Pasta Imperfect (25 page)

The same as mine?
It wasn’t enough they were wearing my clothes? Now, they wanted my hair? I liked to think of myself as a nice person, but come on! Britha’s request was a blatant violation of the unspoken code that a female should
never
copy a friend’s car, clothing, or hair. Of course, the twins had done nothing
but
copy each other all their lives, so maybe that explained their ignorance of the code.

“Um…” I smiled. I hedged. I —

“I know the name of the salon,” Mom said helpfully. “It’s called Donatella and it’s located by that lovely cathedral. Would you like me to help you find it?”

I shot Mom an evil look.

“I’ll show you where it is!” Jackie offered. “In fact, I can take you right to the front door!”

My mouth fell open so far, my chin hit my knees.

“No, no. We don’t want to take you away from what you’re doing,” Britha demurred. “If you just point us in the right direction, I’m sure we’ll be able to find it. We’re from Iowa, you know.”

“
Pleeeeease,
” Jackie begged. “Please let me help you.” She extended an arm to each of them. “I absolutely insist. Maybe I’ll get a shampoo and style myself.”

I threw Jackie a murderous look and mouthed the word “traitor.” She favored me with a delirious smile that bespoke the thrill of escape.

“Would you mind if we made one small detour before the hairdresser though?” Britha asked Jackie. “We passed a little jewelry shop down one of these side streets that had some lovely earrings in the window. Clip - ons. Clip-ons are so hard to find these days. Would you mind stopping? We’d be quick.”

“Maybe you should think about getting your ears pierced,” Jackie suggested as she pointed them toward the dome of the cathedral. “You’d have a much wider selection of earrings to choose from. I could do it for you! All we’d need is a sterile needle, gold studs, an ice cube, and some disinfectant.”

I shook my head as Jackie herded Britha and Barbro across the street. She really shouldn’t get their hopes up about the ear piercing. The twins might already have a sewing needle and disinfectant, but this was Italy. They could forget about the ice cube.

“They’re going to have such a nice time,” Mom commented as she watched the trio disappear into the crowd. “You seem to know your way around the city so well, Emily, maybe we should offer to meet up with the twins later this afternoon so you can show them around, too.”

“Maybe we’ll run into them someplace.”

“But if we don’t make arrangements now, how will we find them?”

I sighed in defeat. “Shouldn’t be too hard. We look for the only two septuagenarians in Florence running around with my hair.”

We strolled along some of the main streets of Florence — Mom, oohing and aahing over the shoes and handbags in the stores — me, darting my eyes back and forth so often that I was making myself dizzy. When we turned the corner onto one particularly narrow lane, we caught sight of tables and chairs set up café style on the sidewalk, and clusters of people standing in small conversational groups on both sides of the street, waving wineglasses in their hands.

“Oh look,” Mom said, as we passed a shallow niche in a building that was replete with a counter, a tiered backdrop of bottled wine, and stemware in every available space. “It’s like the salad bar at Fareway, only with wine. Look at all those lovely bottles, Emily.” A hint of excitement crept into her voice. “How do you suppose they’re arranged?”

I hurried her along before she could offer to alphabetize them.

“Emily! Margaret!” a man’s voice beckoned. “Over here!”

I nearly got whiplash trying to find the owner of the voice amid the clutch of midday tipplers, but the tanned arm rising over the dark heads in the crowd looked familiar, so we headed in that direction.

“I’m glad I spotted you,” Philip Blackmore said in welcome, his hand wrapped around the stem of a full glass of red wine. “We were just about to offer a toast to Sylvia. Join us, would you?”

Marla Michaels and Gillian Jones stood on either side of him, looking uncomfortable and subdued as they balanced their drinks in their hands. Duncan completed the quartet, giving me a quiet nod that spoke volumes.

“Two glasses of Merlot for the ladies,” Philip instructed, handing Duncan a fistful of lire. While Duncan dutifully bought our drinks, Philip girded an arm around Mom’s shoulders, embracing her like a proud father. “I’m in your debt for all the work you’ve done to make our contest a success, Margaret. With our unfortunate turn of events, if not for you, we’d have no contest at all.”

Color scorched Mom’s cheeks. “It was nothing.”

“I love you Midwesterners. You’re so damned humble. How does it make you feel to know your decision will change someone’s life tonight?”

“A little nervous actually.”

