randazzo at the same barbershop that my dad frequented.

  “You look awesome, girlfriend,” she pronounced.

  “Thank you.”

  “So,” she switched topics only slightly, “with your new hair and having lost all the Oreo-and-ice-cream weight, do you feel like you are ready to go on Friday?”

  I couldn’t believe our departure date had arrived already.

  “T minus 2 days and counting,” I affirmed. “Auntie Lil and I are ready to go, but to be honest with you, I’m not so sure that my mom is ready for me to leave.”

  “Your mom will worry until the minute you’re in the air, then the whole time you’re gone, and won’t stop worrying until you walk back through the airport arrival gate.”

  “Oh don’t I know that. It’s her job as a mom. I wouldn’t know what to do if she were different, though.”