Christmas and Cannolis

by Peggy Jaeger

  Upset didn’t even begin to describe it.

  I’m gonna be busy for the next two days, but can I see you on the 19th? I’ll bring dinner over to your place after the bakery closes, if that’s okay. I know you’re super busy this close to Christmas, and you might not want to go out. Just let me know. And mille grazie for everything you did for the fundraiser. Best cake ever.

  How cute was it that he’d written his thanks in Italian? Ya gotta love Google translate.

  I sent a quick reply text telling him it sounded great.

  With the rest of the afternoon stretching before me now since I wasn’t spending it at my parents’ house like I usually did on a Sunday, I went down into the bakery and worked on a few of the special orders for the week. Exhaustion pushed me back to my apartment long after darkness fell.

  A glance at my phone and no new family missives had come through. Good. They’d gotten the hint to leave me alone.

  When I crawled into bed an hour later after heating up a quick bowl of Ma’s minestrone, a pair of eyes the color of clouds over the ocean followed me into dreamland.

  ****

  “Shit really hit the fan after you left yesterday, Zia Reggie,” Pesce informed me the next morning when he found me in my office. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Nonno go after my dad like that before.”

  “Nonno was mad at ’Carlo?”

  “Pissed beyond words. The minute you left, he started in on him how he shoulda kept his mouth shut about you and let him handle the Irish situation.”

  “That’s what he called it? The Irish situation?”

  Pesce tossed me one of his rare smiles. “Yeah. Nonna sat there, saying the rosary the whole time they went back and forth. And when the uncles got involved, well, shit got super loud.”

  I could only imagine. “Was Nonna okay?”

  He shrugged. “A little weepy. Ma and Aunt Penny took her to her bedroom and helped her lie down, all the while she was talking in Italian. Ma said she was saying the Hail Mary over and over.”

  No surprise there. She’d probably said two decades of the rosary while she’d been sitting at the table. I’d been prepared for a tongue-lashing this morning, or worse—the feared silent malocchio—when she arrived at work, but for the first time in the three years since the bakery had been open for business, she hadn’t come in. My night crew manager, Terese, told me Ma had called early in the morning and said she was taking a sick day. I saw this for the ruse it was. My mother never went against anything my father told her to do. He’d probably insisted she stay home until I came around and capitulated with a personal apology for my behavior.

  Not gonna happen. Not now, at least. I was still pissed, ultra busy with baking, and I had quarterly taxes due at the end of the month and needed to finish up with them. My mother, in my mind, deserved a day or two off, so I hoped she was sitting in her big recliner in the living room and watching soaps and talk shows all day long on the sixty-inch flat screen Pop got her. And by got, you know I mean it fell off a truck somewhere in Bayonne.

  The rest of my family was on radio silence during the morning, something I was thrilled about. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I’d said my piece and meant every word of it.

  When I ran up to my apartment to fix myself a quick lunch at noon, I found Penny and Trixie waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

  They were dressed as if they were going out bar hopping. Skintight jeans ending in four inch stilettos, the absolute wrong footwear for the weather outside, and short little jackets that did nothing to protect them from the cold and wind, and everything to show off their narrow waists and ample breasts. Their hair was teased and sprayed with so much product, even a category-five tornado wouldn’t move a hair of it from place. Both of them were in their mid to late forties and trying valiantly to look like they hadn’t seen the front end of thirty yet.

  Trixie appeared to have been voted the spokesperson.

  “We brought lunch,” she said, holding up a brown paper shopping bag. “And leftovers from yesterday.”

  “Do my parents know you’re here? Or you husbands?” I asked.

  They flicked a glance at one another and shook their heads.

  “So this isn’t some kind of food intervention to get me to apologize?”

  Trixie smiled and reached into one of the shopping bags. She pulled out a bottle of Moet champagne. “More like a celebration.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “You.”

  “And your independence,” Penny added.

  I shook my head but couldn’t stop the smile that tugged at the corners of my mouth.

