“Hey, Vince. Hey, Buddy,” I tried to control my breathing from betraying the Herculean effort it took to propel a large set of Italian breasts over the best quality roofing shingles money could buy.
“Problem with your roof?” Vince asked, as he shielded his eyes from the lowering sun. Buddy looked over at him and put his tiny hand up to his forehead too. Since he didn’t know why he was doing it, he looked like he was reenacting the John-John Kennedy salute.
“Problem with your roof?” Buddy echoed, and Vince beamed down at him.
“Nope,” I said, “just checking the view. I come up here sometimes.” I casually swayed my legs back and forth over the roof edge.
“Can I go up with Auntie Marie?” Buddy asked.
Warmth spread through me as it did every time he said that. Auntie Marie. Sure, it sounded more like a rotund Italian relative with the female beard-growing skills of Johnny Depp, but I’d never been called Auntie before. Mom and Dad had accepted the fact that our generation would end the Santora lineage with a grandchild that was a Miniature Pincher named after a Christmas special, so hearing Buddy call me Auntie made my heart grow ten sizes that day.
Vince said, “Sorry, Bud, your Mom would have my ass.”
Buddy moved his saluting hand to cover his mouth. “You said a bad word again,” he said, as he giggled through his fingers.
“That’ll have to be another thing we don’t tell your Mom,” Vince said, making wide eyes showing this was something that happened quite often. “So, really, Mare, what are you doing up there?”
“Just wondered what the view would be like,” I said. “You know, if I were the type of person that could climb a roof.”
Buddy was used to being disappointed by his dad, so he rarely asked for anything, but on this he was relentless, “Can I please see the view! Please?”
Vince and I had an entire wordless conversation with our eyes: Think we should? He would love it. His mother will kill me. Oh, he’ll be fine. I could hand him up to you. Just for a minute or two. Don’t you dare let him fall. I would never let him fall.
Vince scooped him up, and Buddy let out a high-pitched yelp of joy, and while my new nephew looked just like a child, right then he seemed more like a wriggling puppy. This was a creature I understood, I thought, as Vince easily lifted him to me. Vince kept his hands open to catch him, until well after I had pulled him safely into my lap.
“Wow!” Buddy said, as he took in the view, “This is the best house ever!”
“Sure is,” I said, keeping a hold on him with both my arms wrapped around him from behind, as if he might need a chicken bone released from his throat. I saw the view from Buddy’s perspective, the long stretch of woods, the horizon oddly lower than us, and the feeling that if you could climb a roof, you could have anything in the world you wanted. I wondered if I had ruined that feeling for Erica. Even the scent of pine was heavier from this vantage, or maybe it was Buddy’s hair. A closer look revealed a sticky patch of tree sap leftover from his salute.
Vince hopped up on the rail, and, after a bit of struggling, he was sitting next to us. “On the first try, just like me. Impressive,” I said.
“Wow,” Vince said, “Buddy is right, this is the best house.” I could feel Buddy tense with the excitement of having Vince join us, or maybe because Vince had copied him. The three of us were quiet for a minute before Vince put his arm around me, and, with just enough detail to keep Buddy in the dark, he asked, “Did Lisa tell you we finally got those papers finalized?”
“That’s so great,” I said.
Vince said, “We don’t know why. Or how. One day the papers were signed and left under the door.”
“Creepy,” I said.
“You don’t seem surprised. Funny, Lisa wasn’t either,” he said, and then he raised an eyebrow at me.
I said, “Your girl is a capable woman. Good for her for getting that monkey off her back.”
“There’s monkeys up here?” Buddy said, searching the trees.
“She’s capable of kicking my a—, butt, if she finds out I let her son on a roof.”
“A really, really high-up roof,” Buddy said.
“That’s one more secret we don’t need Mommy to know, OK, Bud?” Vince said and Buddy nodded seriously at him.
“I’m cooked. He’ll serve me up,” Vince mumbled to me as I nodded back. Then he smiled at Buddy again, knowing the view was made more exciting because his mother was not supposed to know.
