Christmas and Cannolis

by Peggy Jaeger

  With a tiny tilt of his head, he nailed me with a look that was so hot it was a wonder I didn’t immolate. His back was to the girls, so I knew they couldn’t see him. But they could see me, so I made sure to stuff down the need to jump into his arms again and stuck out my hand to shake his instead.

  God bless him, Connor must have sensed the reason I was acting like I hadn’t had his tongue down my throat just a few seconds before and was riding his knee like a horse.

  He grabbed my hand, shook it once, and squeezed.

  “Okay. Sounds good. I’m sorry I have to leave.”

  “I’ve got to go, too, remember? I’ve got a hot date with Pop.”

  His smile charmed me straight down to my toes.

  My girls watched him shrug back into his coat and slide his gloves on.

  “Ladies,” he said to them. They hadn’t moved from their spots since divesting themselves of their own outerwear. Now, to allow him passage, they stepped aside.

  Before opening the door, Connor glanced over his shoulder. “Thanks for the…taste,” he said.

  And then he was gone.

  “Holy hotness,” Kari said.

  “Who is that?” her partner in crime asked. “And is he married?”

  I told them simply, “A customer,” then said I was leaving for lunch with Pop.

  It was good thing it was cold and windy for my two block walk to Mangianno’s. I needed the chill to cool my body down from the inferno of desire blazing through it.

  Cool it down? Who was I kidding? Tossing a bucket of ice water on me wouldn’t have cooled me down.

  Chapter 4

  Regina’s tips for surviving in a big Italian family: 4. Learn to carry your grief quietly in your heart and lean on your family when you need to.

  “Nonno and Nonna are doing good,” I said with a sniff. “Getting old, but so are the rest of us. Nonna is a big help in the bakery, but I think I’m gonna have her cut back her hours soon. At this point in her life, she should be home with her feet up on the ottoman watching her soaps and keeping Nonno in check.”

  I brushed a little dirt from the top of the white marble, then swiped at my eyes again.

  “Milania made the honor roll this year. Of all your cousins, she’s the one I think will go the furthest when she’s grown. Be a doctor, or a lawyer. Although, I hope she chooses medicine. If Nonno thinks she’s going into law, I’m afraid he’s gonna consider that a gift from God to solve any legal problems that pop up. Oh, Angelina.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “I look at Milania and the rest of your cousins, and sometimes I get so mad. Even though I love them with all my heart, it’s just not fair they’re here and you’re not. I miss you so much, baby. Every. Single. Day.”

  The wind was biting as it swirled around me in the empty cemetery. I was surprised I was all alone in my section since it was just two weeks before Christmas. For the past six years that I’d come on this date—December 10—the cemetery had been crowded with visitors paying respects to their loved ones. Not so today. The weather might have something to do with that. A frigid cold front had snapped in yesterday afternoon and was still around this morning. But I didn’t care if there was a blizzard or if the temperature was forty below. I never missed visiting on this date. I never would, no matter what.

  In the beginning, I’d come here every day. Sat on the ground and cried for hours. Sobbed until my insides screamed in pain with the effort, and my body wouldn’t produce any more tears. Ma had Pop physically lift me up from lying on the freshly dug grave several times during those horrible weeks afterward. Both of them were suffused with grief as much as I was.

  Although the passage of time hadn’t lessened the grief one spit, I was able to start functioning again like a human being, when I hadn’t been able to do much more than sleep and cry before.

  Six years. Six long years that seemed to blink by. I know how opposite that sounds, how ironic, but it’s the way it feels. The days drag on and on, but the years fly by.

  Angelina, my darling, beautiful angel of a daughter, would be thirteen this year if she were alive. She would have already made her First Holy Communion, something she was never given a chance to do, and would be studying to make her Confirmation. She’d be a senior in middle school. A teenager, bringing with her all the hormones, crazy emotions, and angst that defined the age.

  I’d started measuring how long she’d been gone from me in the milestones she’d missed a year after she died. First Communion; first confession. Eighth birthday, then ninth, tenth. Moving from grade school to junior high, or middle school as it’s called now. All landmarks in her life she was never going to pass through.

