Pasta Imperfect (15 page)

Scurrying back to Vincenzo, I slid my arms into the silky lining of a leather jacket that felt smooth as whipped butter. “Wow.”

“You like?”

Chirrup chirrup. Chirrup chirrup.

“It’s your phone, Emily. You want me to answer it?”

“Appreciate it,” I said to Jackie, as Vincenzo did the honors of zipping up my jacket. He stood back to assess me, smoke swirling around his head.

“Very pretty.
Va bene.
”

I turned this way and that in the mirror. “The sleeves are a little long.”

“I mark them. We shorten them in one hour. You come back and pick up.”

“Really?” This was better than fast food at Blimpie’s.

“Emily’s phone. Jackie speaking.” A pause. “Oh, hi, Etienne. Yeah, she’s here, but she’s tied up at the moment. Can I give her a message?”

“This the best leather in all Italy,” Vincenzo attested as he pulled a butane lighter from his pants pocket. He flicked the striker wheel then waved the flame down the length of my arm.

“EH!” I snatched my arm away. “ARE YOU NUTS? What are you doing?”

“Bad leather burn,” Vincenzo claimed, grabbing my arm back and reapplying the flame to my sleeve. “Good leather not burn. This good leather.”

“Okay, I believe you!” I stared at the flame licking my elbow and could feel my skin heating up in protest. “Hey, I can feel that. You can stop anytime.”

“Etienne is sorry you were cut off,” Jackie announced.

“The leather good everywhere,” Vincenzo droned around his cigarette. He swung the lighter flame toward my shoulder.

“Enough with the lighter!” I said, shrinking away from the flame.

“Every panel good.” I eyed Vincenzo in the mirror as he circled around to my back with the exposed flame. “Some people mix the bad leather with the good leather, but Giorgio only use —
Merda!”
Up flew his hands as his cigarette fell from his mouth.
“Oy!”
He caught it in midflight, bobbled it in his hand, then cursed loudly as he dropped it to the floor and stomped on it.

“What’s that?” Jackie asked. “Can you speak up a little, Etienne? There’s a lot of background noise where you are. One-armed bandits? Euw. That’s not good. How much is that in American dollars?”

I felt a little palpitation in my chest. He’d lost money. I
knew
that would eventually happen. I just didn’t want to know how much.

“
Scusi,
” said Vincenzo, airing out his hand.

“Did you burn yourself?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” he said, massaging his palm. “I get chalk to mark your sleeves.”

I preened before the mirror as he disappeared into a back room. The jacket didn’t look terrific with my Laura Ashley dress, but with a pair of black leather pants, it would look sensational.

I wrinkled my nose. Phew! The air stank of Vincenzo’s cigarette. Italian tobacco was powerful stuff. Little streamers of smoke still floated in the air above my head. They could use a better air-filtration system in this place.

Jackie’s voice rose in volume. “I’m still having a hard time hearing. Hold on. Maybe if I walk out —” A pause. “Holy shit!”

I spun around to find her charging at me full throttle. “EHHH!” I screamed.

WUFF! She tackled me around the waist. BOOM! We crashed onto the floor. I bumped my head and cracked my elbows. Air escaped my lungs in a painful
whoosh.

I beat at her with my fists, trying to fend her off. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I shrieked. “ARE YOU CRAZY?”

“Your hair!” she yelled, slapping my head with her hands. “It’s on fire!”

H
ow bad does it look?” I fretted, as we dashed into the lobby of the Hotel Cosimo Firenze.

“You don’t wanna know,” Jackie replied. “And that awful garbage smell? It’s not garbage. It’s your hair.”

Great. This was
just
great. I thought I’d had problem hair before. I couldn’t imagine the styling challenge I faced with half of it missing!

“Vincenzo was crushed you didn’t buy the jacket,” Jackie anguished. “Losing that sale really hit him hard. I felt sorry for him.”

“HE SET MY HAIR ON FIRE!”

“Still. You might be sorry later on. You don’t find bargains like that every day. Hold up a minute.” She unloaded her packages on the floor at the front desk and smiled at the unshaven desk clerk. “
Cuscino
?” she asked.

He regarded her through half-lidded eyes, then snaked his gaze toward me and sniffed the air unpleasantly.
“Si.”

