The cars were a gift to everyone, a result of selling their family restaurant in the Bronx at a tremendous profit, the one Papa had been a partner in. Ella was the only one with a “normal” car, a boring four-door sedan she’d bought when she’d first arrived in Charleston. It turned out that Mama loved her hot rod, adored driving, and was the best driver in the entire family.
“Whoa,” Hank said, when he saw the cars, all the hoods striped, the bodies painted either cobalt blue, scarlet red, lemon yellow, white, black, or silver.
“People come by to look at them on Sunday afternoons,” Ella said. “That’s when we gather at Mama’s for dinner.” She told him their purchase history.
Hank laughed. “I want to meet this Uncle Sal.”
“He’s great,” Ella said.
“I loved your family restaurant in the Bronx,” Hank said, “especially the marinara sauce. So simple yet robust. I used to dream about it after you left.”
“You did?” Somehow that got her right in the heart.
“Yes, but I was afraid to go back.”
It was a shame, but she understood.
“Anyway,” he said, “every time I was there with you, it never had an empty table.”
“It was very successful.” Ella was proud of Papa and her whole family. Everyone had played a part. “That marinara sauce is my great-great-grandmother’s recipe. I’ve finally learned how to make it.”
“You have?”
She laughed. “Yes, I was a haphazard cook when I was younger. But I’m starting to appreciate devotion in the kitchen.”
“I always loved your cooking.”
“Well, you’ll get to see how much I’ve improved.”
“I’m very lucky,” Hank said.
She believed he meant it. Hank wasn’t a person who tossed out meaningless compliments. They walked up the sidewalk side by side. She carried the pot of sauce. He lugged the two cases of wine, one stacked on the other. They must have weighed a ton, but he had the biceps and triceps to handle them.
“I’ll send a nephew or niece out for the flowers,” Ella said.
She had the strangest feeling as they strode together, their steps matching. It felt as if they were a couple. They were in sync again. The pot of sauce was their mutual offering, that and the wine and the flowers.
She stole a glance at his gorgeous profile, his stubbled jaw and defined cheekbones. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Don’t worry, okay?”
He chuckled over the top of the boxes. “I’m not worried. I’m excited.”
“You are?” That made her happy.
“Very. These are your people.”
He said it as if that made them special, which was sweet of him. “Yes, they are,” she replied. The Mancinis weren’t exactly polished. And no one would ever peg them as being from Charleston. But this was the place the Mancinis called home now—this Southern city, which they’d embraced with utter faith that they could make their contribution to the community and be happy here.
They had made their mark in only a few short years, and they were very happy.
The next thing Ella knew, she and Hank were swept up in a crowd of loud talkers who whisked the pot of sauce out of her arms, then kissed her and hugged her tight without her even getting to explain Hank’s presence.
“Wait,” she yelled over the noise, and watched two teenage Mancini nephews carrying the cases of wine toward the kitchen. A younger sister—not Jill, who was still in New York with Cosmo—carried the pot of sauce. “I need someone to get the flowers out of the car—and to introduce someone to you!”
“We know him!” cried Nonna Sofia. “He’s that lovely young officer from the World War Two movie!”
“And the other movie where he takes the queen as a lover even though his head might get chopped off!” shouted Nonna Boo. “Abbiamo visto il suo culo nudo!” she called to eight people huddled in a corner—the Sicilian relatives. We’ve seen his naked butt!
Ella and her three younger sisters in their twenties—two of them married with kids—and her fourteen-year-old niece giggled.
“Abbiamo visto anche il suo culo nudo!” called back one of the Sicilian relatives. We’ve seen his naked butt too! He was a skinny old man with closely cropped white hair, large blue eyes, and an unshaven face. He wore a faded coat and a shirt buttoned up to his neck.
“My goodness,” Mama shouted. “We’ve all seen his naked butt—except the children. It’s Hank! Hank Rogers! Ella’s old beau!”
“The one who dumped her?” cried Uncle Sal.
Ella cringed.
“The very one,” said Mama, but she didn’t sound angry. She sounded happy. So very happy.
What was that about?