  In my mind, I always pictured her as the beautiful, frail six-year-old she’d been when God took her to Heaven and made her a true angel, just like her name.

  The hurt never went away; it just eased to the point where I could move through each day without it paralyzing me.

  “How long you been here, Regina?” my mother asked from behind me right before she plopped down on the bench where I was seated. She was clothed from head to toes, her eyes the only part of her visible over the top of the scarf covering her lower face and neck. A bright red knit hat, made by my cousin Gia’s sister-in-law, sat on her head, her old-fashioned black woolen coat covering her from shoulders to knees. Fur-lined, waterproof boots adorned her feet—feet that didn’t touch the ground once she sat on the bench, but dangled like she was atop a ledge. The boots were my Christmas gift from the year before. Bright green leather, rabbit-fur-lined gloves Pop gave her a few years ago were a size too big for her stubby fingers, but like Pop told her at the time, he got them “for a song, so beggars and being choosy don’t wash.”

  “You look…festive,” I told her, after kissing the minute amount of skin exposed just under her left eye. “And warm.”

  “Madonna. Fa freddo, oggi.” She shivered after telling me what I already knew. It was cold today. She repeated her question.

  “About an hour.”

  “You’re gonna be frozen to the bone soon, bambina.”

  “No, I’m good. I’m bundled up, Ma, don’t worry.”

  She narrowed her eyes, a gesture I knew meant she was thinking, I will always worry about my bambini.

  “Madre di Dio, it’s as cold as a witch’s tit,” blasted from behind us at the same time I heard crunching, huffing, and puffing come close.

  My aunt Francesca, who’s married to my pop’s brother, and her sister Grace trudged up to the grave, garbed much as my mother was. Where Ma is tiny and round, Frankie is small all over, and Gracie a good six inches taller than both of them and buxom as a pinup model circa 1940. All three of them had the same color of champagne-tinted hair under their hats since they’d all had the same girl dye their hair for the past twenty years.

  It was Gracie who’d made the loud and, some would say, inappropriate comment, since we were in a holy cemetery, about the witch’s mammary glands.

  “How long you been sittin’ here, Regina?” Aunt Frankie asked.

  “Over an hour,” Ma answered before I could.

  “Gesu. You’re gonna need some soup or somethin’ hot to get the circulation back to your feet,” Frankie said, shaking her fur-hatted head.

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  I noticed then that Gracie carried a poinsettia plant in bright red, Frankie its twin with white leaves.

  “Aw, thanks, Zie. It’s sweet of you to bring Angelina holiday plants.”

  Aunt Frankie pressed her lips together, lifted them into a pouty purse, and gave me an elegant shrug that I knew translated to “Why wouldn’t we?”

  Growing up, Frankie’s daughters, Chloe and Gia, told me their mother and their nonna Constanza were experts at what they called Italian sign language. The women in Aunt Frankie’s bloodline could make a simple hand gesture or tilt their heads a certain way, and everyone present knew exactly what they were silently saying with their bodies. Chloe referred to her mother as having a black belt in kinesthesia
. Luckily, I was able to read that body language well.

  “Angelina is our great-niece,” Frankie said as she placed the plant next to the edge of the gravestone. “Of course we bring her a gift for Christmas.”

  Both of them made the sign of the cross once they were done.

  “We’re going uptown for lunch,” Ma told me when we all started walking toward the cemetery exit. “And then getting our nails done at some frou-frou salon Joey gave Frankie a gift certificate to. You wanna come along?”

  “Yeah, Reggie,” Gracie said. “It’s a sad day. You shouldn’t be alone today but held in the loving bosom of your family.”

  It dawned on me in that moment that Gracie made a lot of references to breasts.

  “Thanks, but I’m good. I’ve got a little Christmas shopping I need to do, and I won’t have a minute free from the bakery until after the holidays. You guys go and have a great time.”

