by Cora Brent
“Hey, Dominic,” Melanie called.
I held the door open for Donna and glanced back. The servers were clearing the tables and laughter rang out from the kitchen. Melanie was standing right where I’d left her.
“Did you get to talk to the reporter at all?” she asked.
“The reporter showed up?”
Melanie nodded. “Yeah. I talked to her and so did Gio, but I figured she’d want a word with you too.”
“Apparently not.” I shrugged.
Melanie was frowning, but I didn’t know if that was because of me or because of the reporter. In any case, I had to get Donna home, so I turned around and escorted my grandmother to my parked truck.
As soon as I walked into Sonoran Acres, a nurse in purple scrubs marched over and gave me the stink eye.
“Mr. Esposito,” she said rather haughtily, “you know very well we require residents to be in their rooms at nine p.m. These rules exist for a reason. The fragile health of our residents requires them to get adequate rest.”
“My apologies,” I said, with a sincerity that surprised me. “I shouldn’t have kept her out so late.”
The nurse’s expression softened when she looked at my grandmother. “Would you like me to get you a wheelchair, Mrs. Esposito?”
“Oh no, I’m just fine,” a cheerful Donna said. She patted my arm and tried to reach my cheek for a kiss. I had to bend down quite a bit to make it possible.
“Great job, Dominic,” she murmured in my ear. “And Melanie is wonderful.” My grandmother touched my face. “I knew she would be from the way you talked about her.”
“I told you about Melanie?”
Her bright eyes danced. “Of course you told me all about Melanie. Don’t you remember?”
In fact, I did remember now. I’d stopped by to see Donna one afternoon with a bag of the forbidden chicken tacos she loved so much. I was all out of sorts because Melanie and I had just bickered over menu prices. While Melanie was standing in front of me, spouting off all her dense market research, I just kept thinking about how badly I wanted to silence her with my mouth. I hadn’t admitted that last part to Donna, but I’d said enough. I didn’t even realize Donna had been listening to me complain as she happily ate her tacos and flipped the television channels.
“Good night, Donna,” I said, and she winked.
The nurse said a stiff farewell to me and then led my grandmother down the hall to her room. I checked my phone and saw that Gio had texted. Now that Leah was safe and asleep, he said he’d come down to Espo 2 and help clean up. I told him to forget it and stay home with his family. I didn’t see a good reason for Gio to leave his wife and baby and come down to Espo 2 in the middle of the night when I was capable of handling everything myself.
I yawned the whole way on the drive back to Espo 2. Tonight I planned on getting a good night’s sleep for once. Tomorrow I would start tackling the projects that remained before opening day. All I had left to do tonight was to make sure the fires were out and the doors were locked.
If Melanie had followed my instructions, the place should’ve been empty. I’d been gone for nearly an hour, and I’d ordered her to chase everyone, including herself, out after thirty minutes.
She had almost listened.
As I approached the door, I saw her through the glass and I stopped to stare. Her white Esposito’s T-shirt sported a tomato sauce stain on the right shoulder, and her hair was still loose. Melanie had caught my eye from the very beginning in her crisp power suits and heels. But lately she’d started dressing more casually, and right now in her T-shirt, jeans, and messy hair, I felt like I was seeing the real Melanie, not the sophisticated version that hid behind designer clothes and perfect makeup. And my god, she was beautiful.
Melanie hadn’t noticed that I was standing right outside. She was walking around and pushing all the chairs into place around the empty tables. As she finished, she tucked her long hair behind her ears and picked up a stack of plates. I hesitated with my hand on the door. Even though we’d been alone in the restaurant for countless hours, there was something more intimate about tonight, about the surrounding darkness, about the way we’d locked eyes for a split second, and the earth had seemed to shift under my feet. If I went in there now, I didn’t know if I was capable of keeping my distance. I was tired of doing that, tired of coming up with endless reasons why I shouldn’t touch that girl when I wanted her so much I couldn’t function normally. Maybe all this stuff I’d been telling myself about rules and propriety was bullshit anyway. Maybe when we were offered a moment like this, we ought to take it.
I opened the door.
“Thought I told you to take off,” I said.
Melanie was startled. She let out a tiny gasp and took a step back. I saw the blush creep across her cheeks and the way her eyes briefly lowered after they swept over my chest. I wasn’t going to bother lying to myself; it excited the hell out of me. Then she tipped her chin up and got a little huffy.
“Most employers are grateful when a dedicated employee wants to put in more time even when she’s off the clock,” she informed me.
“I’m grateful,” I said, and tossed my keys on the nearest table. “By the way, don’t hang out in here by yourself with the front door unlocked. Especially not when it’s after ten o’clock at night.”
“I wasn’t by myself for long,” she said defensively. “Tim and Gilberto only left ten minutes ago.”
“Don’t do it for two minutes, Melanie.”
“This is a safe neighborhood,” she sniffed.
“There’s no such thing. Now quit arguing with me.”
She rolled her eyes and hugged the plates to her chest. “Aren’t you a little too tired to play the macho savior?”