  “Carlotta and Ella wanted to come too, but Lottie had a dentist appointment and El needed to help her ma make the mozzarella for Christmas Eve dinner,” Trixie told me, indicating the wives of my two other brothers.

  “Come on in, then,” I said. “I could use something to eat.”

  “And drink,” Trixie said, swaying the bottle back and forth in her hands.

  A few minutes later, we sat at my table.

  “You never got a chance to have any of Ma’s pork roast yesterday,” Penny said, forking over two thick slices onto a dish. She handed it to me and passed a plastic container filled with asparagus spears. Penny handed me the heated gravy—the real kind of gravy, brown and full of mushrooms, not the red sauce. “She outdid herself, as usual. It’s to die.” She pressed all five fingertips to her lips and then blew them in a loud kiss.

  She wasn’t kidding. Ma’s roasts were a family favorite and one of my five all-time most-requested of her dishes.

  When we were all set to eat, Trixie glanced at Penny and then cleared her throat.

  “I’ve been waiting for that,” I said.

  “Wha’?” Trixie’s northern Italian heritage gifted her large, pale blue eyes in a perfect oval of a face. She widened them, and it wasn’t an affectation. Trixie isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  “That little throat thing you do that signals when you want to say something that makes you nervous.”

  “Get out. I don’t do that?” She looked over at Penny. “Do I?”

  “Yeah, ya do,” Petey’s wife said.

  “Hmm. I never noticed.”

  “We have,” Penny and I said in unison.

  Trixie looked from me to Penny, then back to me. With a shrug and a slight tilt of her head, she cleared her throat again, stopped, then laughed. “Okay. I guess I do. Anyway.” She turned her full attention to me. “We was talking after you left last night, and we wanted you to know how proud we are you finally stood up to Ma and Pop and your annoying, overbearing brothers.”

  “Those annoying, overbearing brothers are also your husbands and the fathers of your children.”

  Penny flapped her hand in a careless wave. “Yeah, but they’re still idioti, and they were acting like morons.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing new. They all have trouble believing I have a brain and can take care of myself.”

  “Like Penny said.” Trixie shoved a huge mushroom in her mouth and talked around it. “Morons.”

  “Pesce told me after I left it got kinda loud and heated.”

  Both of them rolled their eyes.

  “It’s always loud when Pop and ’Carlo start in. Both of them are such stubborn bulls,” Trixie said.

  “Pesce also said Ma was a little…” I waved my hand.

  “Yeah.” Penny nodded. “She was a little raw around the edges when we put her to bed. First time I can ever remember she didn’t bellyache about having to do the dishes and put the kitchen to rights.”

  “The four of us did that,” Trixie said.

  I didn’t say wow, but it rambled around in my head. Ma had left her daughters-in-law to clean up the kitchen, and they’d done it without being cajoled or bribed to.

  It was an almost-Christmas miracle on the Upper West Side.

  “Anyway,” Trixie said, after taking a substantial sip of her champagne, “we figured you needed to kno
w how proud the four of us are of you. Standing up to your family is scary.”

  “Terrifying,” Penny said.

  “But you did it, and we’re thrilled for you. It’s been a long time coming.”

  I’d grown up immersed in a cloud of sweaty testosterone, the single female child at the end of long line of hot-headed boys who all thought they were the alpha in the pack. I’d always yearned for sisters, which was why I’d sought the company of my older female cousins so much when I was a kid. Girls, I’d discovered, didn’t leave the toilet seat up after being in the bathroom, didn’t leave their gross gym socks and shorts on the floor in the bathroom or their bedroom waiting for them to be laundered, and didn’t leave the bathroom sink gunked-up with the remnants of shaved thick black beard stubble that started sprouting at the age of eleven.

  My sisters-in-law were older than I was, but they treated me like I was their flesh and blood sister-from-another-mister and I loved them for it. With Chloe and Gia busy with their own husbands and kids, I hadn’t had any females to chat up in a while, and I wanted and needed that connection.

  “Thanks,” I said as I willed my tears back.

