Pasta Imperfect (16 page)

I stared at Mom for a long, numbing moment. Mmm, okay.

“Too bad it never got published, but writing it made Barbro realize she really liked tinkering with words, so her greeting card career grew out of the whole experience. She’s made a wonderful contribution to the industry. Did you know she was the first person to pen the rhyme, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’? And once, when she had writer’s block, she even came up with, ‘Have a nice day.’ I don’t know how she does it.”

Me either, but I wish she’d stop. I gave Mom a hard look. “Have you been outside the hotel today?”

“Not yet. With all this work who has time to sightsee?”

Iowans were so responsible. Even the ones like Mom, who’d been born and raised in Minnesota.

Knock knock knock.

Had to be Jackie. I crossed the room to let her in.

“I found the perfect salon,” she announced, when I opened the door. “It’s not too far from the Duomo and according to the ad, they specialize in damaged hair. It’s called ‘Donatella.’ Sounds pretty upscale, hunh? Hey, you got some of your clothes back!” She wandered into the room. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Andrew. I didn’t know you were in here.”

Mom fixed Jackie with a vacuous stare. I’d explained about Jack’s transformation into Jackie before the trip, but so far the only kind of communication she could manage with the female version of Jack was blank stares…and a brief comment on the plane about how pretty Jackie’s outfit was. But this was fairly typical. Even at her most freaked out and confused, Mom was always complimentary. She lifted her hand toward Jackie in an awkward greeting. “Lovely outfit you’re wearing.”

“Not for long. I bought some new threads, and I’m going to jump into them right after we get Emily’s hair fixed. Hey, Em, you mind if I leave my bags here and pick them up when we get back?”

“No problem.” But there
was
a problem I still needed to address, and it suddenly became clear how I might resolve it — much to my dismay. But what the heck, I didn’t have any big plans for the evening anyway. “Say, Mom, why don’t you spend the night in here with me? We can have a sleepover.”

“A sleepover? Why, Emily, that’s so thoughtful of you. I haven’t thought of sleepovers for years. Remember the ones you used to have when you were a girl?”

Jackie rolled her eyes. “I hope they were more fun than the one we had in Ireland.”

Mom sighed with disappointment. “I’d love to, Emily, but I really can’t. I need to take care of your grandmother.”

“Mom! She doesn’t need taking care of! She has a white belt in Tae Kwon Do!”

“That doesn’t matter. She’s my mother, and I can’t expect George to keep her company indefinitely. Especially with her hearing loss. He was a saint to take up the slack for me today, but enough is enough. George Farkas didn’t come on this trip to babysit your grandmother.”

I smiled. At least she got that part right. “Well, here’s the thing, Mom. I need to spend the evening mending and treating the stains on that stack of clothes on the bed, and it would go a lot quicker if I had your help.”

“Stains on your clothes? My goodness, Em, what did you do? Buy them at a resale shop? That’s not like you at all.”

I could go through the whole long explanation, but what was the point? Much as I’d like to blame someone for my clothes fiasco, I really couldn’t fault Mom. As always, she’d only been trying to help.

“I’d be delighted to give you a hand, Em.” Mom’s face split into a smile as wide as an octave on a piano. “In fact, I’d be
thrilled
to help you. I even have a little sewing kit. But do you think George would feel I was taking advantage of him if I asked him to keep your grandmother company again this evening?”

Oh, yeah. Nana was going to owe me bigtime.

“Bless you, Emily. When I die, you’re gettin’ all my money,” Nana vowed fifteen minutes later. “You’ve earned all eight million.”

“I thought it was seven million.”

“Bull market, dear. My investments are all on an earnin’ streak.”

We were standing at the northwest corner of the eight-sided baptistry that fronted the Duomo, trying to hold our own against the hordes of tourists who swarmed the square. Jackie and I had wended our way down some side streets and along the Borgo San Lorenzo to discover that it was impossible to get lost in Florence by day, because if you were headed anywhere near the Duomo, all you had to do was look up, and there it was. We’d spotted Nana on the fringe of the baptistry crowd, taking pictures of all the activity, so we’d crossed the street to join her, which is when I’d made her day with the news about my pre-arranged sleepover with Mom.

“Don’t know how you ever spotted me in this crowd,” Nana said as she coddled a stack of Polaroids in her hand.