“No.”
Melanie pressed her lips together, then shook her head. “I’m just going to clean a few things up and then I’ll be out of your way,” she declared, carrying her pile of plates to the kitchen.
I didn’t remain in the empty dining room. I followed her. She was in front of the huge sink, running the water full blast.
“You hungry?” I shouted over the noise of the water.
She shut the faucet off. “What?”
“I asked if you were hungry.”
She turned around just as I started adding some wood to the nearest oven.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Firing up the oven.”
“But why?”
I pulled a sealed bin from the small refrigerator under the counter and removed several neat globes of dough.
“Because I had promised to make you a custom pizza,” I said. “Yet somehow I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
Melanie leaned against the sink and dried her hands on a nearby towel. She looked slightly confused. “I’ve had your pizza, Dominic.”
I spread flour across the countertop, running my hands through it, enjoying the comfortable feeling of performing a task that was as familiar to me as breathing. “Not like this you haven’t,” I told her. “Come on, I’ll make you whatever you want.”
“Right now?”
“Unless you have other plans,” I said, rolling out the blob of dough and keeping an eye on Melanie. She smoothed her hands down her thighs like she was nervous. She was looking down so I couldn’t read her expression.
“I thought you wanted me to leave,” she said softly.
I stopped rolling, ready to just be honest. “I think you know damn well I don’t want you to leave.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“What else am I thinking?”
“That you can’t wait to try this one-of-a-kind pizza.”
She exhaled deeply and raised her head. She was smiling now. “You’re a puzzle, Dominic Esposito. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Occasionally. By the way we’re taking your suggestion about the happy hour menu.”
She clapped her hands together and beamed. “You are?”
“Yup. Gio’s all for it,” I said, thinking about the brief conversation I’d had with my brother on the topic. He’d been enthusiastic about Melanie’s plan, and I realized I’d only been holding out because the concept didn’t match my vision of the traditional family-style atmosphere I remembered from the first Esposito’s. But in the end I understood something Melanie already knew; this was a new place in a new neighborhood, and our goal was to make the customers happy so they kept coming back.
I went to work on the dough, flattening and shaping. Melanie stayed put at the sink, but I could feel her watching me.
“That’s so easy for you,” she said, sounding amazed. “It’s like watching an artist.”
“Been doing it for a while,” I said as I stretched the dough into a perfect flat sphere.
“How long?”
I paused, remembering. “Gio and I were really small when we came to live with our grandparents. They were always working at the restaurant, so the two of us ended up spending most of our time there too. I was around eight when they finally started letting me into the kitchen to roll out dough, just for fun. The kitchen was my grandfather’s domain. He was a big man anyway, but in the kitchen he was larger than life, a veritable god. He could have avoided the hot kitchen and stuck with managerial tasks, but he wouldn’t. He would always come up with some excuse about keeping the discipline. The truth was he didn’t have much of a head for business and he couldn’t stand being away from the kitchen.” I rolled the dough vigorously just as I’d done ten thousand other times. “The first little pie I ever made I was too proud of to even eat. I brought it home, stuck it safely under my bed, then forgot about it until Donna did the spring cleaning months later.”
“I’m picturing you,” Melanie said, smiling and coming a little bit closer, “this smartass little kid making trouble for everyone in the middle of a busy Manhattan restaurant.”
I chuckled. “So that’s how you see me? A constant creator of mischief?”
She smirked. “Oh stop, I didn’t mean it like that. But I bet you were quite a handful back then.”
I’m still quite a handful, honey.
I managed to stop myself from saying that out loud and kept my tone carefully casual. “Eh, you may not be too far off,” I said, sprinkling a little more flour. “My grandpa always used to say to me, ‘Dom, you can’t fake it with food. If you start out wrong, there’s not always a chance for forgiveness.’ I suspect he was actually trying to teach me something about life beyond pizza.”
“You must miss him,” she said softly.
“Of course. He was a father to me and Gio—only father figure we ever knew.” I stopped what I was doing and sighed. “He’s been dead thirteen years now. Suffered a massive stroke behind the restaurant one winter night as he carried out the trash. He never got up again.” I swallowed before continuing. “The thing is, I was supposed to be working that night, and it would have been my job to carry out the trash. I blew off my obligation to my grandfather to go party in an abandoned warehouse with some friends.”
Melanie let out a small tsk of sympathy. “You were a kid, though, Dom. It’s not good to carry around that kind of guilt for something you could never have foreseen. He would have forgiven you.”
“I know he would have,” I said. “The thing is, I’ve never really forgiven myself.”
She looked around. “That’s why, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.
“Why what?”
She made a sweeping gesture. “The reason for all of this. Why you work yourself to the breaking point. You’re trying to make it up to your grandfather.”
“Could be,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed at the way Melanie was gazing at me with such intense sympathy. I didn’t usually spill my guts like this. “Once my grandfather was gone, it only took a few years for my uncle and cousin to run the old restaurant into the ground. When we left New York, it was . . . well, let’s just say we weren’t on good terms,” I said, stopping short of confessing my role in that mess.