  Penny reached across the table and grabbed my hand, squeezed it.

  “So,” she said after darting a look at Trixie. “Who’s this Irish guy Pop was talkin’ about? Did you really sleep with him the other night? Tell us everything. Where’d you meet?”

  “Yeah, tell us all about him,” ’Carlo’s bride commanded.

  So I did.

  ****

  The next two days were so busy at the bakery with the need to get all the Christmas orders ready to go, I never left the workroom at all once I arrived in the morning. Both nights, I fell into bed close to eleven after being up and working nonstop since three a.m. Eighteen-hour days take a toll on you when you’re past the age of twenty. The last time I remembered feeling this exhausted was when Angelina had been a newborn and needed to be fed every two hours.

  My mother was still on her self-imposed sick leave, so that left me a man—or woman—short at the register. None of my cashiers had complained, though, probably because the fight I’d had with my parents had already been broadcast all over the bakery courtesy of Pesce.

  And they say old women are miserable gossips. Nothing compared to loud, spoiled, and foul-mouthed teenage boys, that’s for sure.

  Wednesday flew by, and before I knew it, it was after seven o’clock. Connor had texted he’d arrive by seven thirty, so that gave me less than a half hour to make myself look somewhat respectable and presentable. Although I knew he loved the taste of my cakes, I didn’t think he’d want to be kissing my hairline and inhaling confectioner’s sugar or almond paste.

  Connor was bringing takeout—yay!—so I didn’t have to cook. I set the table with my nonna’s china and got down the good crystal glasses Aunt Frankie had brought back from Florence and which she’d given me for a wedding present.

  Since we were staying in and I didn’t have to worry about dressing for warmth, I opted for a midcalf black skirt topped with a long-sleeved red silk blouse my baking crew had given me for Christmas last year. It was as soft as a baby’s bottom and fit my curves without being tight.

  I glanced at myself in my bedroom mirror and twirled right and left a few times.

  Festive, flirty, and comfortable. Perfect.

  When was the last time I’d been this excited about seeing a guy?

  Truth? Never. Married at barely eighteen, divorced at twenty-six. I was thirty-two and acting like this was my first date. But it kind of was. My first real date with a man and not a boy, anyway. My father periodically hinted that he knew a few guys who were looking to get married and wanted to meet a nice Italian girl. He’d even asked me outright if I wanted to get married again. I’d told him no, the pain of my first marriage was still too deep, but I’d really put him off because the guys he knew weren’t the type of man I would look for if I was looking. Which I wasn’t. Most of the men Pop associated with were nice guys, even if their professions were shady and not exactly nine to five jobs, but I wasn’t in the mood to be set up by parents like this was Bologna circa 1910.

  I never believed in that expression butterflies in your stomach until my downstairs bell rang at exactly seven thirty. If these tremors quaking around my insides were butterflies, then they numbered in the millions.

  I sprinted down the staircase and let Connor in. His hands were each filled with the same kind of shopping bags Trixie and Penny had delivered their lunch with. This time the bags didn’t contain my mother’s leftovers, though.

  He leaned in and kissed me on the lips, just a quick buss. Those butterflies were giving their wings a real workout.

  “Hey, you,” he said, smiling down at me.

  I could have feasted off that grin for days and never known hunger.

  “I hope you’re hungry because I just about bought out Mangianno’s.”

  “I knew I recognized that aroma.” And I did. Mangianno’s was a neighborhood favorite and where Pop and I had last had our pizza lunch together. “Penne alla vodka,” I added, sniffing the air around him. “Meatballs with onions. Chicken parm. And garlic bread.”

  Connor’s laugh had those butterflies flapping out of control now. “You know your food aromas.” We started up the stairs.

  “Since I order from them at least once a week, I should.”

  Inside my apartment, he put the bags down on the table and shrugged out of his coat. When I held out my hands, he handed it to me with his scarf and slipped out of his suit jacket. His tie was undone. The second I turned back to him after hanging everything up on the peg by my door, I was in his arms.