Vince asked, “So, when you’re up here, are you remembering that thunderstorm, the night before we opened the Dove?”
Right on target. That scene had gone through my head a hundred times.
“I guess so,” I said.
“You guess so?” he said, as he tightened his arm around my neck, “I would think you’d remember kissing Erica, seemed like a good one from what I saw.” When I turned to look at him, he was gloating just a little. I, on the other hand, felt sick.
My throat tightened up when I tried to speak. “I know you’re happy now. But that doesn’t change what I did. And since I can’t take it back, I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you, and to prove to you that hurting you was the last thing—”
“You proved that,” Vince said. “You let her go.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder, remembering how I had leaned on him when Lorn left me the first time.
Vince gave my neck another squeeze. “What were you thinking?” he asked, as I waited for the talk I had been dreading: the one where he asked me how I could let anything happen with the woman I thought he loved.
Vince continued, “How on earth could you do it? You get a woman like Erica, and then you let her go? She dumped me, so I have an excuse. But you are an idiot.”
I tried to stop my lip from quivering as I felt a tear roll down my cheek. And I imagined my body as an air mattress with the plug pulled, and all the guilt finally rushing out. “I love you, Vince,” I choked out.
“I can say the word ‘idiot,’ too,” Buddy said.
“Go for it,” I said, wiping my eyes behind him so Buddy wouldn’t see. I still had my arm tightly curled around his waist.
“Idiot!” Buddy yelled, and we all laughed when it echoed back to call me an idiot again. Buddy thought it was magic, while I thought the trees were finally making some fucking sense.
I exhaled heavily, realizing how much the guilt had still been weighing on me. Now, all that was left was the misery of losing Erica. “Ain’t love grand,” I said.
Vince said, “It is for Uncle Freddie.”
“What?”
“Well, it turns out that he wasn’t just going back to Italy for the winter to help build a house for his niece,” Vince said. His eyes were gleaming with the thrill of breaking news before Lisa, a rare accomplishment indeed. “There’s a new woman in Uncle Freddie’s life.”
“Get out!” I said, and laughed in spite of my own pathetic love life. I thought about how our other Uncle Tony had found love with Lorn’s mother, Katherine. What was it with these old Italian guys?
“Yup. Uncle Freddie’s exact words to Mom was that he was going back to Italy and taking a young woman with him to boss him around.”
I smiled serenely at this news before it struck me, just like lightning on a rooftop. I hugged Buddy more tightly and leaned over to kiss Vince on the cheek, “Oh my God, Vince! Erica’s in Italy!”
Thirty-Four
When Your Ball Hits Your Thigh, Like a Big Pizza Pie . . .
Vince volunteered to go on the trip with me, and just a few days after I’d guessed Erica was in Italy, we were booked on a flight to Naples. I picked Vince up at his condo and watched him kiss his new little family goodbye. Vince whispered something into Katie’s ear that made her smile, lean into him, and kiss him again. Then he crouched down to Buddy and mimicked our dad, telling Buddy he was to take care of his mommy, the house, and his new bulldog puppy. (To Lisa’s delight, Buddy had insisted on naming the pup after her.) We were runni
ng a little late, so Katie held on to Buddy who wanted to get in the car to visit. She told him to wave to his Auntie Marie. Then Katie shouted, “I’m counting on you to make sure your brother behaves! And hey, Marie, I’d feel better if that woman were off the market, so, really, good luck!”
“Good luck!” Buddy repeated as he copied his mom’s wave, and I was glad he’d said it. I would need all the help I could get. Then Vince bent down to Buddy, and Buddy yelled out to me, “Where’s Uncle Lisa?” I shook my head at my brother, in a silent warning that he was going to get his ass kicked. It could have been worse. Vince had been debating whether to have Buddy call her Guncle (Gay-Uncle) Lisa.
The only one who was completely against us going to Italy was Mom, who said, “You don’t go flying across the entire world hoping to find somebody.”
