Dolci di Love (16 page)

T
hankfully there was no one in Montevedova's only phone booth, because Lily needed just the slightest excuse for her courage to abandon her, but once inside the dusty little box she quickly dialled Rose's phone number and held her breath as it rang.

‘Hello, Harry speaking,' a youthful voice tinkled down the line from across the ocean.

‘Hello, sweetie, it's your aunt Lily here,' she said, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. ‘How are you doing?'

‘Good,' he said. ‘I can read almost as fast as Jack now, but he's much better at soccer.'

‘I'm so happy for you, honey. That is such great news. You're such a big boy now! Hey, is your mom there?'

She heard the phone drop to the floor and Harry roar into the background that Lily was on the phone, that he'd told her about the reading and the soccer.

Rose was there in a moment.

‘Lily? Is that really you?'

‘It is, yes, I'm in Tuscany.'

‘Oh my God, I can't believe it! You sound like you're just around the corner. AL! TAKE THE KIDS OUTSIDE AND DON'T COME BACK UNTIL I TELL YOU TO, I'M ON THE
PHONE TO LILY IN ITALY. YES, ITALY! So what happened? Did you find Daniel? What's it like? How are you?'

‘I'm fine but I didn't find Daniel. He's not here.'

‘Not in Italy?'

‘I'm not sure, but he's not in the place where I thought he would be, where he usually is, where I am now.'

‘And what about the floozy?'

‘Well, she's here, but to be honest, she hardly fits the floozy bill. It's a long story but I think Daniel has run out on her as well.'

‘You're kidding me,' breathed Rose. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. No! Actually, I don't know. I have absolutely no idea. I'm just not—God, Rose, I just can't believe this is Daniel we're talking about. My Daniel. What happened? One minute we're just us, an ordinary happily married couple, and the next it's like being in one of those awful dreams where everything just keeps getting worse and worse but I can't even wake up. I'm stuck in this. I'm completely stuck.'

‘Oh, honey, I can't imagine what you're going through,' her sister said, and the truth of that burrowed into Lily's untapped loneliness so swiftly it floored her.

No one knew what she was going through. No one ever had. Other people might have suffered the same sorts of losses as she had, but other people weren't her. They did not know what it had done to her. They did not know how hard it was, how hard it always had been, to manage her survival. She was so tired of it.

‘Those babies, Rose,' she whispered. Those beautiful lost babies. Little slips of hope and prayer that had almost delivered her everything she dreamed of.

Survival? The world she'd built to keep from pining for those lost babies crumbled inside that phone booth right then and there—and Lily with it. She slid down the wall, collapsing on the dirty floor.

‘I'm so sorry, Rose,' she sobbed. ‘It's all my fault. Everything is my fault. I just couldn't bear to see you being so happy with your children when I couldn't even have one of my own. I'm so sorry, I really am, and if I could turn back the clock I would, but I've missed you so much. I really have and I'm so sorry.'

Her head in her hands, she pushed the phone to her ear as though it were Rose herself.

‘Oh, Lily,' her sister said. ‘Please, I'm sorry too. I could have fixed it myself, you know, but I didn't. You're the one who fixes things and so I left it to you, but I shouldn't have, so we are both at fault. And I might have all these kids, but the truth is I've envied your life too. I SAID OUTSIDE, AL, ALL OF YOU! I've envied your beautiful clothes not covered in spit, your varicose vein–free legs, your tiny little figure, all your sleep, the quiet. Seems you never want exactly what you have, no matter what that is. And the way I feel about Al right now I'd give anything for him to run away with someone else, only I wouldn't even go looking. I'd move houses so if he ever brought his sorry ass back home again, he wouldn't find me.'

Lily sniffed. ‘You are joking, I hope.'

‘Honey, sometimes all you can do is joke. Don't worry about us, we'll be fine as soon as these kids grow up and get scholarships to good universities and leave and never come back. It's you we need to worry about.'

‘I need you, Rose,' Lily said. ‘I really need you. Without Daniel there isn't a single soul who gives a damn about me.'

‘I give a damn, Lily, and you only need one single soul that does. That's all any of us needs—just one person who'll walk on hot coals for them.'

‘I thought it was him!'

‘I know you did, sweetie. I know you did. And it was, too, but right now it's not. It's me.'

‘But you're there and I'm here!'

‘That doesn't matter. It's not like I have to tie your shoelaces. I just need to be rooting for you wherever you are; that's what you told me when we were kids and you were going off to middle school. Remember? I can help you from here, Lily. I can help you from anywhere. Just tell me what's your plan?'

