That Month in Tuscany (Take Me There)

by Inglath Cooper

  “Then he’ll have to be independently wealthy to support your Starbucks habit.”

  Peyton giggles. “That’ll be the least of his worries,” she says, stretching out a leg to show off the Prada platform she’d worn out last night.

  “You got that right,” Kylie says.

  “Is your mom in Italy now?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why don’t you call her if you’re all worried?”

  “I’m not worried. More like pissed.”

  “Por quoi?”

  “Because she shouldn’t have done that to my dad.”

  “My guess is that’s exactly what she should have done.”

  “Hey. Whose side are you on anyway?”

  “Well, I’ve seen my mom after one of my dad’s last minute cancellations. She takes it pretty hard. Maybe your mom did, too.”

  “I don’t think my parents are like yours.”

  “How so?”

  Kylie shakes her head. “I don’t know. You know how when you’re a little kid, you think your parents love each other more than anything in the world? That nothing could ever change that?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Somewhere along the way, I figured out that was all just a big fairy tale.”

  “Hey,” Peyton says, putting her hand on Kylie’s arm. “I know what you need.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s ditch classes today and go shopping—with your parent’s credit card. That should make you feel better.”

  “You’re crazy,” Kylie says.

  “But I’m right.”

  Kylie doesn’t bother to deny it.

  8

  Lizzy

  WHAT I ABSOLUTELY love about Florence: the bells.

  The magnificent sound of church bells waking me in the morning. A heavy medieval gong, gong, gong that is as pleasant as it is beautiful, music I would like to hear over and over again.

  As soon as the bells rouse me from sleep, I jump out of bed and open the glass-pane doors so that I can hear them in their fullest glory. I think it would be wonderful to be woken this way every day of my life.

  The second thing I love about Florence: this room. This magnificent, high-ceiling room in the Hotel Savoy. Again, another piece of our anniversary splurge. The room is far more luxurious than anything I need. Nonetheless, I love it. I love, too, the fact that the doorbell rings at seven on the dot, and a dark-haired Italian, who looks like he must be a college student arrives with my tray of American coffee. It’s a weakened version of their Italian espresso, but still strong for me. The taste is wonderful, rich and mellow on my tongue. A small basket of delectable pastries accompanies the coffee pot. They all but melt in my mouth.

  I pour myself a cup and sit on the terrace of my room that overlooks a square, where people are walking quickly in every direction. There’s a woman ducking into a bakery. I smell the goods from here, warm bread and something sweet, like doughnuts. A man with a white cane and a seeing-eye Standard Poodle expertly taps his way through the middle of the square. I’m amazed that, of all the people winding in and around him, he never stumbles, never even brushes shoulders with anyone.

  All of the streets within my immediate view are pedestrian only so there’s no roar of cars to disturb my interpretation of this extraordinary spring morning.

  My third favorite thing about Florence: the food. It is incredible. In even the smallest, plainest trattoria, you can find the best meal you’ve ever eaten. Homemade pasta with a pomodoro sauce that tastes as if someone just picked the tomatoes from a summer garden, the olive oil fresh and fruity.

  Last night, I had dinner at a little place I happened to pass on my way back from the Ponte Vecchio where I had browsed the wonderful jewelry shops that occupy either side of the famous old bridge.

  The décor of the trattoria was simple and rustic, heavy wood tables and comfy farm-style chairs. I sat by a window where I could see the people passing by and took my time eating. The owner of the trattoria walked from table to table, welcoming people. I was one of the few Americans there, but when he approached me, he did so in English and asked me what I thought of the dessert. I told him that I wasn’t sure I could find words to express it well enough, and it was clear this pleased him greatly. When I left, he asked me to come back again, and I said I most definitely would.

  I am now beginning day three of my stay in Florence. There’s something about the immediate absorption of the beauty in this place that makes it feel as if I’ve been here much longer.

