Apricot Kisses (26 page)

“Look at me, Hanna.”

I blink. Don’t cry now. Then again, why not? I’ve wept so much these past few days that one more tear won’t make a difference.

“He was beside himself—with enthusiasm! As we all were. Your article is
formidable
, absolutely brilliant. It’s the title story.”

My thoughts tumble like dice, and I have no idea what number comes up. Claire picks up the paper from my lap and holds it in front of my nose. When I recognize the picture on the cover—a winding, cypress-lined road leading up to a yellow-stone house—I almost start to bawl. I’m relieved, but my broken heart is acting up again, too.

“But just between the two of us, Hanna, what made you write such a damn sentimental declaration of love?”

And finally tears flood my eyes.

Fabrizio

It’s a hot midday under a perfect summer sky, and the burning disk of the sun chases everyone into the shade. Vittoria is the only exception. Completely unruffled by humans, she scratches doggedly for worms among the fruit trees. She probably senses that nobody will do her any harm, as the throat of every animal at Tre Camini, including the rabbits, is safe.

I puff on the cigarette I’m smoking instead of eating dessert and grin. Everyone knows that Paolo buys all chickens and rabbits needed in the kitchen in the neighboring village because it would break Alberto’s heart if one of his beasts were killed. If the two of them continue with this practice, we’ll have to enlarge the stables and run a chicken farm. Maybe that’s not a bad idea, since I’ll have to find another job for our loyal Paolo when our orchards are bulldozed.

I wait for this thought to cause pain in my chest, but I feel only emptiness. I look toward the house and Hanna’s window—no different from the other windows now. After stomping out the stub, I light another cigarette. When I inhale, I welcome the pain in my lungs. It’s the only pain I feel right now.

Alberto settles himself heavily next to me on the bench and lifts his cup. “You have no idea how awful espresso tastes with artificial sweetener.” He spits out a mouthful after swirling it around. I force myself to stop staring at Hanna’s window. “You made a wise decision, son,” Alberto mutters and awkwardly pats my arm.

“I made a logical decision.”

“Not everyone can do that.”

“Maybe.” I shrug. “It wasn’t something I wanted. If I had my choice, I’d keep the fields.”

Alberto laughs hoarsely. “Does that go for the pretty German signora, too?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. Yes, you do, son.”

“She left. That’s all I have to say about her,” I snap—gruffly enough, I hope, to make the old guy shut up. But Alberto is a stubborn old devil who will have his say, no matter what.

“And you did nothing about it.”

“Why should I have?”

“Do I really have to answer that, you dumbbell?” Alberto gets up and shuffles toward the house. At the door, he turns around. “Your grandmother made a wrong decision with the girl’s mother—and didn’t forgive herself to her dying day. Don’t make the same mistake.”

“What are you talking about, old man?” I stare at him. He waves away my question with an indignant gesture.

“Your little signora was part of this place before you ever lost your simple heart to her. So you better go and get her back!”

Hanna

“Then I unpacked all the boxes, even the ones full of stuff I was going to donate. Now it actually looks like someone lives here. Well, there are no plants, and maybe the balcony could use some furniture . . . and some more things inside, maybe a few decorative items. Maybe you should come shopping with me one of these days. Where did you buy your colorful pillows? Wasn’t it that store in Steglitz, the one you always talk about?”

I lean forward. Claire laughs, shakes her head, and raises her hands.

“Hanna, you’ve really changed.”

“Have I?” I say slowly.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it yourself.”

I shrug. Claire lifts her hand and counts on her fingers. “First of all, you’re in jeans and ballerina flats. I didn’t even know until now that you owned any flats. Second, you’ve furnished your apartment and bought flowers. You hate flowers.”

“That’s not true at all.”

“Don’t interrupt me.” She frowns and lifts a third finger—the middle one, ironically. “You’ve struck up a friendship with a complete stranger, and the eeriest thing of all—”

“Now I’m really curious.”

Claire looks at me expectantly. “Where are your souvenirs?”

I feel myself blush. “I don’t have any.”

“Are you sure?”

I roll my eyes.

A tiny smile appears on her red mouth. “There you go. No mementoes!” Claire jumps off the desk and does a silly dance around it. It slowly dawns on me what my words mean. After telling Fabrizio about it in the Osteria Maria, I didn’t steal anything, didn’t feel the tingling in my fingertips, no panic that I would die unless . . . I beam. I didn’t bring home anything.