Ella wished Jill was here to ask. Sometimes she got Mama better than the other sisters. But Ella didn’t have time to think about Mama at the moment. She tossed her keys to a nephew and told him to get the flowers from the car and put them in the kitchen. Then she caught a glimpse of her ex-lover out of the corner of her eye. He was surrounded by younger Mancini cousins, all of whom had seen him in a big Christmas movie the year before. He’d played Santa Claus’s misunderstood brother in a screen adaptation of K. O. Cronkite’s bestselling children’s novel, I Am Santa’s Brother.
“It’s Derrick!” they were yelling. A few hopped up and down.
The youngest one, four-year-old Margaret, was crying. Tears of joy, apparently. “D-Derrick,” she stuttered through her tears. “I love you soooo much. Can you call Santa right now?”
Poor Margaret! Ella couldn’t help but laugh. It was funny to think of Santa having a brother named Derrick. Margaret certainly thought Santa did.
“My brother’s busy eating cookies right now, sweetheart,” said Hank. “Gimme some snow slaps.” That was nerdy Derrick’s signature greeting. Hank held out his hand. Every kid lined up and slapped his palm, then said, “Ice to meet you!”
“Ice to meet you too,” he said back in his Derrick voice.
Oh, God. Hank was excellent with kids. Willing to look like an idiot in the name of getting a laugh, yet he also looked like a hero. The character Derrick learned that not comparing himself to his brother Nicholas was the key to finding his own happiness. The kids gazed at Hank with shining eyes. Yet another reason to fall in love with him again—
Which Ella definitely refused to do.
All night long, she refused, even when he shyly offered the vase of gerbera daisies to Mama, then took her hand and kissed the back of it and said how sorry he was that he never told her when he was dating Ella that he admired her strength after the loss of her husband. Ella refused to fall in love with him again when he told Nonna Sofia she had the eyes of a screen siren, and when he told Nonna Boo she was funny and he wanted to call her every day for a new joke.
Ella also refused to fall in love with him when he caught her gaze across the table when one of her younger sisters, the single one, twenty-one-years-old, was telling everyone that true love did not exist, that every guy she went out with turned out to be a frog.
“You’ll find your prince someday,” said Mama.
“Huh,” said Ella’s single sister. Cara was her name. It meant “dear.”
“And when you do, you’ll know it,” said Nonna Sofia. “But it won’t be a big moment. It will be a quiet one.”
“Don’t knock those big moments,” Nonna Boo said with a chuckle.
Nonna Sofia began to laugh with her, although more quietly. It was a knowing laugh from both of them, one that clearly had everything to do with the unbridled joys of sex.
“Nonnas,” Uncle Sal chided them. “We’ve got company.” He indicated Hank.
Hank grinned. “I’m enjoying myself immensely,” he assured the table.
“He’s enjoying himself,” Nonna Boo said, and kept chuckling along with Nonna Sofia.
“Mama,” said one of the nieces, age eight, “why are the nonnas laughing?”
“They’ve had a great deal of fun in life,” said one of Ell
a’s younger married sisters.
Ella looked at Hank and grinned. What the heck. It wasn’t going to kill her to share some funny moments with him.
Mama repeated the snippet of conversation in Italian for the Sicilian side of the family. All evening, translations had been tossed around the table, and the Sicilians would nod and sometimes offer extended comments that Mama would translate for the younger crowd. Not everyone at the table was fluent in Italian. Not by a long shot, including Ella.
Now the Sicilian guests laughed and two of them rattled off some Italian, and laughed some more, along with Mama, Uncle Sal, and the nonnas.
“It’s time,” said Nonna Sofia, and took her knife and hit the long table that ran the length of the living room—the only room that could accommodate two long tables end-to-end, and a round cousins’ table—with the bottom of the handle, making the nearby wine glasses filled with Hank’s delicious wine rattle. “It’s time for the story of my shoe.” She stared at Ella. “Only you may hear it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ella tried to hide her sense of awkwardness with a smile. She didn’t like being singled out. All her sisters and nieces, even Mama, would feel hurt that Nonna Sofia didn’t want to include them in the telling of the shoe story. Why had Nonna Sofia brought up the topic in front of the entire family? She was acting very strange, even for Nonna Sofia.