  I hugged Frankie, who, despite her tiny size, is as strong as a bull, then Gracie. The overwhelming scent of l’Air du Temps wafted over me when she clutched me to her chest.

  With my eyes starting to water from the aroma, I turned to my mother. She pulled me to her and said, “You gotta be strong, bambina.”

  “I know, Ma. I am.” I lowered my voice and whispered in her ear, “It’s Gracie’s perfume. It’s stinging my eyes.”

  She glanced at her sister-in-law’s sister, squinting again as she nodded. “Smells like a puttana, I know. But she has a good heart.”

  “She does. Have a nice afternoon.”

  She placed a lime-green gloved hand on my cheek, the aroma of the leather negating some of Gracie’s perfume.

  “I’ll be fine. Really. I just want some alone time today. You understand, right?”

  With a nod, she patted my cheek and got into the backseat of Gracie’s big-ass, new Cadillac, a present she received every year from her husband who got it at a great price from a guy Pop knew in the auto business.

  “Can we drop you anywhere?” Frankie asked, after rolling down her window.

  “I’m gonna walk to the train,” I told her. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Of course you will,” she said as she slid the window back up. “You’re a San Valentino.”

  I watched them pull into traffic and said a silent act of contrition for lying to them. I didn’t have any shopping to do, I simply wanted to be alone today. It was the one day of the year I took off from the bakery, the one day I needed to be alone with my memories.

  I rode the train to midtown and then walked toward Rockefeller Center to see the tree. When Angelina was five, Johnny and I had brought her here as a Christmas treat, taken her ice-skating for the first time, and then had gone to see the holiday show at Radio City. It was the last time the three of us were together as a normal family. A year later, my marriage was in ruins, my daughter was in Heaven, and I was embedded in a depression so deep, my family feared I’d be lost to them forever.

  I bought a cup of hot chocolate from a street vendor, then found an empty spot at the top of the stairway down to the rink and leaned against the barrier, just set on watching the skaters. Skating at Rockefeller Center was something I’d done a lot when I was kid. Growing up in Manhattan, my cousins and I would take the train to midtown after school and on the weekends and troll around Fifth Avenue, staring into shop windows at the gorgeous designer clothes and practicing our love of people watching. We’d gorge on hot chocolate and hot dogs, skate, and then head back home, full, happy, and exhausted.

  Tears burned the backs of my eyes while I watched a mom and dad teaching their little guy to skate. Angelina would never have the memories I did as I child, would never know the freedom of living in the greatest city in the world, or the love and devotion of her family.

  The boy’s gleeful shriek as his dad spun him around warmed my heart and tore at my soul. A laugh choked out of me when he wiped out on his butt, a goofy smile on his face.

  To be so young, so innocent, so happy. My daughter would never be any of those things, and it wasn’t fair.

  It just wasn’t fair.

  Suddenly, I felt the crowd close in on me, the laughter I’d enjoyed a moment before now sounding like one of my old nuns’ fingernails scraping along a bare blackboard. The aroma of fresh chestnuts, a smell that always made my mouth water, was now acrid and nauseating. A swell of bile chugged up within me, threatening. My hands began sweating inside my gloves, so I tore them off and thrust them in my coat pockets. Gasping for air, I tore at my suffocating scarf.

  I needed to get out of here, away from the throng of people, away from the chatter and excitement. I needed to run home, up to my apartment, and shut everything out. Shut the door, shut the lights, and shut my eyes and mind against…everything.

  With a panicked impatience, I pushed and shoved my way through the crowds lining the plaza and headed back to Fifth Avenue. There was no respite from the hoard of people milling and walking about.

  What had I been thinking coming here today, two weeks before Christmas? What did I expect? That it would be calm and quiet? The streets empty and silent?

  I wanted to sprint back to the train station but could only go as fast as the walking mob would allow. Ducking and weaving, I cut people off as I tried to escape, murmuring “Excuse me’s” and “Sorry’s” when I bumped into them. I ignored the angry glares, turned deaf to the annoyed utterings.