She made a gimme gesture with her hands.
“Per favore.”

Looking put out, the clerk heaved himself off his stool and shambled around the counter toward the lobby. “What’s he getting?” I questioned.

“I asked him for a telephone book. We need to find a listing for hair designers and get you to a salon pronto.”

I watched the clerk disappear down the hall and heard a creak of hinges as he opened a door. I eyed Jackie skeptically. “Shouldn’t ‘telephone book’ have the word ‘telephone’ in it someplace?”

“ ‘Phonebook’ is an idiom.”

“So?”

“So Italian idioms don’t sound anything like what they mean. Just relax. I have the situation under control.”

No cause to worry there.

A moment later the desk clerk rounded the corner by the staircase and with a churlish look on his face handed Jackie a bed pillow.

I rolled my eyes. Obviously, not the right idiom. “Tell you what.” I dug my key out of the pocket of my shoulder bag. “It looks like you might be a while down here, so I’m going up to my room, and when you’re done, give me a holler. Okay?”

Jackie stared at the pillow. “But
cuscino
is the right word. I know it is.”

I trudged up the stairs, brightening a little when I saw the heap of clothing piled in front of my door. All right! Did I know how to get results, or what? I unlocked the door and shoved it open an inch, then hunkered down and scooped my clothes off the floor. My black silk cardigan. My rosebud dress with the ruffled hem. My lemon yellow sundress with the thin shoulder straps. Capri pants. Blouses. Looked like a pretty good haul! Straightening up, I shoved the door wide with my hip and —

“Hi, Em.”

“EHHH!” I spun around to find my mother propped up on my bed, surrounded by orderly piles of paper, a modest stack in her lap. “Mom!” I screamed, my heart in my mouth. “What are doing in here?”

“You’ve been shopping,” she announced, marking the clothes in my arms. “But it would have been nice if they’d given you sacks for your purchases. Looks like you bought quite a bit.”

“
How
did you get in here? The door was locked!”

“The light’s so bad in my room, Emily. I was about to go cross-eyed reading all these manuscripts. So I went down to the front desk to ask if I could borrow your key to see if the light in your room was any better, and no one was there, so I wiggled your key off its hook and let myself in. And I’m so glad I did. The light really
is
much better in here. I hope you don’t mind.”

“You wiggled my key off its hook?” I dumped my clothes onto the bed.

“It’s not very hard. All the keys are hanging on the wall right there in the open by the front desk.”

It certainly made me feel secure knowing that if the front desk was unmanned, our rooms would be accessible to anyone.

Mom wrinkled her nose. “My goodness. What’s that awful smell?”

“Me,” I said, dragging myself around to her side of the bed. I sat on the edge and twisted around so she could see the back of my head. “I had a run-in with a Zippo lighter. Other than smelling awful, does it look really bad?”

“Tilt your head back a little, Emily. That’s good. Oh my!” I heard a little intake of breath. “Well, to tell you the truth, it burned in a real pretty pattern. Kind of like one of those English crop circles. And the ends of your hair have an attractive crinkle to them now. Much prettier than the split ends you sometimes get. And I bet if you pin your hair up in a French twist, no one will ever notice that semi-bald streak down the center of your head. It’s nice the sides are still long. If you could only do something about the smell. Maybe room deodorizer would help.”

I patted the back of my hair for the first time, my hand freezing in place when it grazed a patch of roughened bristles where corkscrew curls used to be. “Oh, God.”

“It looks far better than the hairdo your grandmother came home with from Ireland.”

Which wasn’t saying much. Poor Nana still looked like a denuded rabbit, and she’d been cut and styled by a pro.

“How did this happen?” Mom asked, giving me a motherly pat on the back.

So I told her the whole story about the incident at the leather market and when I was done, she shook her head and offered me a grim smile. “You’ve started smoking, haven’t you?”

“No! That’s the truth! I even have a witness!”

“Accidents like that don’t happen in real life, Emily.”

“They do to me!”

“Really, hon, maybe you should put the escort business on hold and try something else. You were always good in English, and you have your grandmother’s beautiful penmanship. Maybe you could write a novel. I’d have an easier time reading a manuscript handwritten by you than by the person I’m reading now. I think it must be a doctor. Tell me, does this sound right to you?” She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose and angled the paper in her lap toward the bedside light. “ ‘She gently caressed his cork with her lily white hard.’ ‘Hard’ could be ‘hand,’ but I don’t know where the cork comes in. They weren’t even drinking wine.”