She was nervous. I was a wreck. Maybe I should consider a drug stronger than wine.

Duncan returned with our drinks and lingered casually beside me. Philip elevated his glass reverently. “To Sylvia,” he toasted.

“To Sylvia,” we repeated, raising our glasses and clinking them in midair.

“She was incomparable,” he declared, his voice gravelly with nostalgia. “The industry will shine far less brightly because of her absence.”

While Gillian and Marla fought off tears, Philip Blackmore knocked back his entire glass of wine in one long gulp. “I think I’ll have another,” he said, spinning around and heading back toward the bar, his harness of bottled water swinging from his shoulder like a scuba tank.

“I can’t believe she’s gone.” Gillian dashed tears from her cheeks. “Over the last few months she’d become one of my dearest friends. She was warm, witty, honest. She negotiated the most lucrative contract of my career. Three books. Twenty-city author tour. Four million dollars.”

“Four million dollars!” Marla’s glass slipped from her hand and shattered at her feet, spraying wine over her flowered muumuu like a deadly red pesticide. “Hightower offered you an advance of four million? They only offered me three. The shysters!”

Gillian took a long sip of wine before arching one superior eyebrow. “I guess that proves which one of us is more highly regarded in the writing world.”

Marla shook wine from her hemline as she stepped away from the broken glass on the sidewalk. “The only thing it proves is that Sylvia didn’t do enough by me to earn her f-ing 10 percent!”

Gillian inhaled a sharp breath. “Sylvia only charged you 10? She charged me 15! She was screwing me out of another 5 percent? The shyster!”

Mom looked happily from one diva to the other. “Maybe if you did the math, it’d work out that advance-wise and percentage-wise, you were both earning the same thing.”

That was
so
like something Nana would say. I guess there was no denying genetics.

Gillian looked at Marla. Marla looked at Gillian. They both looked at Duncan. “Do you have a calculator?” they asked in unison.

He held his hands up defensively. “The only thing I have on me is my phone.”

“I propose another toast,” Philip bellowed as he returned with another full glass of wine. “This one is for Margaret.” He raised his glass. “May your decision provide us with the next rising star in the romance world.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, touching my glass to his. Marla and Gillian glared as he downed his second glass of wine.

“So how many millions are you going to pay the next rising star?” Marla sniped at him, angry fists poised on her hips. “More than four? Sylvia told me
I
was your highest-paid author. Funny how she forgot to mention that the
cowboy queen
was getting more!”

“I want my money back!” Gillian demanded. “Sylvia’s dead. That 15 percent belongs to
me…
and I want it right now!”

Philip eyed each woman blandly before shoving his empty glass at Duncan. “Be a good chap and refill that for me, would you?”

Hmm. I wondered if Hightower had ever published a book on the dangers of binge drinking.

“Are we going to toast Mr. Fox?” Mom asked him.

“Hell, no!” Blackmore’s face was so red by now that he looked like a Valentine balloon. “The little bastard. He had responsibilities on this trip and what’s he done? He’s run away.”

Time to play a little devil’s advocate. “How do you know?” I leaped in. “I mean, aren’t you in the least bit alarmed that something terrible might have happened to him?”

“If he’s not here, something terrible
better
have happened to him! He better be dead! But I won’t hold my breath. He’s done his disappearing act to get even with me, but the son of a bitch has forgotten it doesn’t pay to piss off the guy who signs your paycheck. So he’d better use this time away from the tour to begin looking for another job, because as of now, he’s fired!”

Gillian and Marla sucked in their collective breaths. “Can you do that?” they cried in one voice.

When push came to shove, I guess having a literary snob for an editor was better than having no editor at all.

“I can do whatever I damned well please,” Philip corrected. “Ah, Duncan, good man.” He snatched the glass from Duncan’s hand and without bothering to offer another toast, guzzled the contents like an empty gas tank at the pump.

“But you said Gabriel was our ticket to respectability!” Marla whined.

“You said he was going to give romance a good name!” Gillian added.

Philip remained stone-faced. “There are other editors in New York. People who, unlike Gabriel Fox, know how to be team players. Now that he’s out of the way, I’ll find you the best, ladies. You’ll see.”

Was that a slip of the tongue? Mere speculation? Or did he know for sure that Gabriel Fox was “out of the way”?