We hear a mocking voice from the kitchen—“Good god, she’s cured!”—and, a few moments later, a desperate one—“What in the world am I going to do with all the shoe boxes I collected for returning Hanna’s stuff?”

“Shut up, Sasha,” we shout at the same time, and start to laugh. But Claire turns serious again fast.

“Are you sure you did the right thing?” she asks in a low voice, pointing to the yellow house on the magazine cover. A lump fills my throat, but I nod. “And what are you going to do with the grandmother? You know you have to return her.”

“Could I think about it later?” I whisper. This constant pain of lovesickness in my chest is really wearing me out.

Claire sighs. “Let me tell you, Hanna, there’s only one medicine for lovesickness. It’s sweet and chocolaty, and you’ll find it in a large screw-top jar.

Fabrizio

It takes my brother the whole afternoon to finally talk to me. He’s always found it difficult to admit that he did something wrong. And that he’s done something wrong is as clear as Rosa-Maria’s chicken broth after she’s strained it twice through cheesecloth. Lucia must have wrung the truth out of him by whatever means she has at her disposal—in other words, many. Honestly, I don’t even want to hear the truth, and so I escaped to the outer apricot field to help Paolo and his men. But at last Marco catches up with me.

I hit the brake when Marco appears out of nowhere in front of the tractor. He’s wearing work pants, to my surprise.

“Is there a hole in your running tights?” I shout. But Marco ignores me and looks to Paolo, who has put down his basket to listen to our conversation.

“Could I talk to you for a minute, Fabrizio? Alone?”

I exchange a glance with Paolo and climb down from the tractor. Paolo heaves his basket onto the trailer and takes my seat. Tapping the brim of his hat, he slowly putters away.

“Let’s walk,” I say curtly, indulging in the spontaneous hostility of turning off the main path.

As I anticipated, Marco soon falls behind on the donkey path. It’s muddy, despite the heat. The memory of Hanna striding ahead of me with dirty legs and just one slipper, but her head raised high, weighs heavily on me. Huffing and puffing, I walk even faster to chase away the vision. But my brother’s sneakered feet can’t keep up with me.

“Man, Fabrizio, don’t run like that!” he shouts, and he mumbles to himself. I don’t even turn around.

“Don’t tell me you’re already out of steam, superstar.” I hear swearing, cracking sounds, and more swearing. “Step on the roots. That makes it easier.” I shake my head and wait with arms crossed until Marco catches up.

“Why do you always do that?” His fists are so tight that his knuckles are white. His eyes glitter with anger.

“What am I doing?”

“You . . . You . . .”

Marco’s stutter and the expression that accompanies it have changed little since he was four. His lower lip trembles, and an A-shaped wrinkle appears on his forehead. Nonna called it “the anger barometer” and assigned levels to Marco’s temper tantrums—from one to ten. Today it’s definitely a nine, even though I’m the one who should be furious.

“You always make me feel like I’m the loser,” he gasps.

“Is that why you want to talk with me?”

“No . . . Yes! I—Lucia told me to start at the beginning.”

“She did?” I roll my eyes. Women.

“She also told me not to make myself small in front of you.”

“But you are smaller than I am.”

“She wasn’t talking about our heights,” Marco says stiffly. He still can’t tell when I’m joking, and suddenly I feel sorry for him—and guilty, because once again it’s my fault that he’s feeling bad. The only difference is that now he’s not sobbing in Nonna’s armoire. I pat his shoulder and turn right.

“Let’s go back to the main path. And then, with all due respect to Lucia, forget her brainwashing, and let’s talk like men.”

Fifteen minutes later, Marco is still searching for words while we walk the main path toward the manor house.

Finally I lie to get him to spit it out. “Whatever it is, Marco, just assume that I already know it.” He hesitates but then looks straight at me for the first time in months.

“I put Nonna’s recipe book through the shredder.”

I look at the house in silence for a while. I actually imagined it would be something like this, and I’ve even contemplated how I should react—unsuccessfully. I couldn’t decide whether I would beat the living daylights out of Marco or drown him in the well. But now that I know, I feel just as empty as before—and it’s because that damn woman stuffed my heart into her suitcase two days ago and took off with it. She also took my grandmother. That’s another problem I need to deal with.