Euw boy. I returned to the other bed and began sorting through my clothes. “Maybe she caressed his ‘coat.’ ”

“Coat?” She chewed on that for a while. “Hunh. Coat might work, but this person really needs help with syntax.”

“So how are the entries looking?” I asked as I noticed a huge coffee stain on my yellow sundress. Damn!

“These are the ones I’ve read,” she said, sweeping her hand over the neat piles on the bed. “There are entry numbers instead of names on them, so I’ve arranged them alphabetically by title to keep them in order. And I have to give these people credit, Em. Some of them are really talented. And their stories are so original.”

I inspected my rosebud sheath to find the zipper slide off the track and the tape pulled away from the fabric. Keely had obviously been in a huge hurry to get out of it, but how was I supposed to wear it with a broken zipper?

“There’s one about a pirate who kidnaps a headstrong Irish girl off a sailing ship and takes her to his pirates’ den in the Caribbean, where they eventually fall in love. And one about an Indian who kidnaps a headstrong Irish girl off a wagon train and takes her to his village on the plain, where they eventually fall in love. And one about a highwayman who kidnaps a headstrong Irish girl from her carriage on the moors and takes her to his cottage in Cornwall, where they eventually fall in love.”

I examined tops, pants, cardigans, and dresses to find jam stains, split seams, cigarette holes, lipstick stains, missing buttons, and broken snaps. How could they have been so careless? I couldn’t wear anything now! I dug through the pile again. Where was my one-shoulder sweaterdress with the leather shoulder strap?

“And this one’s
really
original, Em. It’s about a Montana cowboy who kidnaps a young woman from her best friend’s wedding ceremony and takes her to his cabin in the Rockies! Isn’t that different?”

I threw her a confused look as I tossed my stuff right and left in search of my coral sweaterdress. “I don’t think I get what’s so different. Is this one where they don’t fall in love at the end?”

“Ofcourse they fall in love, Emily. But she’s not a headstrong Irish girl. She’s Lithuanian!”

No sweaterdress. Unh. I pouted in complete despair at the clothes on the bed.

“You could do something like this, Em.” Mom waved a page at me. “I know you could. Have you ever dreamed of writing a book?”

I sank down on the bed. I dreamed about Etienne…and obscenely large body parts. “Can’t say that I have.”

She clutched the page to her chest, looking suddenly nostalgic. “I probably never told you this, but when I was younger, I dreamed of becoming a stewardess. There was nothing I wanted more than to fly the friendly skies in a stylish little uniform and matching cap.”

Mom had wanted to be a flight attendant? Serving peanuts and beverages to people? Showing them how to fasten their seat belts? Instructing them what to do should the plane lose cabin pressure? Who knew? But her revelation gave me pause. I guess I’d never really looked at Mom as being anyone other than my mom. “So why didn’t you follow your dream?”

I caught a twinkle in her eye behind her wire-rims. “Because I was kidnapped from St. Kate’s College by a strapping man on a John Deere tractor and carried off to his grain farm in Iowa, where we fell in love.”

Aw, life imitating art. That was so sweet! Despite my depression, I felt my mouth curve into a smile.

“You know who else wanted to fly the skies years ago?” Mom continued. “The Severid twins. Britha told me when we were shelving aviation books at the library one afternoon. That would have been the six hundred section, located in the northeast corner of the building by the restrooms.”

“They wanted to travel the world?” I asked, testing the back of my head again in the hopes that my hair had miraculously grown back. “But they’ve hardly set foot outside Windsor City their entire lives.”

Mom shrugged. “Britha said her father didn’t want them parading around in those skimpy uniforms or demeaning themselves by serving demon liquor, so they never got to go. But Barbro did the next best thing. She wrote a book about the romantic adventures of a stewardess from a little town in the Midwest. She was even thinking of turning it into a continuing series. Can you picture Barbro writing a book like that?”

I’ll say. Love and romance written by a woman who’d probably never dated a man in her life.

“What an imagination she must have, Emily. Think about it. She wrote that entire book without ever having set foot on an airplane!”