“Nonna Sofia,” she asked gently, “wouldn’t it be nice if all the women in the family could listen to your shoe story?”
“No,” her grandmother said, her lower lip sticking out. “Only you. And if you tell it to anyone else, I will be very unhappy.”
It was final. That face meant Nonna Sofia refused to budge. And Ella was stuck.
She exchanged a glance with her mother. She’s being difficult, Mama’s gaze said. Just go along with her.
“Very well, Nonna Sofia,” Ella said softly.
“Not until after the tiramisu,” said Nonna Boo, “which Daisy and Nina made this morning with their grandmother.”
Mama smiled over at the cousins’ table. “The girls did an excellent job.”
“Thank you, Nonna Maria,” the two girls said in unison.
“I know this shoe story,” one of the Sicilian guests, Nonna Alberta, said in a voice that sounded as if it needed to be oiled, like a creaky hinge. It was the first time she’d spoken that night.
The tables went silent. Everyone had forgotten that Nonna Alberta spoke English. They rarely saw her, and whenever she talked, it was in Italian. But Ella remembered her mother telling her that Nonna Alberta was the only Sicilian relative who spoke fluent English.
Nonna Alberta was ninety-two. She’d spent three years in New York in her early twenties with her American soldier husband, who was killed in the Korean War. She’d then gone back to Sicily as a widow, remarried, and had three children. “I will tell everyone else this tale while Sofia tells Ella in private,” she said. “It is not her story only. It is a story for the entire family. May all who hear it embrace it as a piece of precious family history.”
Nonna Sofia turned bright red. But she said nothing. She couldn’t defy the matriarch of the Sicilian branch of the family, who was a good fifteen years older than she.
“Go ahead, Nonna Alberta,” Uncle Sal said. “Tell my mother’s shoe story.”
Nonna Alberta cleared her throat. “Once, back in the early seventies, a young lady named Sofia Brattorio arrived in Palermo from a nearby village, but her home was in Rome.”
Sofia Brattorio … that was Nonna Sofia’s name before she married, the children at the cousins’ table quickly learned from their whispering mothers.
“Sofia was no more than seventeen or eighteen,” said Nonna Alberta, “and wore beautiful leather sandals with a very high heel when she got off the bus. They showed off her legs to perfection. In Palermo, women in high heels were not a common sight. My two sisters and I, all of us married with grown children, were shopping in the nearby market and were enthralled with these shoes. We wanted to meet this young girl to get a closer look at her. But before we could walk the short distance to the bus stop, where she was struggling with a very fat suitcase, a young man came up to her and began talking rapidly, moving his hands with some urgency. He took her suitcase, and she went scurrying after him.”
Nonna Sofia sat stiffly while Nonna Alberta told the story. Ella felt for her. She could tell Hank did too, by the serious, concerned look in his eyes. They were very expressive, which was probably why, in addition to his good looks, the big screen loved him so much.
“And then what happened, Nonna Alberta?” Mama encouraged her to go on.
Nonna Sofia scowled at her daughter, and Ella remembered that she hadn’t wanted Mama to hear the story, in case she became ashamed of Nonna Sofia, if she thought her foolish.
Nonna Alberta looked down the table at Nonna Sofia. “We thought Sofia Brattorio would pull off her shoes to keep up with the young man. But she kept the gorgeous sandals on her feet. We went running after her, and then others began to follow. Especially the men.”
Everyone at the table chuckled. Except for Nonna Sofia.
“Sofia did not look back at the crowd,” Nonna Alberta said. “Neither did the young man carrying her suitcase, whom we knew to be the son of a powerful vineyard owner in Palermo, a high and mighty man above our touch. Many of us worked for him, but he wouldn’t attend any festivals with the townspeople. Nor would his son.”
Ella had no idea where this story was going. But she would be patient. Most of her family’s stories were long and circuitous.