“Why?” I ask, not because I’m interested, really, but because I don’t want to think about how to get Nonna back to Italy.

“Are you aware that it’s hell to be your brother?” Marco blurts out. He tries to clean his shoes in the grass on the shoulder of the road. I blink. I knew Marco had a problem, but I thought it had more to do with him.

“That comes as a surprise to you, doesn’t it? I understand. If you get a halo as a child, it’s not likely you’ll take it off. Why should you? I can still hear her today”—he taps his forehead and rolls his eyes—“‘No, not like that, Marco. Look how Fabrizio does it.’ ‘Marco, leave that to your older brother.’ ‘Why can’t you be just a little like Fabrizio?’ ‘We’ll only let you play with us because Fabrizio is the leader of the gang.’ ‘Stop bothering me, Marco.’ ‘Watch your brother—he can drive a tractor already.’ ‘Fabrizio is stronger, funnier, faster, bolder.’ What good are good grades against such competition? I was just the Camini who’d rather sit in the library than help in the fields—a deal breaker for our father. And Nonna, she beamed whenever your name was mentioned.” He kicks a stone. “Whatever I did, it was never as cool as what you came up with. I was never good enough.”

“Marco, you’re four years younger. Obviously there were things you weren’t allowed to do, but not because people thought you couldn’t do them. Everybody was protecting you. I was, too.”

“But I didn’t want to be protected. I wanted to . . .” He gasps in a breath and then looks at me defiantly. “I wanted to be like you. There, I said it.”

“Believe me, you shouldn’t have wished for that,” I say, thinking of Father’s motorcycle. I wish
I
hadn’t convinced myself Father would come back if I just kept slaving away in the fields. I might have read some books, too.

“I realized that eventually—fortunately,” Marco says. “I doubt Lucia would have fallen for me otherwise.”

“How witty. But I still don’t know what all this has to do with Nonna’s liqueur recipe.”

“It was wrong to destroy the notebook, but I thought I had no other choice,” Marco says. “When Nonna gave me the estate’s books to keep, I could finally prove that I was good at what I do. No bookkeeping in all of Italy is as clean as ours.”

“We all know that, Marco.”

“But not one of you ever said so. I could live with that—I can still live with it today. But that nobody listened to me—that was unbearable. Our business has gone downhill constantly these past few years, but nobody wanted to hear the truth, and I didn’t want to trouble Lucia with it. Instead, you and Nonna and Alberto became obsessed with this apricot pipe dream. And I was supposed to find the money to fund it, siphoning from the hotel and the restaurant. We haven’t been able to pay our suppliers for months. And when Nonna’s will was read . . . I just didn’t know what to do anymore.”

“And so you—”

“So I made sure that this apricot dream would come to an end, once and for all. I did it for the family—so Tre Camini will continue to exist, for my kids and yours. I realize now that I chose the wrong way to do it. Lucia came down hard on me today until I told her everything. Then she slapped my face, and she was right to do so. All I can do now is apologize to you.”

“No, I’m the one who should apologize. I was a selfish idiot.”

We look at each other. Marco scratches his head.

“We messed that up, didn’t we?” he says.

“We definitely did.”

“I’m afraid it’s also my fault that your little German ran away.”

“Her name is Hanna,” I say. “And that has nothing to do with you.”

“But I talked her into believing that she means nothing to you. I even tried to bribe her. And I sent Sofia to the osteria.”

I shake my head. “I meant nothing to Hanna from the start. That’s all that matters.”

“So your marriage was really only a business deal?”

“You were right as always, you old pessimist.”

“For some strange reason that gives me little satisfaction now,” Marco says. “She’s a tough cookie, but I sort of liked her. And I wouldn’t be so certain about her feelings for you, if I were you.”

“She’s gone, Marco. That’s proof enough for me. It’s all history now.”

“Meaning?”

“We look forward and do what your numbers tell us to do. Our apricot orchards go to your golfing friends, even though I might puke on the contract when I sign it. We pay our debts and work on the new plan—to make Tre Camini the most famous hotel and restaurant in the region. And since I’m definitely not getting married, everything will be in your able bookkeeping hands starting next year. You’ve earned it, even if you are a real son of a bitch sometimes. But maybe that’s the kind of boss we need here.”