  I have done nothing more with my days than wander street to street, not even using a map, letting them lead me where they would. Passing shops with beautiful leather goods, journals, satchels and purses. Shoe stores in which I want no fewer than a dozen pair. And bakeries with the most mouthwatering breads I’ve ever seen—mounds of them fresh from the oven.

  Two full days of this. In my adult life, I have never known such a luxurious expenditure of time. In fact, not since my childhood when a day knew no schedule aside from play and sleep. Certainly not in my regular life where a day is normally sectioned off by appointments and fundraising meetings and grocery shopping and all of those things that somehow manage to steal most of the best parts of our waking hours.

  I wonder how it is that we go along year after year never questioning the routines we’ve set for ourselves, never wondering if it could be different. I feel as if I’ve opened a door and discovered a way of life that makes so much more sense to me. A slower pace that allows me to actually see the beauty around me. Hear the song in the sounds and feel appreciation for it all.

  I take another sip of my coffee and wonder if this would have been the same for me had Ty actually come. I have barely completed the thought before admitting the answer. No. It would not have. With Ty, there’s always a sense of impatience to get to the next thing. The next case. The next rung up the law firm ladder. He is constantly checking his watch, and I’ve wondered many times if it’s because he would rather be doing something other than what he is doing with me at that moment. If I’m honest, I’ve wondered if there was somewhere else he would rather be. Someone else he would rather be with.

  Whatever the reason, this habit of his makes everything we do together feel rushed and incapable of comparing to whatever it is that he’s anxious to get on to. I realize now that to wander Florence without a schedule would make no sense whatsoever to Ty. He would see it as a place to be conquered. The most famous tourist attractions viewed and checked off a we’ve-done-that list. So that in the end it would seem more about completing the list than actually seeing what there is to see.

  Before coming here, I really didn’t question that. It is Ty’s nature. It’s who he is. If it wasn’t who I am, somehow that failed to be significant, at least in any way that matters.

  The sun is now draping itself across the terrace, its warmth caressing my face. I lean back in the chair and close my eyes, willing myself not to think about Ty. Even as I do, a thorn of worry makes itself known.

  I haven’t let Kylie know that I took this trip without her daddy. I have no idea if Ty has done so. My guess would be yes. Guilt prods me out of my chair. I retrieve my laptop from the room and bring it back to the terrace, popping the lid open and waiting for it to find the hotel’s wireless signal.

  Once it does, I log in to my email account. Surprisingly, there are no new messages from Ty. But there is one from Kylie. I open it with some reluctance. Selfishly not wanting her certain disapproval to pop my bubble of happiness. Even so, I cannot help but read what she has written.

  Mom,

  Daddy is worried sick about you. Please call him as soon as you get this. I can’t believe you went without him.

  K-

  And there it is—the instant feeling of something almost like shame.

  It’s not the first time Kylie has put me in my place. As an only child, she’s really good at manipulation.

  But maybe that’s more my fault and Ty’s fault than it is Kylie’s. At
some point in her childhood, and I’m not even sure I could say when, a tug of war for her affections had come into play between Ty and me, each of us seeking her approval whether we realized it or not.

  I wonder now if that was the first symptom of erosion in our relationship. The need to prove to the other who was more valuable in our family structure.

  If I had to say which of us pulled ahead at some point, I will admit it was Ty.

  Before age twelve, Kylie was Mama’s girl. I could do no wrong in her eyes. She wanted to dress like me, smell like me.

  How many conversations did we have–in the car going grocery shopping or a trip to the library—about how she would never leave home? That even after she got married, she and her husband would live with us. Maybe they could build another part to the house, she said, but she would never leave home. And she would only marry someone who would agree to that.

  As the adult, I knew it was simply her age talking. That the picture she painted was nothing more than a fairy tale. But it felt so nice to be that loved by her—to think that she never wanted to be apart.