“Radar,” I teased, and the fact that she was the only person in Florence wearing Minnesota Vikings wind pants and a pink teddy bear top.

“Did you get some good shots of the baptistry, Mrs. S.?” Jackie held her hand out to indicate she’d like to see the photos. “The tour book said the building is at least seventeen hundred years old. Can you believe it? I mean, that’s older than the Empire State Building!”

I threw her a bewildered look. Thank God we’d never had children.

Nana lifted her chin and sniffed. “Do you smell somethin’, Emily?” Grabbing on to my arm, she checked the bottoms of her sneakers. “I hope I didn’t step in nothin’. These are the only shoes I got left.”

Jackie shuffled through the photos. “I guess unbaptized people weren’t allowed to enter a church way back when, so the congregation had to construct a whole other building for the sole purpose of baptizing babies so they could enter the real church.” She looked suddenly perplexed. “You don’t have any pictures of the baptistry here, Mrs. S.”

“I know, dear,” she said, rubbing her nose, “but I got some dandy shots a the crowd. Only time Windsor City gets a turnout like this is for the Hog Days Festival and parade.”

“Where’s George?” I asked, scanning the crowd in search of his seed-corn hat.

She nodded toward the baptistry. “He’s just north, takin’ pictures a the door some fella spent twenty-somethin’ years makin’. Too bad he couldn’t a gone prefab. Woulda saved a whole bunch a time.”

“Well, well, well. Would you look at this.” Jackie handed me one of Nana’s photos.

I perused the glossy photo, surprised to find three familiar faces staring back at me. But the picture could have been better. Brandy Ann’s hair looked washed out in the sunlight, and Fred’s safari hat cast a dark shadow over his face. The only thing that had photographed well was the bolt in Amanda’s nose. Funny about Fred though. After his remarks in the open-air market, I didn’t think he’d be cozying up to Brandy Ann and Amanda anytime soon. I held the photo up for Nana. She squinted at the image.

“That’s the girl with the rugged sinuses,” Nana said in a whisper. “Amanda. She was real good about lettin’ me take her picture. They’ll never believe this back at the Legion a Mary. I bet knowin’ a girl with a can opener in her nose will be way better than knowin’ a guy who used to live in a closet.”

“How long ago did you shoot this?” I asked.

“Five, ten minutes.”

“Can I see that again?” asked Jackie, removing the photo from my hand. She studied it briefly. “Aha! If you concentrate on the foreground, you can miss things in the background. You want to know what my roommate looks like, Emily? Here you go.” She handed the photo back. “She’s the busty blonde Gabriel Fox has his arm draped around in the far right corner there. Our Mr. Fox doesn’t waste any time with the ladies.”

“He hit on your roommate?” I checked out the blonde, my eyes focusing on the slightly grainy image. “SHE’S WEARING MY CORAL SWEATERDRESS WITH THE LEATHER SHOULDER STRAP!”

“Euw, that’s yours?” Jackie took another peek. “Nice color. Where’d you get it? Catalogue? Is the scarf yours, too?”

“What scarf?”

She poked the photo with her fingernail. “Fox’s arm isn’t the only thing draped around Jeannette’s neck. See? There’s a scarf trailing down the front of her dress. Frankly, I don’t think the neckline of the dress calls for a scarf. She might know a lot about food, but she obviously doesn’t know diddly about accessorizing.”

I went up on my tiptoes, searching the crowd. “I wonder which way everyone went?”

“Amanda and them was headin’ for that famous museum over by that famous plaza with all them famous statues, but I told them how I’d just read this mornin’ you might have to wait in a long line if you don’t have no advance tickets. They decided to climb to the top a the Domo instead, though the man with the hat said he didn’t much like heights.”

I looked at Jackie. Jackie looked at me. “I guess maybe I should keep an eye on them,” she said, handing all the photos back to Nana. “But I still think it would work better if I had a disguise. Oh,
God,
this is exciting.” As she bounded through the crowd, she turned around and yelled back at me, “Meet you at the hairdresser’s in a couple of hours or so!”

Nana waved her photos at Jackie in farewell, then to me, “She’s very tall, isn’t she, dear?”

I tugged on the cloth sack hanging from her arm. “Been shopping?”

“You bet.” Eyes gleaming, she sidled a surreptitious look over each shoulder, then opened the sack just wide enough for me to spy a big wad of black leather.