‘I don't have one,' Lily cried. ‘At first I thought maybe I'd find him and make him come home, then I thought I'd just come home without him and either file for divorce or pretend nothing had ever happened. But then I met his daughter, and now I don't know what to do. Her name's Francesca, she's nearly seven and she looks so much like him, you wouldn't believe it. And she's great, she's really great, but the mother—the floozy who isn't really a floozy—is a total mess and Daniel's missing in action so…oh, it's all screwed up.'

‘Oh, brother,' Rose breathed. ‘I could kick his polo-shirt-wearing ass!'

‘You don't like the polo shirts?'

‘I don't like them now!' Rose exclaimed. ‘I don't like anything about him now. You must hate him. You must want to snap his neck in half or take to him with a pick axe.'

‘I can't even find him,' Lily protested. ‘I'm not even sure I'm looking for him. And I know about the pick axe and maybe I will feel like using one when I see him, but before I can hate him I just need to know why he would do this to me, why he ruined everything and why he's still ruining it. If that seems weird and not angry enough or whatever—it's just that if you could see Francesca, you wouldn't want to kill her father either. She's so young and, I don't know. This could really mess with her. Look how having our so-called father hardly ever there messed with us.'

‘Lily, it wasn't not having a father that messed with us. It was having our mother.'

‘But Francesca's mother is a wreck too! And if Daniel abandons those kids…'

‘Listen, Lily, don't jump the gun too much. We might not have led the life of fairy-tale princesses, but we actually turned out OK.'

‘Well, you can say that now, but you know how horrible it was back then and it's just that Francesca is so—I can't explain it, Rose. She's just at that age where she could be anything she wanted but she could also just as easily be crushed.'

‘That's every kid in the world, Lily. They're all fragile little eggs whose shells can be broken.'

‘Or not, Rose. Or not. I guess she reminds me of me, of you and me. Actually, she's sort of why I'm calling. She wants me to teach her how to make oatmeal cookies.' A hard ball of something indescribable rose up from somewhere below Lily's heart, squeezing it as small as it could, then pushing its way past to her throat. ‘We used to make them with Mom, right?'

‘Oatmeal cookies? With Mom? Yeah, right!'

‘The thing is, Rose, I keep having the strangest feeling, this weird sort of half a memory.'

‘Half a memory is generally enough in our case, Lily. The woman was a monster. Especially to you. A monster. Don't go there.'

‘Rose, she had an apron. It was pale blue and it had little yellow and mauve flowers on it with greeny sort of ivy winding around them. Do you remember?'

There was a long silence. ‘No, I don't.'

‘Before he left for good, Rose, before the drinking and the hitting and—'

‘And the kicking,' Rose butted in. ‘Don't forget the kicking.'

Lily blinked as a tiny torn piece of memory fluttered into a corner of her mind. It wafted from side to side before settling long enough for her to grab hold of it. She saw Rose's chubby legs in
Mary Janes standing on the kitchen chair. She saw the footstool next to it.

‘Before all of that, Rose, she had this pale blue apron with little yellow and mauve flowers and she bought us our own special spoons and you stood on a chair and I was on a foot stool and we made cookies with her.'

‘I don't remember,' Rose whispered.

Lily pushed away the memory of ice clattering into a glass, the crackle as warm gin hit the frozen cubes, the jangle of her mother's bracelets as she lifted the glass to her bright red lips again and again and again.

‘Before all that, Rose,' she said, shutting her eyes against the pain of the hair being pulled from her head, the welts on her legs, the bruises on her arms.

‘Before all that, we made cookies with her, I remember, and she was laughing and dancing around the kitchen and she kept kissing us, Rose, and telling us how pretty we were, and she was beautiful. And happy. She made frosting and we were allowed to eat it in spoonfuls out of the bowl. And I think she loved us then, Rose. I think then she really loved us.'

‘I'm crazy about frosting,' Rose said, crying softly. ‘I've always been crazy about frosting. And she must have at least really liked us. You don't bake cookies with kids unless you really like them. I know this. They make such an unholy mess of the kitchen.'

Lily laughed—an impossibly light, unfettered sound that seemed totally unfamiliar to her. ‘We did turn out OK, didn't we?'

‘It's going to be all right, Lily,' Rose sniffed from across the world. ‘Everything is going to be all right.'

I
t was a small subdued collection of widows waiting in the church basement when Fiorella made it there at the end of the day.

‘I just passed Lily in the phone booth by the piazza,' she said. ‘Should someone have been snooping?'

‘Luciana's had a fall,' a white-faced widow Pacini reported. ‘She's in the microwave and Violetta's in there with her.'

‘That will be the end of her,' the widow Ercolani added. ‘That will be the end of both of them.'

‘What was Lily doing in the phone booth?' the widow Benedicti asked. ‘Was she talking to Alessandro?'