I answered, “It’s Europe, Mom, we’re not crossing the globe, it’s an eight-hour flight.”
“Besides,” Vince said, “it’s not just somebody, it’s Erica.”
“Still,” Mom said, “we were supposed to go outlet shopping together. I need good shoes and your father needs underwear. And your brother was going to come with Katie and Buddy and me to the movies on Sunday.”
Later, Dad pulled me aside, looking concerned. He looked around suspiciously, like we were two spies meeting on a park bench, before he explained: “It seems your mother has come up with a reverse case of agoraphobia. Ever since Camptown Ladies closed for the season, she never wants to be in the house anymore. She always wants to be outside or heading somewhere. She acts like she is afraid to be alone in her own house.”
This was the first I had heard of it.
Dad continued, “Your mother drags me around with her all over the place. I’m friggin’ exhausted! If you kids take off to Italy, it will all be on me to keep her busy!”
I told Dad I would discuss it with Vince and Lisa, and that if it was still going on when I got back, we would address it.
“Oh, it will still be going on,” he said. “Yesterday, she followed me into the bathroom, and I had my newspaper with me! That is a sacred time for a man.”
Vince and I drove to the airport, armed with information Mom had reluctantly supplied, which was the married name of Uncle Freddie’s niece, though she was recently divorced, and a vague reference to a village just south of Naples. Vince said it amounted to no information at all.
Vince waited until we were walking toward our gate before he said, gently, “You should be prepared we might be wrong, and that she might not be there.”
“She’s there,” I said.
I tried not to think about how I might have stupidly convinced myself she was there, just to have one more shot at finding her. I also knew Vince was coming on the trip because he thought I might be wrong. I didn’t care. As we walked, an announcement came over the loud speaker that caught our attention: “Will Asini Stupidi please meet your party at gate B12. Asini Stupidi, your party is waiting at gate B12.”
Vince and I stopped dead in our tracks, then simultaneously asked, “Did you hear that?” We must have looked like we were in a comedy routine, as our eyes bugged out. “Holy Shit!” we both said, before we busted into a competitive run toward Gate B12.
Gate B12 is where we found Lisa hitting on the young woman behind the ticket counter. She spotted us barreling toward her, but she took the time to turn back to the girl to say something charming before turning to us.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded as Vince and I hugged her. She ignored my question to introduce us to her new friend.
Lisa said, “Stupid Asses, meet Natalie. She’s great with a loud speaker. Natalie, these are my siblings. We’re heading to Italy so my sister can bang my brother’s ex-girlfriend.”
Natalie said, “Oh. That’s . . .” and looked back and forth between Vince and me.
Lisa said, “I know, kind of an extravagant trip, especially when there are so many good-looking women right here in the airport.”
“I’m OK with it,” Vince assured the girl.
Lisa had gotten our flight information from Mom and Katie and made them promise to keep quiet until she could fly from Florida to meet up with our flight. With Lisa joining us, her overconfidence was contagious, which made me think we could pull anything off. Lisa rarely failed. Like her building a four-star restaurant at a campground that catered to gays and rednecks alike; bringing Erica out to work on Camptown Ladies to play matchmaker again (OK, wrong sibling, but still); bribing a cop to sign his own divorce papers, etc. Now finding Erica seemed much more possible, and I could see by the way Vince was smiling, that he thought so, too.
The flight was packed, so we weren’t able to sit together, but Lisa had finagled a seat up front in the exit aisle, and Vince and I sat on opposite sides at the rear of the plane. We didn’t know it at the time, but Lisa knew slipping a nice tip to do thy bidding was just as effective as flirting, and quite a time saver, especially with the Italians. I was fighting hard not to drift off to sleep when the Italian pilot, with a melodic accent that reminded me of Uncle Freddie, made the usual announcements about safety and the weather.
Then, there was one not-so-usual announcement.