“What is it?” I whispered. “Slingshot?” My nephews would love it. My sister-in-law would kill her.

“Undies,” she said.

My eyebrows shot to the top of my head. “For you?”

“For George. I found ’em at the leather market. The fella in the stall tried to sell me a nice leather thong like the one your young man had on last month, but I knew George would balk at that.”

“Too racy?”

“Too flimsy. George needs extra support.” She pulled a pair of what looked like Bavarian lederhosen out of the sack. “So I got him boxers.”

I squirmed my way through the foot traffic clogging the piazza, circled around the north side of the Duomo with its gleaming pink, white, and green marble, and found the hair salon located in a pristine limestone building with brown-shuttered windows, decorative stone medallions, and window boxes hanging from wrought-iron balcony grills. Before opening the polished wood door, I gazed upward at the monstrous Duomo, wondering why Fred would agree to climb to the top if he was afraid of heights. Talk about being a glutton for punishment. And why make the climb with Brandy Ann and Amanda if they’d hurt his feelings so badly?

Something had happened to get them together. Maybe they’d kissed and made up. But in light of my suspicions about Brandy Ann and Amanda, I hoped Jackie watched Fred closely. I’d hate for anything to happen to the poor little guy. He just seemed so…helpless. Or maybe a better word was, hopeless.

However, speaking of kissing…

I retrieved my phone, punched in a number, and waited.

“Miceli.”

“I’m sorry we were cut off, too.”

A pause. “Ahhh, Emily. I miss you.”

“I think we need to remedy that. Where are you? The casino?”

“I’m at my great-aunt’s. They’ve lit all ninety candles on her birthday cake and she’s methodically blowing each one out, which could take a while. She’s been a two-pack-a-day smoker for seventy-five years.”

Gee, if the party was winding down — “I have an idea. When the party’s over, you could hop a train and tell me how much you miss me in person.”

“The next time I see you, darling, I’ll be doing more to your person than just telling you I miss you.”

Euw, I liked the sound of that. “Would tomorrow be too soon? I don’t necessarily have to visit Pisa.” I stared at my reflection in the window of the salon. “But I should warn you. The next time you see me, I might look a little…different.”

Another pause. “Different can be good.” He breathed heavily into the phone. “Different…how?”

Bless his little Swiss heart. He was trying so hard to be open-minded. “I’m hoping it’ll be a pleasant surprise.” To both of us.

“And I hope you don’t mind, Emily, but I’ve assured the entire family that they’ll have an opportunity to meet you very soon. They tell me I made the same promise before leaving for Ireland last month and that I vowed to return home with surprising news, but my mind is a little fuzzy on what the surprise was supposed to be. Did I give you any indication about a surprise?”

Okay, this was encouraging. “You did mention something about a
question
you wanted to ask me.”

I heard a frustrated sigh from his end. “It’s not much to go on, but I’m a police inspector. I’ve solved crimes with less information than that. Perhaps — Damn!” Shouting. Scuffling. Then in a rush of breath, “I need to go. My aunt was too slow. The tablecloth is on fire. Someone grab the water pitcher! Love you.” Click.

“Hello, pretty.”

With the phone still pressed to my ear, I turned around to find Duncan giving me an odd look. “What happened?” he asked, touching his hand to my hair.

I smiled self-consciously. “An encounter with a Zippo lighter. The lighter won.”

“Ouch.” He winced before mustering an optimistic grin. “But you’ve come to the right place. Donatella cuts my hair. She’s a genius. You wouldn’t believe what I looked like before she got her hands on me. Cowlicks. Split ends. Sun damage. People mistook me for Don King.”

“You’re just saying that,” I accused, disbelieving that his stunning mane of hair could ever have been anything other than gorgeous.

“Scout’s honor. No worries. She’ll make you beautiful.” His eyes did that lingering thing again. “Or should I say…more beautiful.”

Unh-oh. Okay, moving right along — “Would you be able to switch Jackie Thum to another room?” I was all business again. “She seems to have a personality conflict with her present roommate.”

“Jackie Thum.” He pinched his eyes shut, plucking data from behind his lids. “Her roommate is Jeannette Bowles. Food critic. Burlington, Vermont. She’s won a truckload of writing awards and listed every single one on her travel form — in the Medical History section. I guess you have space for that if you’re healthy.”

Another award winner? I bet Keely wouldn’t be too happy if she found out about that.