The Possibilities of Sainthood

by Donna Freitas

  When the bell finally rang and we uncurled our aching legs, Maria turned to me and said, “You know, Antonia, I think a Patron Saint of Figs is a great idea, and I totally know what you go through with your mother and those crazy fig trees you guys have in the yard. But seriously, don’t you think we need to fill this Patron-Saint-of-Love vacancy? There’s a major oversight if I’ve ever heard of one.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” I said, stuffing books into my overflowing backpack, careful not to mangle my Saint Diary. “They’d never go for it, though, you know? It’s the Catholic Church we’re talking about, not an online dating service. Besides, I feel good about the figs proposal. The fig is practically the national fruit of Italy. I think this one is going to be the winner.”

  “Antonia,” Maria said, giving me a knowing look, “if there was a real Patron Saint of Love, you know you’d be praying to him or her every day about you-know-who. And don’t even try to tell me you wouldn’t be scribbling devotions on all those scraps of paper you carry around, stuffing them in your book every five seconds. The page for the Saint of Love would surpass Anthony’s in no time.”

  Hmmm. Maria had a point about the absent-love-saint problem. Though she should know not to blaspheme about St. Anthony, who would always be number one on my saint list.

  “Come on, drama princess, we’re going to be late for Mr. Sheehan,” she said, giving a good push to the biology book I was still struggling to fit into my backpack.

  Together we spilled into the hallway, a swirling sea of plaid and long hair and bare legs moving this way and that, lockers opening and slamming and laughter ringing everywhere. We merged into the stream of girls heading down the hall like a school of fish on its way to an important destination. But really we were only going to gym class, not at all critical in the grand scheme, and I wondered how it was possible to stand out in a place where everyone was made to look the same.

  5

  I GET READY FOR MY MONDAY AFTERNOON SHIFT AND REMINISCE ABOUT THE FIRST TIME I MET MICHAEL

  “Why is every day in my life a bad-hair day?” I asked my reflection in the bathroom mirror. This afternoon, like always, I’d returned home from school looking like I’d just walked out of a salon with a bad perm. I splashed my hair until it was almost soaking wet, trying to fix the tangled mess.

  For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about my encounter with Michael that morning. I felt sort of guilty about it. Had I been cold?

  I wrapped a towel around my head, squeezing my way out of the bathroom and around all the clutter blocking the entrance to the bedroom that was barely big enough for the double bed where I slept, one chest of drawers, and the vanity set I inherited from my mother when I was eight. My statue of St. Anthony peeked up from the other side of my bed, almost as tall as the shelf that held seven years’ worth of Saint Diaries. (Okay, so I also might have a freestanding saint statue in my room.)

  I did have a nice window though, big enough so that I could crawl onto the fire escape outside.

  The space above Labella’s Market was not exactly a palace. The upstairs apartment where Gram, Mom, and I lived was humble. Meaning really small. The biggest room wasn’t the family room or even any of the three bedrooms. It was the kitchen. The market didn’t have its own, so our apartment served as cooking central for everything fresh sold at the store. When Dad’s family immigrated from Italy, his father, my grandfather, built Labella’s himself. To save money, he decided the family kitchen would not only be the place where everyone gathered for meals and on holidays but also provide the means for keeping the market stocked with all the homemade Italian specialties for which Mom’s cooking had eventually made Labella’s famous. Despite thirty years of business it had never occurred to anyone to renovate, so whoever worked at the store had an all-access pass to our kitchen. You never knew who you were going to see standing over the stove stirring the Italian cream for the zeppolis (filled Italian doughnuts) so it didn’t burn or sipping an espresso at the table during a break. I guessed privacy wasn’t a concern to Gram and Grandpa Labella. I always made sure I was fully dressed whenever I walked around the house.