  I was almost at the street corner, when, out of nowhere, I felt my arm grabbed, yanking me to a stop.

  I turned, a scream shoving its way up my throat. The sound died when I saw who held my arm.

  “I called your name,” Connor said, pulling me with him to get out of the way of the moving multitude. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  I shook my head, the force freeing the tears I’d tried to keep contained.

  “What’s wrong?” He pulled me against his chest and wrapped his arms around me to keep me close. “Regina, what’s the matter?”

  A sob scraped from my throat as I gripped the front of his coat and clung.

  “Good Lord, you’re shaking like—” He stopped. I felt him lift a hand and whistle. In the next moment, he helped me into the back of a cab, got in, and gave an instruction to the driver. Once done, he put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me to rest next to him. He felt warm and solid and protective, and I melted into all of it. I laid my head down on his shoulder, sobbing still, and closed my eyes.

  The noise of the street was muffled inside the cab, and the quiet was a welcome relief. My nerves, which had been standing at attention and firing with an anxious edginess, started to calm, the warmth of the cab and the security of Connor’s arm around me dousing my agitation.

  “You’re okay, Regina. I’ve got you now.” He kissed my temple and squeezed me closer. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and handed it to me. I pressed it against my face to sop up the tears I’d shed. The fabric was whisper soft and smelled of a fresh meadow. The initials CG were embroidered into a corner.

  He slipped his free hand across his lap and gathered mine in his. “Your hands are like ice,” he mumbled, while his fingers began stroking my knuckles, infusing me with their heat. His touch was so reassuring, so soothing. Physically spent and emotionally exhausted from the wall of memories and thoughts that had run rampant through me since I woke, I kept my eyes closed and just leaned against him.

  When the cab jerked to a stop, my eyes flew open.

  After he paid the driver, he got out and helped me from the interior.

  “Where are we?” I asked. We were surrounded by the cityscape, but nothing was familiar.

  “Come on.” He tucked my hand into the crook of his arm, elbowed his way across the foot traffic, and led me through a large wooden door, decorated with a huge holiday wreath and red bow.

  The interior was dark and warm, the rich scent of a wood fire burning adding to the pleasant atmosphere. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust.

  “Mr. Gilhooly,” a unifo
rmed maître d’ who looked as old as my father said, inclining his head. “Your usual table is ready. Allow me to take your coats.”

  Connor helped me with mine as I glanced around the room and took in the unfamiliar surroundings. The walls were paneled in a dark, burnished oak stain, and every square inch was covered with black and white photographs of celebrities from all walks of the entertainment industry. Connor placed a hand at the small of my back and propelled me through what I realized now was a restaurant. The maître d’ preceded us through the main part of the establishment and kept walking us toward the back. The tables were filled with men and women in business suits, the low hum of conversation, soft and gentle. The wait staff meandered from table to table, silently delivering and removing food and drink in a well-timed and rehearsed dance.

  “I’ll send your server right over,” the maître d’ told us, after lifting his hand, indicating I should slip into the booth in front of us. Connor slid in next to me from the opposite side so we were seated next to one another in the center.

  “Is he in today?” Connor asked.

  “In his office. Shall I tell him you’re here?” He handed us each a menu.

  “Please.”

  With that he nodded, then left.

  I’d watched this entire exchange without saying a word. While he spoke, I took in Connor’s appearance. Gone was the casual-guy look he’d worn in my bakery, replaced by what I gathered was his regular business attire. I was grossly underdressed compared to him in my jeans and Henley to his well-fitted suit and tie. He looked like a captain of corporate commerce. Both styles on him, casual and work wear, were mouthwatering. Even through my sorrow, that registered. When we were alone, Connor reached for my hand. “I hope you’re hungry because this place makes the best burgers in the entire state of New York.”

  “Connor.” I shook my head, not knowing what to say. He’d basically kidnapped me from a street corner while I was in the middle of a panic attack, whisked me off in his arms to a safe location, and was now going to feed me.

  “Are you okay now?” His hand engulfed mine, his natural body heat surrounding me like heated bath water.