  And then, not that long after she turned twelve, things started to change. They were little shifts in the beginning. Like the tremors way down deep in the earth, predicting a quake to come. I felt them like pinpricks to the skin. One night when we’d gone out to dinner, she said my dress looked frumpy. A year before, she had called that same dress classy in the way Coco Chanel thought women should dress. Frumpy hurt. It sounds silly, and I could admit it even then. But there was a change in the tide.

  At the same time, Ty grew in stature where Kylie was concerned. She wanted to know more about what he did every day. Became fascinated with the trials he was a part of, with the criminals he had represented in various cases.

  And while she had once wanted to be a photographer, like I once was, now she wanted to be a lawyer, like Ty.

  He would take her with him to the office on Saturday mornings, letting her read depositions, giving her some minor task to complete within them. She would come home elated by the fact that she had helped him and earned his lavish praise.

  And as Ty began to be the recipient of her obvious affections, I became diminished in her eyes.

  At thirteen and fourteen, it seemed that a day never passed that we did not end up in an argument over some difference of opinion about what she should or should not wear to school. Tank tops that showed cleavage. Skirts that were inches from being close to meeting the dress code. And boys. That was probably the biggest divider. Kylie wanted to date. Like all her friends were doing, she said. Being dropped off at the movies or at the mall to wander around hour after hour, hand in hand.

  Ty and I had always agreed that she would not date until she was sixteen. This was the restriction my mother had set for me. And it was one I came to believe in because of how close I got to doing something extremely stupid when I was thirteen, and a seventeen-year-old boy wanted to take me out. Of course, I thought I should be allowed to go. My mother, however, stood her ground and would not relent.

  I shared this with Kylie several times, but to her, there was no comparison between the world she lived in and the teenage world I had lived in. They might as well have occurred on different planets for as relevant as she found my advice.

  The gap of distance between us continued to increase to a point of actual heartache on my part. If I had hopes of maturity bringing new focus to Kylie’s attitude, it was completely lost on the day she turned sixteen.

  She had asked to borrow one of my sweaters for a party she was going to that night. I told her where it was in my closet, and she had run upstairs to get it. I had been busy making her cake in the kitchen and didn’t notice how long she’d been gone until I glanced at the clock and realized it had been almost an hour.

  Concerned, I called up the stairs but did not get an answer. I walked up, looked in her room and found her in my closet.

  She was sitting in the middle of the floor, holding the red leather diary I kept as a teenager. I stared at her, my lips parting without any sound coming out. I finally managed to say, “How . . . where . . . how did you find that?”

  “A button popped off the sweater, and I couldn’t find it, so I looked under the dresser. I saw this, stuck up under the drawer.”

  “That’s mine. You should have asked first.”

  She’d closed the cover, softly, too softly, looked at me and said, “Why did you never tell me?”

  “Because in the end, Kylie, it didn’t matter.”

  “You getting pregnant and only getting married because of that doesn’t matter?”

  “Your daddy and I would have gotten married anyway. Surely, you know that.”

  “No, I don’t know that. And that’s not how it looks. Here,” she said, opening the diary and flipping to a page where I knew exactly what I had written. “I wish I had never said yes,” she read.

  My heart caught in my throat. I struggled to find the words to explain to her. “Oh, Kylie, I was nineteen years old, barely a sophomore in college. I was scared of what my parents would say. Scared of having a baby. Scared of letting go of every dream I had for myself. That was who wrote those words—a very different me from who I was after I figured out the right thing to do.”

  “And what was that?” she’d asked, tears in her voice.

  “To marry your daddy and to have you. So that is what I did.”

  She looked back at the page, her eyes taking in the words. “But you weren’t even sure that you loved him. That’s what you said here.”

  “I wasn’t that much older than you are now. Try to understand that—”

  “You try to understand, Mom. You try to understand that what I thought was true about you and daddy wasn’t true at all.”

  “I love your father,” I said. “You know I do.”