  All over the apartment were family portraits hung so close together on the walls you almost couldn’t see the yellowed paper underneath. Most of the pictures were sepia-toned, some so faded in places that it looked like Great-grandma Amalia had no legs and the dress that Grandma Labella, Dad’s mother, was wearing was shorter than my uniform skirt on a day I got out of the house without any mother-harassment. One of my favorites was of Grandpa Goglia, Gram’s husband, in his police uniform, looking proud and handsome. My only sense of him was in sepia, since he died before I was born and I’d seen only this one portrait. The image closest to my door was a color photo of me and my three cousins—the daughters of my dad’s sister, my aunt Silvia—Francesca, Concetta, and Veronica—back before they turned into mean girls. In the picture we were little—Veronica and I were four when it was taken—and wearing bathing suits, me in a one-piece and my cousin in a tiny bikini. Our chests were as flat as boards and our bellies stuck out. We were still in that blissful stage when the world thinks protruding tummies and nonexistent chests are adorable. Concetta and Francesca were acting the role of babysitters, watching over Veronica and me as we stood in the two-foot kiddie pool by the fig trees even though you could see our mothers in lawn chairs in the background.

  Those were the days—before all the bad blood between our families poisoned everything.

  Unfortunately, my cousins grew up to be three loud, mostly annoying, chubby (they’re Italians, after all), boy-crazed girls always throwing themselves at the opposite sex in ways that made even me embarrassed. Of course, occasionally they were successful, which, I had to admit, was more than I could say for myself in the boy department. You’d think Veronica, Concetta, Francesca, and I all lived in the same house since they were always over at our apartment with their endless drama, acting like they owned it. At least one of them worked at the store every day.

  “Antonia,” my mother was always saying after the three of them left the apartment or the store, “if I ever catch you acting like those girls I’ll never let you out of the house again!” I always wanted to answer, “But Ma! You don’t let me out now as it is,” but it was best to just nod my head. We had to tolerate them because they were family, she claimed. Though my mother and Aunt Silvia were barely able to tolerate each other.

  When my father died, Aunt Silvia, Dad’s sister, had assumed she would inherit Labella’s and my mother would work for her to keep it in business. But Aunt Silvia couldn’t even cook pasta from a box. And since Aunt Silvia’s parents—my grandmother and grandfather on Dad’s side—had passed on sole ownership of the store to my father, it was up to him to decide what happened to Labella’s should he die. The rest is history: Dad left the family store to my mother even though she was originally a Goglia, honoring her role in turning it into the most famous Italian market around and ensuring that she and I would be taken care of. He only left 25 percent ownership to Aunt Silvia.

  Aunt Silvia was livid, to put it mildly. She contested Dad’s will and accused my mother of stealing what was rightfully hers. Relations between everyone had been strained ever since.

  Veronica, though—she was the worst. We used to be like sisters before Dad died. The highlight of our day was if we somehow convinced Gram she should cook her famous Italian-style artichokes and then sit with us on the back steps deleafing them until we all got down to the delicious, juicy hearts. But between the fiasco with the store and the closer I became friends with Maria, it wasn’t long before Veronica began acting like a bully.

  My alarm clock read 3:50 p.m., which meant it was time to get ready for my shift. I unwrapped the towel from my hair, shaking the long, wet ringlets as they fell down my back, and threw on a black sweater. My tan skirt didn’t seem to be anywhere. It wasn’t in any of my drawers, and I began wondering if Gram had been in here and had stashed it under her bed. Or in the attic.
Or perhaps in one of the kitchen cabinets. Things had been disappearing a lot lately, and Gram was my prime suspect. I grabbed a black skirt instead, one that I was pretty sure would hang below my knees, and dropped my uniform plaid in a heap on the floor. Yanking the other one up, I said a quick prayer of thanks to Paul the Hermit, the Patron Saint of Clothing and Weavers. The skirt fell to the middle of my shins.

  For a woman worried about people seeing my legs, I found it ironic that my mother made everyone wear skirts to work at the market. I mean, half the time I was up on a ladder putting away bottles of olive oil on the high shelves in aisle 4 or taking something down for some old Italian guy from the neighborhood who was standing there, probably looking up my skirt. It was too gross to even imagine.

  Though whenever my mother wasn’t around, I’d just roll mine over at the waist to reach the middle of my thigh, just like I did with my uniform. You never knew who might walk into the store that you wanted to impress, you know?

