Julie and Romeo (2 page)

“How’s Sandy?” he said.

“She’s good,” I said. He was a better person than I was. I wasn’t going to be asking about his Tony.

“Things turned out for her okay?”

I shrugged. “You have kids. You know how it is. Her marriage didn’t work out. She’s back home with me now. Two children.” I felt awkward. I wanted to say everything was fantastic for her, a
lifetime of happiness and she never looked back for a second. I wanted to say it not for myself but for Sandy, who, in her weaker moments, still felt the loss of Tony Cacciamani.

He scratched the top of his head, where all of his hair appeared to be intact. “That was a sad thing,” he said, as much to himself as to me. “A very sad thing. What my son was doing with a Roseman—”

“A Roth,” I corrected. “Sandy was a Roth.”

Romeo smiled. “You’re all Rosemans as far as I’m concerned. And your husband was the biggest Roseman of them all.”

So at least that answered that question. We were not fighting our battle alone. “My husband only looked like a Roseman. In the end he proved to be otherwise.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’m better off,” I said, though my very presence at this seminar of hopelessness proved otherwise, at least on the business front. “He met somebody else.” I don’t know what possessed me to include this last bit of information, but once it was said, there was no taking it back.

Romeo nodded sadly. Maybe he thought he’d known what kind of guy Mort was all along, or maybe he felt sorry for me, but either way I knew it was time for our reunion to come to an end. “I need to get going,” I said, struggling to get a look at my watch. “I want to get a seat for the advertising panel.”

He let me go graciously, said something about it being nice to see me again. Had he always had such a nice face?

“Romeo?” I said. I don’t think I had ever called him by his first name. It was always “Mr. Cacciamani” even though we were the same age. I had never wanted to appear familiar, and besides,
I thought Romeo was a ridiculous name for an adult. He stopped and turned back to me. “I read in the paper about your wife. I was sorry about that.” It was so long ago, three years, four? After Mort left, I know. I should have sent a card at least.

He nodded a little. “Thank you.”

“I didn’t know her. I mean, I think I only met her that one time, but I had a lot of respect for her. She seemed like a lovely woman.”

“Camille was a lovely woman,” he said sadly, and then he turned away.

After the panel moderator announced that it was essential for every small-business owner to set aside ten percent of his or her gross revenues for advertising, I stopped listening. A great idea, unless you plan to make payroll or have dinner every now and then. Instead my mind drifted back to something Romeo had said about Mort being the biggest Roseman of all. It hit the nail on the head, and I wondered how a Cacciamani could have so much insight into my life. The whole time I was growing up I worked in my parents’ shop. Even as a little girl I was sitting in the back room filling up the stik-piks or wrapping florist tape around the bottom of corsages. When I got older, my father moved me out front to work the cash register, and when I was in college, I came in early to do the arrangements for the day. I loved the shop when I was young, the cool, dark world of the walk-in on a hot summer day, the bright yellow light of an African daisy in February. I loved the lush piles of discarded leaves in the trash cans and the constant, dizzying perfume of the gardenias. But
then I met Mort and he started hanging around the store, so helpful, so polite. From our second date my mother was saying, When is he going to marry you? Like he’d been stringing me along for years and I was about to let my best chance get away. I was all of twenty-one, just minutes away from being yesterday’s fresh pick. Six months later Mort asked my father if he could marry me, which might have been construed as charming and old-fashioned, but nobody asked me anything. Me they told. “Julie, Julie!” my mother said when I walked in the store, and my father’s eyes were beaming from all the tears and Mort was just standing there, a grinning idiot, like I was going to be so proud of him. It was a good ten minutes before I could figure out what in the hell was going on. They’d sold me off, or at least that’s what it felt like. My brother, Jake, had bailed out on the business and in Mort they had found a responsible son to assume the Roseman mantle. I was nothing but the conduit for the transaction. But this isn’t the truth. This is my memory speaking. I am telling the beginning of the story when I am the one who knows the end. I’m sure I was happy at the time. I have a vague idea that I loved Mort then.

I made my own bouquet for the wedding. My parents did everything else, but the bouquet was mine—white tuberoses, white hydrangeas, white peonies, and a few orange blossoms for luck. It was the most beautiful work I’d ever done, good enough for Grace Kelly, and I wrapped a silky white ribbon around the stems. Then at the end of the reception I walked up a few stairs at the front of the banquet hall. The band was playing “Satin Doll” and everyone was yelling, “Throw it! Throw it!” All my single girlfriends were there: Gloria, my maid of honor, all the
bridesmaids, such a pretty semicircle of well-wishers. I turned my back on them and with all my might I threw my beautiful bouquet up over my head. The flowers sailed right out of my hands. It was nearly thirty-five years before I got them back again.

Mort didn’t want me in the shop. This was rule number one when we got back from our honeymoon. My parents agreed. They could only afford one employee, and since Mort would be taking over sooner or later what mattered was that he learn the business. I could use my college education working as a secretary for an insurance company with the understanding that I would quit work as soon as I got pregnant. Nobody was drugging me. Nobody put a gun to my head. That was just the way things went, and it didn’t even seem strange to me then. Marriage, babies, long afternoons ironing shirts and watching daytime television—those were all the things I aspired to anyway. Mort became the Roseman and I became his wife. Who would have believed it was my name on the front of the store and not his? When people called the house and asked for Mr. Roseman, I just handed him the phone. It was a beautiful name, a florist’s name, why shouldn’t he want it?

My parents retired safe in the knowledge that Mort was there and they died before he got around to proving them wrong. For this I am grateful. At least he didn’t cause my parents any pain. To say they loved him like a son would be something of an understatement and I think his departure would have been a greater blow to them than it was even to me. But for all their love and unquestioning trust, they did one very strange thing: They left me the shop. Me. Just me, everything in my name. Mort cursed and
raged for weeks. “What a slap!” he said. “A betrayal!” I didn’t understand what he was talking about. It wasn’t like they left it to my brother, who got the savings and the assets from the sale of their house.