Philip regarded his empty glass, seeming to ponder how it had gotten that way. “I need another drink,” he said, but as he turned, Duncan stayed him with a hand.

“Why don’t we grab something to eat first,” Duncan said with quiet authority. “You mentioned you’d like to dine by the river. I know the perfect place. Great food. A spectacular wine list. Much better than anything you’ll find at a wine bar.”

It took a moment for Duncan’s words to bore into Philip’s skull, but when they did, Philip deposited his empty glass in Duncan’s hand and nodded agreement. “A fine idea. I could use something to eat. What do you think, ladies? Shall we dine by the Arno today on Hightower’s dime? I’ll write it off as a ‘memorial to Sylvia’ on my expense account.”

“You’re not addressing my concerns, Philip,” Marla blasted.

“You’re ignoring mine as well!” Gillian spat.

“And I shall continue to do so for the remainder of the tour. If you have a problem with that, ladies, I suggest you buy your own damned lunch. Emily, Margaret, I hope you’ll agree to join us. Maybe you can show Marla and Gillian how a typical adult conducts a conversation without all the bickering.”

“We’d love to!” Mom agreed. “Wouldn’t we, Emily?”

“You bet.” Whether Gabriel Fox was dead or alive, I figured there had to be safety in numbers, even if Gillian and Marla did end up killing each other.

Duncan led the way back through the streets of Florence toward the Arno, with the dome of the cathedral constantly to our left. Outside the baptistry, Philip stopped for a slug of water and immediately spat it out. Unh-oh. Must be the expensive hotel water that Jackie had said tasted like liquid sewage. But instead of discarding the bottle, he gritted his teeth and chugged half the contents. Ick. Some people were obviously too proud to admit they’d just blown twenty-thousand lire.

We marched in the hot sun down streets lined with designer clothing stores and expensive salons, and when Marla made a detour into a gelato shop, Philip whipped out his bottle again and drained it.

“Just like I always told your brother,” Mom said in a hushed voice as she watched him throw the bottle away. “Excessive drinking not only gives you a raging headache; it makes you thirsty. Then you end up going potty all night.”

You could tell Mom was originally from Minnesota. Her proficient use of the word “potty” in both its noun and verb forms was a dead giveaway.

While Marla slurped her gelato, we arrived at the insanely crowded Piazza della Signoria where we stopped to shoot pictures of an impressively naked Neptune rising from a really big fountain and an equally naked David without the fountain. As Duncan motioned us toward the arcaded walkway flanking the Uffizi, Philip lost his footing and went sprawling onto the pavement in a graceless heap. “I’m all right. I’m all right,” he assured us, as Duncan helped him to his feet. But he didn’t look all right. The sweat from his body was soaking through his shirt, and his eyes had that vacuous look that sometimes appeared in Mom’s when she was talking to Jackie.

“You want to rest?” Duncan asked him.

“Tripped is all,” he growled, pressing a hand to his stomach. “My shoelace. Get me to the restaurant. I’ll be fine.”

The liquor was obviously starting to impair his thinking. His shoes didn’t have lacings. He was wearing loafers.

We dodged around people queued up in long lines for the museum and fought off young East Indian men hawking artwork and questionable articles of clothing. “You buy this, Madame,” one man urged Mom, shoving a fishnet shirt in her face. “It look very nice on you. I have large size.”

Mom offered the man a courteous smile and stopped to hold the thing up to her. “What do you think, Emily?”

I eyed it critically. “I think it would look great…at the end of a pole.” I craned my neck to keep track of the rest of the group. “Come on, Mom, we’re losing everyone.”

We pushed, and shoved and beat off more men selling postcards and gaudy scarves. By the time we reached the end of the arcade and stepped into the sunlight, we’d lost sight of the entire group, except for Philip, who was staggering across the street, unmindful of the scooters that
vroomed
past like angry gnats.

“What’s he doing?” asked Mom.

I cringed as a Vespa squealed to a stop just shy of plowing into him. The helmeted driver flipped him an obscene gesture and gunned around him, leaving him to fend off a half dozen more.

“Watch out, Philip!” I yelled, but he seemed not to hear me as he stumbled toward the opposite sidewalk and collapsed onto the low stone balustrade that overlooked the river. “Don’t move!” I screamed at him. “I’m coming!” Then to Mom, “Stay right here and wait for the others, okay? I don’t want to lose you, too.”