  Of course, I also never knew when Michael might stop by looking for something his mother wanted, which usually was also something that we stocked so high I needed the ladder to get it, at which point Michael would stand there below me while I searched for whatever his mother needed.

  Waiting.

  Watching.

  Thinking what, I didn’t really need to know.

  With Michael, nothing ever felt innocent. I mean, the first thing I ever said to him the first time we spoke, all I did was ask one little question: “What are you looking at?”

  Totally harmless, right?

  I still couldn’t decide if it was a mistake or a blessing—the fact that I spoke first, which also turned out to be the beginning of our, whatever you call it—friendship? Odd boy-girl relationship? It was at the beach in Narragansett two summers ago. Michael had a summer job lugging people’s lounge chairs and umbrellas from the parking lot onto the sand for tips. I had a rare day off from the store and was trying to enjoy a day at the beach. I was outside the snack bar trying to crack a frozen Snickers bar with my teeth—making a fantastically gorgeous expression, I’m sure, as I chomped down on the corner—when I noticed someone staring at me with a smirk on his face.

  First, I stopped gnawing and glared back, a don’t-look-at-me-you-jerk glare. He didn’t seem to care, though, and just kept on staring. I already felt self-conscious enough. It was my first summer wearing a two-piece bathing suit, since I was forbidden to show my stomach at the beach until I turned thirteen. (Don’t ask where my mother got these rules. She just made them up as she went along.) I’d seen him before but I didn’t know his name. He’d been in the store occasionally and I knew he went to Bishop Francis since he always wore the uniform.

  So there I was, concentrating on my Snickers, trying to ignore him staring at me with what I now know is the Michael-girl-appreciation face (which is basically his permanent expression), and after what seemed like forever I finally got up the nerve to do something I never normally did with a boy I didn’t already know.

  I talked to him.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked.

  “Your legs,” he answered, smiling and without skipping a beat in the Irish brogue that’s so familiar to me now. His stare intensified.

  My jaw dropped at his boldness, though I have to admit I’d felt a kernel of relief that he didn’t say something like “I’m watching your bizarre wolflike attack on that candy bar” instead.

  “You heard me,” he said as if I’d answered him, when really I just stood there speechless.

  “Um, what . . .” I said, which he took as an invitation to continue the conversation.

  “I’m looking at your legs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You asked me what I was looking at and I answered you.”

  “Excuse me?” Okay, I got repetitive.

  “Would you prefer I lie to you?”

  “No. I mean, yes! I mean, I can’t believe you just said that! It’s totally inappropriate.”

  Question: Could I have sounded more like my mother in this moment?

  Answer: No.

  “They’re nice.”

  “What?” I asked next, still playing the role of confused girl.

  “Your legs are nice.”

  My cheeks were on fire at this point, matching my new red gingham bikini, which I began to wish was cut more in the style of a spacesuit.

  “My name is Michael,” he said, his eyes rising to meet mine, which, I admit, almost made me melt on the spot despite all his unnerving forward behavior. They were a bright greenish blue, their color seeming to change back and forth with the glimmer of the sun. He was good-looking, I decided. This made my heart pound so hard that I worried he might hear.

  “Are you going to tell me your name?” His eyes were huge and unblinking. I couldn’t look away.

  My mouth opened but nothing came out.

  “You want me to guess, then?” He was grinning now, which made me notice that he also had a nice smile.

  “No. I’m not telling you my name,” I said, finally. “You’re kind of rude, you know.”

  He took this response as a challenge.

  “Tanisha?”

  “No.”

  “October?”

  “That’s not a name, it’s a month,” I said, letting my guard down a little. A laugh escaped despite my better judgment.

  “I once knew a girl named October.”

  “I bet you did,” I said, smirking.

  “Bronwyn! Your name is Bronwyn.”

  “I can’t believe you guessed right,” I said, laughing hard now.

  Somehow our conversation continued for hours that day and throughout the rest of that summer. We were a weird pair when you considered that I was as pure as the driven snow and Michael was more like the snow after it spent a week on the city streets. We became inseparable, with Michael even hanging out after curfew by climbing up the fire escape outside my bedroom and talking to me through the window. But we stopped being inseparable the day he tried to kiss me behind the bathhouses and I got really mad because:

  (a) I’d thought we were just friends.