“Eventually, we all got to the gates of the vineyard,” said Nonna Alberta. “The big house was at the other end of the drive. The son of the owner opened the gates and let the young woman through, and then shut the gates in our faces. I asked him, ‘What has happened?’ and he said that the young lady in the fancy city shoes was the nurse from Rome who would help deliver the baby of the owner’s favorite mistress, who had gone into labor a month early. The vineyard owner had kept her in a house in a nearby village to be prepared.”
Nonna Sofia’s face went redder than ever.
“And?” Uncle Sal asked Nonna Alberta.
“Sofia Brattorio told the son she would put one shoe outside the mistress’s cottage window if the baby was a girl, two if it was a boy. If it was a boy, the baby was to be adopted by the vineyard owner. If it was a girl, the mistress and the baby would be sent away.”
“To where?” asked a teenage niece of Ella’s.
“Oh, probably to a convent near Rome,” said Nonna Alberta. “Somewhere far away, never to be seen again in Palermo.”
“That’s not very nice,” said an eight-year-old nephew.
“What’s a mistress?” asked Margaret, her pudgy little hands folded on the cousins’ table.
Her mother looked back at her. “A fine lady,” she murmured.
Ella and her married sisters exchanged worried looks. Nonna Sofia had been right not to tell this story to the whole family. Mama, too, appeared nervous, her lips pinched thin. Hank, Ella saw, had a serious, calm expression on his face, but his eyes were alert. It was his protective mode. She remembered it from long ago. If he thought something was about to happen that could hurt Ella, he became guarded. She wished—inappropriately—that he were sitting next to, not across from, her.
Nonna Alberta went on. “Ten hours of not knowing passed. The sun was going down when one shoe finally appeared outside the cottage window.” She looked down the length of the adult tables. “The new mother, who had been the owner’s favored companion for twenty years, did not want to be sent away. Palermo was her home. So the nurse pleaded with the vineyard owner on the mother’s behalf, and he let her and the baby girl stay on. The nurse, he said, must also stay for three months to assist the new mother. During that time, the son of the owner fell deeply in love with Sofia Brattorio and asked her to marry him several times. But she always said no.”
Nonna Sofia’s eyes filled with tears
that did not fall. Ella’s stomach tilted. This story was creating terrible tension in her grandmother. Ella was worried. So was Mama, who couldn’t stop looking across the table at her stricken mother.
“What then?” asked one of the aunts. “Did the nurse return to Rome?”
“No.” Nonna Alberta gave a crooked smile. “An eighteen-year-old young man in the crowd who followed Sofia Brattorio the first day she arrived in Palermo, a poor boy who tended the owner’s vines daily, was secretly courting her, leaving offerings of grapes and small bouquets of fresh marjoram and thyme outside her door behind those big gates. It was he whom she loved. And he whom she chose to marry. That young man was my son Giuseppe, your late father, Maria.”
Mama’s face lost a few of its anxious lines. “Papa,” she said, with a warm smile at Nonna Sofia.
But Nonna Sofia was looking at Ella. “He was your grandfather, which is why I wanted to tell you the story, as you are my only granddaughter to turn thirty and not yet be married.”
In this traditional family, that was unusual. Ella was secretly amused, but she maintained a respectful posture. It helped that Hank, too, had a gleam in his eye—that protective one, which bolstered Ella more than she liked.
“I chose the man of my heart,” said Nonna Sofia. “I want you, too, my dear Ella, to wait as long as it takes for your own Giuseppe. And if he never shows up, I want you to be a kickass single lady for everyone to admire.”
Kickass single lady? Maybe Nonna Sofia wasn’t so traditional, after all.
“I will, Nonna Sofia,” Ella said. “I’ll be one of those single ladies who goes out dancing and wears gorgeous shoes all the time.”
Everyone laughed.
“I stopped wearing sexy high heels when I married,” Nonna Sofia said. “Back in the old days, it was grape-stomping country in Palermo. Many dirt roads, stone walls, and high grasses too. Not a good place for heels, but you must keep wearing yours, whether you marry or not. Promise me, Ella.”
Second Chance At Two Love Lane Page 18