  “I’ve always wondered, you know,” she’d said, rubbing a thumb across the cover of the journal. “I knew there was something.”

  “Kylie, don’t,” I said, starting to reach for her.

  “No. You don’t,” she’d said, tossing the journal at my feet and running from the closet and out of the room.

  I leaned against the wall, slid down to the floor with my knees bent against my chest. I felt as if someone had taken a wrecking ball to a life I had so carefully put together. It lay around me in shards and smithereens, and I wondered if Kylie’s anger would ever dissipate.

  Things between us were never the same after that day. I had tried so hard to fix things with her. But she had closed a door between us, and no matter how many times I tried to explain why we hadn’t told her, she was unyielding in her refusal to let me in again.

  Her relationship with Ty, however, continued to flourish. She spent even more time with him at the office when she wasn’t in school. In her eyes, he was everything that she wanted to be. He had her respect and admiration, and I had neither.

  To say it hurt came nowhere near describing how her rejection felt. I kept telling myself that eventually things would smooth out again, and she would forgive me for whatever wrong she thought I had done.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ever talk to Ty about what had happened that day. To do so would mean telling him what Kylie had found and admitting the awful doubts I’d had after finding out that I was pregnant. Somehow, digging all of that up again, reexamining it with Ty possibly reacting in the same way Kylie had . . . I didn’t have the courage to do it.

  I stare at the computer screen now, my daughter’s words at the bottom of the email.

  I can’t believe you went without him.

  I imagine the conversations the two of them have had about what I’ve done, that maybe I’ve gone a little crazy because this is so out of character for me.

  I hit Reply and begin an email laced with apology and reassurance.

  Dear Kylie,

  I know this must not make any sense to you. And I’m sorry for any worry I’ve caused. Please understand that this was something I’ve always wanted to do. Your
daddy decided that he couldn’t go, and so I’m visiting a place I’ve always wanted to see. I will be in touch soon.

  Love,

  Mom

  I hit Send and hear the whoosh of the email as it flies from my inbox to hers.

  A yawning feeling of loneliness settles over me. I wonder how it’s possible to reach this point in life, married with a family, and be this lonely.

  I hate my own self-pity. I mostly refuse to allow myself to indulge in it. But I can’t deny that it hurts. I wonder, not for the first time, if it’s always going to be this way. Ty and Kylie on one side of the fence and me on the other. The thought swamps me with an awful feeling of regret.

  I start to close the laptop, spot my cursor blinking in its nosy Google search box. My hands automatically slide to the keyboard.

  I type in his name. Hit Enter. And blink at the number of results returned by my search: 6,897,512.

  That really shouldn’t be a surprise, I guess. He is, after all, a rock star.

  Ren Sawyer. Lead Singer. Temporaltheband.com.

  Every time my encounter with him pries itself into my thoughts, I instantly light up with the heat of embarrassment. Until now, I’ve resisted the urge to find out anything more about him. I can’t really say why I’ve given in to curiosity now. Rebellion, maybe? In response to Kylie’s email? I don’t know. Maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe it’s just old-fashioned curiosity.

  I click on the first link to an article in USA Today about the conclusion of a recent tour. There’s a photo of him at the top of the page, a gorgeous young woman, I vaguely recognize as a model next to him.

  In the caption below, her name is linked with his, and I realize who she is. Gretchen Macher. She certainly looks like someone who would be with him. It would be hard to say who was more beautiful. Him or her.

  I almost talk myself out of reading the article, but my gaze is pulled to the type.

  By most accounts, the Temporal tour came to a highly successful conclusion on its last stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ticket sales for the thirty-city tour topped the group’s previous records. Speculation continues as to whether the group will produce another album. Band manager Stuart Langston is quoted as saying, “There is no question as to whether the band will go to the studio for another album.” Questions have surfaced regarding the performance of lead singer Ren Sawyer at the tour’s last concert in Charlotte.