  (b) It wasn’t as if he’d been leaving out details about his escapades with, like, every girl in the grade above mine at Holy Angels.

  (c) He knew I liked somebody else even if that somebody didn’t ever give me the time of day.

  Who did he think I was anyway? Just another girl who fell for the accent and his ridiculous one-liners?

  No way. I was not going to be one of those girls. And I conveyed this to him the second I realized he was about to kiss me, but not so much in words and more in the way that I turned around and ran in the other direction and then stopped hanging out with him from that day forward because I was petrified he’d try to kiss me again.

  He didn’t.

  The red glare of the clock told me it was already 3:58, so I pushed all thoughts of Michael McGinnis out of my head. I took one last glance in the mirror and rubbed St. Anthony’s halo for luck out of habit before grabbing my book bag and racing out of my bedroom to the back stairway that led down to the market. At the top of the steps I paused, uttering a quick prayer to Leonard of Noblac, the Patron Saint of Grocers and an important saint if your family happened to own a market.

  O St. Leonard of Noblac, please let everyone get along tonight during my shift, and don’t let Francesca be a pain in everyone’s butt, especially my mother’s, because then she always makes me the one to deal with Francesca’s messes and I really hate that. And if you could inspire Andy Rotellini’s mother to need a rare imported olive oil, or perhaps a spinach pie, or really anything at all that would send her hottie son to Labella’s this evening while I’m working, I’d be forever grateful. Thank you, St. Leonard, for your intercession in this matter.

  Descending the stairs one at a time, I embarked on yet another afternoon at Labella’s Market, where you could buy “The Finest, Freshest Homemade Pasta in all Rhode Island.” At least, that’s what the sign in the w
indow said.

  6

  THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, ANDY ROTELLINI, VISITS THE STORE AND I AM WITNESS TO A MAJOR MIRACLE

  “Antonia! Who died?” My mother looked up from the “Today’s Specials” chalkboard to give my outfit the once-over. She was carefully erasing the stuff that was already sold out, which included every kind of pasta except the fresh, hand-cut linguini. It was looking rather lonely in the display fridge.

  “What are you talking about, Ma?” I said, squeezing behind her ample frame so I could shove my backpack behind the counter. I picked up the “To Do” notebook by the old-fashioned cash register. There was a page with my name and today’s date at the top.

  For Antonia, November 14, 4 p.m.

  —stock all new produce

  —organize storeroom

  —home deliveries: Mrs. Bevalaqua, Mr. Romanelli

  “Hi, Gram,” I said, peeking around the door frame to the back office. She stopped reading her tabloid long enough to blow me a kiss. “Love you, too,” I said, and headed back out front.

  “Where’s Frankie today?” Francesca hated that nickname from when we were kids, so I tried to use it often when I thought she might be around.

  “She called in sick.”

  Score one for the good St. Leonard, I thought to myself, but said out loud, “That’s too bad, I hope she gets better soon.”

  “You look like you’re going to a funeral, wearing all black like that, Antonia.”

  “Look who’s talking, Ma,” I said, wedging past her again and pinching the sleeve of her black blouse.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” my mother said as if she didn’t really know.

  Right.

  “Whatever, Ma,” I called back as I made my way around the tower of imported canned San Marzano tomatoes that I’d spent all Saturday afternoon stacking.

  My mother still dressed like a widow, all in black, at church, in the market, everywhere she went. I usually avoided the subject since she was sensitive about it, but today I couldn’t help myself. Dad died eight years ago, but she still acted like it was yesterday. I couldn’t decide if this was sad or ridiculous or a bit of both. I mean, we all missed him and it had been difficult getting used to life without him, but wearing black from head to toe didn’t exactly help Mom to move on, and it certainly didn’t say “Ask me out” to any potential suitors either. It was kind of gross to think about my mother dating, but I had to admit that some of the men who came into the store flirted with her. She didn’t seem to notice, though.