“We will be touching down in Naples on schedule. I want to give special thanks to the Santora family, who are traveling with us today.” My eyes popped open and I craned my neck to lock eyes with Vince, who was sporting an identical what-the-fuck look.
“The Santora family has made a generous donation to cover any food or drink you may like on your way to Naples, so la prego, quindi mangiare e divertiti!” Upon hearing “so please eat and enjoy!” the passengers burst into applause, and a few passengers shouted Italian cheers of bravo, as the pilot continued. “The Santora famiglia is traveling to the Naples area in search of their only living Italian relatives. If you have any connections in that area that might help them find their uncle, or his niece, kindly please alert your flight attendant.”
An hour later, when the flight attendants were inundated with free food and drink requests, Lisa joined in to help the two attractive women serve the crowd. She ran drinks and food to the passengers, despite making time to flirt with her new co-workers, who instinctively treated Lisa like the restaurant manager. I marveled at how my sister had assembled an efficient (though mediocre) cuisine version of the Dove Gaio Mangia at forty thousand feet.
When Lisa came to my row to take my order, she indicated with hubba-hubba eyebrow moves which flight attendant she had her eye on. The woman was watching Lisa with a mix of rapt interest and fear, a look I had seen at the beginning of all my sister’s relationships. I laughed as I thought how, whenever Lisa was around, every day had its dog, and the dog was Lisa. When the woman winked at her, Lisa proved my point by crouching down low, to say toward her crotch: “See, vagina, there really is a Santa Claus.”
After we landed, Vince and I waited by the VIP Lounge, well beyond the limits of my patience, as Lisa exchanged numbers (and probably body fluids) with her flight attendant. She came out of the room forty minutes later and Vince said it looked like the VIP (Very Immediate Pussy) Lounge had served her well. When Lisa wasn’t forthcoming with any details, Vince and I silently agreed with our eyebrows that there might be something a little different about this hook-up.
Lisa led us to the correct luggage carousel and traded in the driver I had found for one she said wouldn’t gouge us. She rattled something off a piece of paper in Italian, and as she did, I realized it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask where we were heading. Lisa had taken over this trip, and I, with a lifetime history of this type of thing, had completely turned it over to her.
“We’re going to Uncle Freddie’s niece’s house, of course,” she said, like I had asked the stupidest question she had ever heard.
“But how?” I asked.
“She probably bribed a cop,” Vince said.
Lisa answered, “Someone on the plane knew somebody in Frederica’s village. We’re heading there.”
There
were times when I couldn’t imagine doing anything without my sister. Times like this. Not that this was always the case. When Lisa made a debacle, it was usually a goliath one that Vince and I could laugh about for years to come. Vince and I liked to goof on those times so we didn’t feel so inept during at times like this. Also, they were fun to relive.
There was the time she scored a date with a woman she had been stalking for weeks. Lisa was so mesmerized by her looks that she never bothered to ask for a name to go with the coveted phone number. Lisa had to call her “sweetheart” from the first phone call, which was fine with Lisa: “Dumb as a box of rock but hotter than an August pussy planted on a pavement.” But after her second date, the woman disappeared on her. Lisa insisted she had only sent her a charming text message about how pretty she was, only to receive a message back that she would like Lisa never to contact her again. Ever. It wasn’t until weeks later, when Lisa was scrolling her sent messages, that she saw the text she’d sent to the unnamed beauty: “If only you weren’t so damned petty.” Petty—so similar to the word pretty, and yet, so very, very different. (Lisa guessed the woman had had this happen a few times before.)
Right out of college, on her first “real” job, Lisa tried to bond with the boss’s daughter by taking up smoking on coffee breaks. Like ex-president Clinton, she had all the moves except for the inhale, and she was working toward the stain on the dress. On day two, Lisa felt she was gaining ground charming the girl with her smart aleck remarks. So when a guy from accounting walked by, Lisa shared her observations about him. “Damn, that guy creeps me out. He looks like a child molester.”
Camptown Ladies Page 28