To my surprise, Melanie nodded. “Yeah, the reporter mentioned something when I talked to her.”
“She did? What did she say?”
Melanie shrugged. “Nothing particular. A family fight. Honestly, I think she was just fishing. So what about your mother?” she asked.
Generally I avoided talking about the woman who’d given birth to my brother and me. My feelings about her were complicated. But that was the thing about Melanie; I found myself wanting to explain things to her, things I’d spent a long time trying not to think about. I stopped shaping the dough, flattened my palms on the floured countertop, and lowered my head.
“She did what she could for a while,” I said. “At least that’s what I always told Gio. She just didn’t have a lot of fight in her, I guess. So when she ran out of those resources, she gave us to her parents, figuring they could do better. She was right.”
“And you don’t keep in touch now?”
“She died years ago. We were just kids at the time. Still, I kind of wonder how things would have been different if she’d lived. Maybe she would’ve figured out how to navigate adulthood eventually. In time we might have gotten to know her.”
“Was her name Marie?” Melanie asked suddenly.
I was surprised, wondering where she’d heard that. “Yes.”
“Makes sense.” She nodded. “Your grandmother mentioned Marie. It caught me off guard for a moment. That was my mother’s name too.”
The day that Melanie had confided her parents’ fate to me, I had to use every ounce of willpower not to hold her tight to my chest and kiss her pain away. I knew it was stupid to think that anything I did could lessen the anguish of her lost family. But the sorrow in her voice had twisted something inside of me and even now, all these weeks later, I couldn’t manage to untwist it. Perhaps it was high time to stop trying.
“If you come over here,” I said. “I’ll teach you a few things.”
“And what will you teach me?” she asked in a curious, flirtatious voice. As she stood there, blushing and fidgeting awkwardly, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t the only one who was suffering from sex on the brain. Dirty thoughts were written all over her face.
I leveled my gaze at her.
“I’ll teach you every pizza trick I know,” I vowed.
She chewed her lip and then released it. “I know everything about where pizza comes from. I memorized the entire process while I was training down at Espo 1.”
“Melanie,” I said in a commanding voice, “come over here anyway.”
She stayed put for the moment. That was fine. I could wait. All the toppings and marinara sauce had been carefully contained and placed in the small fridge. I dug around until I collected everything I would need. As I laid out all the toppings, Melanie crept closer until she stood beside me at the counter. She took one of the balls of dough and slowly rolled it around in the flour.
“My dad used to make tamales every Christmas,” she said softly. “It was an old family recipe that his grandmother had passed down to him. My sister, Lucy, and I used to help when we were little, but by the time we hit our teens, we’d lost interest. Eventually he couldn’t drag us into the kitchen.” She stopped rolling the dough around. “I really wish I had that recipe now. I didn’t realize then how important it was. It wasn’t just food. It was a connection to who he was, who his parents and grandparents were.”
I spooned some marinara sauce over my circle of prepared dough. “If you want,” I said, “I can help you try to figure it out sometime. A friend of mine owns a Mexican restaurant, so I’ll ask for some tips.”
She brightened. “You think it’s possible?”
“Sure. We’ll just conduct a little trial and error until we get it right.”
Melanie lowered her eyes. “That would mean a lot to me, Dominic. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now what’ll you have? I’m betting your tastes are somewhat diverse, maybe some pineapple, a few peppers. Tell me I’m close.
”
“Not at all,” she laughed and looked up at me, shaking her hair out of her eyes. That hair, so dark and thick. It always seemed to be everywhere and always smelled like orange blossoms. “My preferences for pizza are simple, like my preferences for life.”
I sprinkled a generous helping of shredded mozzarella. “Is your life simple, Mel?”
“It is now—just me and my cats.” She groaned. “God, that sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?”
“Humble. Not pathetic.”
“I made a huge mistake when I married James,” she said suddenly.
“You can tell me about it,” I said. “If you want to.”
Melanie stared down at the dough and talked slowly, haltingly. “It was a really stupid decision. My folks had just died, and the guy I’d been dating in college decided he needed to be a hero. I was a fool to say yes. Neither one of us knew what we were getting into, and it didn’t last.” She sighed again. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll end up joining the cynics.”
“The who?”
She gave me a rueful grin. “The cynics. The scoffers who don’t believe in romantic ideals and argue that it takes two years and a lot of agony to properly fall in love.” She shrugged. “At least the mistake with James taught me a few valuable life lessons about blind trust and believing in heroes.”
I didn’t like hearing that from her. Melanie deserved optimism and hope, not wariness and suspicion. I didn’t know everything, but I’d seen enough to understand that she was as kind as she was beautiful. She was as smart as she was stubborn. She went out of her way to make each member of the staff feel valued and respected. She genuinely cared when her bad-tempered boss carelessly cut his hand open. She took the time to escort confused old ladies to the restroom even when she had a million other things going on. A woman like that deserved to be wined and dined and held and worshipped. She deserved every ounce of romance that could be squeezed out of this uncertain universe.