“It’s ours,” I said. “My name, your name, what difference does it make?”

Mort said it made a difference, a big difference, and soon he was after me to sign over the title. While I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life, I am pleased to report that this wasn’t one of them. He groused. I stalled. He left. It turns out Lila had her eye on my parents’ shop. Mort and Lila’s Flowers. The very thought of it makes me weak.

A lot can change in thirty-five years. While I was driving car pools and taking Nora and Sandy to tap and ballet classes, the world of flowers was moving forward. I volunteered at adult literacy centers, worked on my overhead serve, and perfected the art of stuffing fresh herbs beneath the skin of a chicken, but I didn’t learn one thing about the business. Sure, I went into the shop from time to time. I dropped things off or picked things up. I helped myself to a bunch of roses if we were having a dinner party. But I was surprised one day when I noticed that the cash register was a computer and no one had told me about it. Shipping, billing, trucking, taxes—the depth of my ignorance was bottomless. I had never noticed that we now sold fancy ribbon and vases. There was even a wire rack of greeting cards beside the door. Mort didn’t leave a manual when he and Lila packed off for Seattle. Nor did he leave much money. He just left.

What a beautiful story this would be if the wronged wife pulled it out of the fire and took the business straight to the
Fortune 500. I believed that I would be doing the arrangements for the Ritz-Carlton lobby in no time. It didn’t work out that way. I stayed in bed for a while and when I got up I found a lot of rotted flowers and unpaid bills. I couldn’t sell the store. It had been my parents’ entire life, and as little as I knew about flowers, I knew less about just about everything else. I went to work.

Five years later I was spending money I didn’t have on a seminar that was telling me to put ten percent into advertising. I still thought there was some piece of information out there that would make all the difference. If only I knew what I should be doing, it would all turn out okay. My hips were getting stiff in the folding chair and my coffee was cold. All around me desperate losers like myself were taking frantic notes. Fortunately I had taken a spot at the back of the auditorium and so I could creep out without too much embarrassment. I pushed open the heavy metal fire door and slipped into the hallway. It was empty except for an orange bench on which sat one Romeo Cacciamani.

The first time I saw Romeo in the Sheraton, I was amazed to find I no longer hated him. The second time I saw him, I was considerably more amazed to find my heart jumped up as if there had been a tiny trampoline installed in my chest. Was he waiting for me?

He glanced up at me and then looked down at his hands. “Oh,” he said, his voice disappointed. “You’ve got coffee. I was going to ask you if you wanted a cup of coffee.”

I looked at him and then at the white cup in my hand. There wasn’t a trash can, so I dug it into the sand of a very clean ashtray. “I’d like a cup of coffee,” I said.

ROMEO CACCIAMANI HELD OPEN THE DOOR OF THE
downtown Boston Sheraton for me and I stepped outside into a beautiful late spring day. There were a million things that should have been going through my head: Why has he asked me for coffee? Does he want to talk about what happened with the kids? Does he want to talk about business? Is he going to tell me he hates me in the fine tradition of his family? But in truth the only thing I was thinking was, Wouldn’t Mort just die? Please, God, let Mort be in Boston for the weekend. Let him be in a coffee shop across the street watching me smile and shake my hair out in the sunlight while Romeo Cacciamani looks on attentively. Let Mort see everything and think that we are wildly in love and that I am planning on signing over every last petal I have to this man. Nothing would kill Mort faster.

“Starbucks okay?” Romeo said, looking down the street.

I told him that was fine.

We found a table among the full-time students and unemployed writers who believed that coffee shops were libraries. Romeo paid for my light grande latte decaf and got himself a cup
of black coffee. I found myself wishing I had asked for black coffee, too.

“Two bucks for a cup of coffee,” he said, sinking into his chair. “Why didn’t I think of that one? I’ve got plenty of coffee.”

“Beanie Babies,” I said. “I should have come up with those.”

“We sell them at the store,” he said. “I hate them. People call all day long, ‘Do you have Spots? Do you have Gobbler?’ We had to put in an extra line so the flower calls can come through.”

Not only had I not thought of making Beanie Babies in time, I hadn’t even thought of selling them. “So business must be good.”

He glanced down at our mutual stack of small-business folders. “You know how it is.”

The thought seemed to depress us both and for a while we just sipped our coffee in silence.

“I’ve thought over the years maybe I should write to you,” Romeo said. “It’s the kind of thing you think about, but then, who does it? And then I saw you today and I thought—”

But he stopped, not saying what he thought, and after a while I was too curious to wait politely. “What would you write to me about?”

“Oh, all of this.” He gestured an open hand at the table, and for a minute I thought he’d wanted to write to me about coffee. “The family stuff, the thing between our families.” He stopped and shook his head. “Sandy. I wanted to write to you about Sandy. Or maybe I should have written to Sandy. I look back on all that and I think I just didn’t … I didn’t handle that whole thing so well. All the yelling and Camille crying, all the back and forth. I still think they were too young to get married, even though
Camille and I weren’t too much older than they were when we did it. It may have been okay to bust up the wedding, but I don’t think we should have busted
them
up. That was about us, not about them.”

It was a terrible night, freezing cold and pouring down rain. Tony Cacciamani had actually brought a ladder to our house like Sandy was some sort of hostage. She was going to climb down the ladder and they were going to get married, but the ladder fell and there was Sandy, hanging off the sill of her second-story bedroom window, screaming. We had said it was all a Cacciamani plot, that Tony was really trying to kill Sandy.