  He didn’t kiss me, just held me against him, his hands gliding up and down my back. He smelled of crisp air, a little garlic—no doubt from Mangianno’s—and sandalwood soap. I melted into him. His heart beat strong and steady against my ear, and the sigh that broke through his lips was filled with contentment.

  “You feel…good,” he said after a few moments.

  I pulled back to find his eyes closed, a ghost of a smile crossing his lips.

  He looked tired. Wonderful, but those little lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes were etched deeper than the last time I’d seen him.

  “Is everything okay?”

  He opened his eyes, and his smile grew when he looked down at me. “It is now.”

  He covered my mouth with his own, and I sensed all the fatigue I’d seen on his face ooze away.

  How was it possible to understand this man’s emotions so well when I barely knew him? It was weird, I’ll admit, but it was as if I’d been expecting him to show up in my life, had always been waiting for him to. As if I knew in the deep recesses of my heart and mind he would come to me one day.

  Like I said, weird.

  Connor deepened the kiss, and I forgot about everything weird or otherwise.

  After a few moments, the sound of his stomach rumbling filled my kitchen.

  I pulled back, laughing. “Someone’s hungry, and it isn’t only me.”

  He cupped my face in his warm hands and kissed the tip of my nose.

  “I was in meetings all day with clients and never had a chance to stop for lunch.”

  I slid out of his arms. “I’ve been working since three this morning and only took about five minutes at lunch to wolf down a scone. I’m hungry, too.”

  “Well, then, let’s eat.”

  I unpacked the shopping bags while he opened the wine he’d brought.

  “I figured you liked red,” he said, showing me the bottle.

  “I’m Italian.” I lifted my shoulders and hands. “I like all wine as long as it’s good.”

  “A girl after my own heart.”

  Now, didn’t that sound wonderful?

  I divided the dishes he’d brought so we could share everything.

  “You seem tired,” I said as we started eating.

  “It’s been busy at work. My assistant is still out on mat
ernity leave and before she left, she’d booked a bunch of new client meets. Taking on new work right before the holidays is tough, especially when some of those clients want to get their software up and running before December 31.”

  “What happens on that date? I mean, other than it’s New Year’s Eve?”

  “New corporate tax laws take effect on January 1, so some companies need to change or update their sites in order to take advantage of this year’s tax breaks.”

  “Sounds complicated. And busy.”

  “It is. And both clients today wanted to get everything done in the next ten days, which is ridiculous.”

  “Can your company do it?”

  He nodded as he swallowed some penne. “Yeah, but it means some of my guys will be working right up until midnight Christmas Eve and then starting right back again on the twenty-sixth. Me included.”

  “Technology waits for no man. Or holiday,” I said.

  “Truth.”

  I bit into a gigantic meatball, closed my eyes, and let the melded flavors of ripe, juicy tomatoes, pungent onions, garlic, and fresh oregano infused into the meat dance on my tongue. Mangianno’s was the only Italian-style restaurant where the food tasted almost as good as Ma’s home cooking.

  “Gesu. This is so good.”

  I swiped at a glob of sauce from the corner of my mouth with my finger, and when I opened my eyes, I found Connor’s gaze lasered on me. His fork was suspended in the air from his hand, and his eyes had gone to half mast. If the heat that swirled around in them wasn’t enough to get those butterflies migrating again, then the heightened color in his cheeks and the way he dragged his tongue across his bottom lip as he regarded me did the trick.

  For a moment I sat, hypnotized. My mouth went as dry as over-floured biscuits, and I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my temples. A tiny gasp broke through my lips when he reached across the table, pulled my free hand to his mouth, and then licked the sauce from my finger.

  Mamma mia!

  Connor’s tongue sliding along my finger was the most delicious, erotic sensation I ever remembered experiencing. My thighs pressed together, little flares of heat shooting flames low in my belly. Suddenly, like my brothers when they were kids, I couldn’t sit still. I started squirming in my chair, my bottom shifting across the cushioned seat.