‘Never mind that,' said the widow Pacini, ‘it's the Ferrettis we need to think about now. If they don't make it out of the microwave, what will happen to the League? Violetta has always made the big decisions and without her…well, it hardly bears thinking about.'

‘At least no one will have to eat their
cantucci
anymore,' Fiorella said. ‘That stuff is the pits.'

‘How dare you!' The widow Ciacci rose to her full height of just about five feet tall and pointed a shaky finger at Fiorella. ‘How dare you waltz in here and start criticising the Ferretti
cantucci
. It has been eaten by popes, I'll have you know. By popes! It is the best in Tuscany and it always will be and for you to suggest otherwise
when poor Luciana is in that place and may never come out again, well, it's disgusting. You should be ashamed. Poor Violetta, if Luciana goes, she is sure to follow. And then where will we be? Where will any of us be!' She collapsed on a chair, her face in her hands, and the widow Mazzetti shuffled over to put an arm around her shoulders, glaring at Fiorella.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, didn't mean to offend,' Fiorella said, pushing her glasses up on her nose and sniffing. ‘Boy, sure smells musty down here,' she added, by way of a diversion.

‘She can still smell?' whispered one widow to another.

‘Yes, you're right, it is musty,' agreed a third.

‘We should buy some of those air fresheners that girl with the thick legs and the moustache sells,' the widow Ciacci said. ‘You know the one. She and her mother and grandmother still have all their husbands and that tiny little boutique the English people go crazy for just behind here. Make everything themselves.'

‘Please, ladies!' cried the widow Benedicti. ‘Enough! What of Alessandro?'

‘Yes, quite,' agreed Fiorella. ‘Lily wasn't talking to him on the phone.'

‘How do you know?' asked the widow Del Grasso.

‘I speak English,' answered Fiorella. ‘I learned it on the Internet. German too.'

‘So who was she talking to?' asked the widow Benedicti.

‘Her sister in America,' Fiorella reported. ‘I think they have had some sort of a bust-up, although it's not like the sister ran away to Naples with her husband or anything, but there seems to have been a
rapprochement
. That's French, by the way. I speak
un peu
of that too.'

‘She is a pain,' the widow Ercolani mouthed to the widow Pacini, pointing at Fiorella.

‘I heard that,' said Fiorella, although in fact she had seen it reflected in the screen on the League's long-defunct TV screen.

The widow Ercolani buttoned her lips.

‘So, she was talking to her sister in America,' the widow Benedicti interceded. ‘What does that have to do with Alessandro?'

Having clearly heard Lily speak of a cheating husband and his Italian daughter, Fiorella was putting two and two together regarding Lily and Alessandro, but she knew enough to know that now was not the time to elaborate.

‘She was talking about baking cookies,' she said. ‘That's what Americans call biscotti. It's English. Maybe she's going to help out the Ferrettis while they're indisposed.'

‘Indisposed?' scoffed the widow Ercolani. ‘Being disposed of, more likely.'

One lot of tongue-holding was enough for Fiorella. ‘You know, you've got it all wrong about that hospital,' she said. ‘I had my hip done last year and look at me.'

She did a little waltz around the room, ending with a jaunty kick ball change. ‘And you know something else? The food in there was delicious. Three meals a day brought to you in your bed and every single one
squisito
.'

‘You were in the hospital?' the widow Ciacci asked. ‘And you came out again?'

‘It's like a four-star hotel,' insisted Fiorella. ‘I wanted to stay longer but they made me go home.'

‘Don't listen to her,' the widow Ercolani said. ‘She's trying to get rid of us all.'

‘Well, I can imagine wanting to get rid of you,' said Fiorella, ‘but I kinda like the rest of them.'

Before this could develop into anything more vocal, the widow Benedicti stepped into the middle of the group and held up her hands. ‘Never mind all that,' she said. ‘Our thoughts and prayers—take pity on us Santa Ana di Chisa—are obviously with the Ferrettis right now, but we must not forget Alessandro. We need to
get him and Lily together again as soon as possible. It's what we are here for. It's what Violetta would want.'

‘I'm not so sure about that,' Fiorella said, but the widow Mazzetti made her ‘zip it' gesture, the widow Ercolani balled her sizable hands into fists at her side, and the widow Ciacci made the sign of the cross and put her face back in her hands.

‘I can get Alessandro into the village for a couple of hours tomorrow around, say, midday,' the widow Benedicti said. ‘All I need to do is send him to Alberto's to get some nonexistent liqueur for my
crostata
. So if a couple of you tail him, and a couple more tail Lily, we should be able to herd them together and let nature—and true love—take its course.'

Benedicti looked pleased with herself. It wasn't so hard what Violetta did after all. But the other widows looked doubtfully at each other.

Who among them could last long tailing anyone these days?