The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (15 page)

Some days, I thought for sure I had caught Bernardo looking at me the same way I looked at him; other days, he seemed so intent on the job that I could have been Emilio, or possibly a wall, for all he cared. But then he would look over and pass me a box of screws right when I had run out, or say, “Don’t forget to measure it, first,” just as I was raising the drill, and I would change my mind, thinking he was watching me after all.

When Emilio and Francesco both joined us one day, they started telling whore jokes and it got worse from there. Guys are bizarre, I decided, grinding my teeth and driving one screw after another into the balcony floor. Every now and then I had to stop and ask Emilio for a silver nail. They don’t work well for actual building; that’s what the screws were for, but they were needed to make the Second Door functional.

“Here you go,” he said, pulling one from a battered wooden box. He caught sight of my face. “What’s going on?”

I shrugged and turned away. A voice in my head said firmly,
You are worth more than that. You need to speak up
. I thought about what Anna Maria would say if she had been here.

“You guys tell these jokes like I’m not even here,” I said, feeling like a spoilsport. He lifted an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry to be a jerk about it,” I said.

“What are you apologizing for?” Emilio asked. He turned to the others. “Hey, guys. Knock it off with the whore jokes, okay? We have Mia with us, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Bernardo was hanging over the side of the scaffolding,
working on the bracing, and Francesco was kneeling on the floor. They both stopped dead, mouths dropped open, heads tilted at comical angles, looking like the two frontrunners for the Dope of the Year Award.

“They were just jokes,” Francesco offered lamely.

“No, Emilio’s right,” Bernardo said to Francesco, but he was looking at me. I forgave him at once.

The next day, Anna Maria joined us for the first time. When I saw her striding up the street beside her brother, looking like a leggy goddess in her own canvas work shirt and worn jeans, I prayed that Bernardo wouldn’t notice her. Although I had no idea how he wouldn’t.

She climbed the scaffolding, pulled on a pair of stout work gloves, and looked around. “Can you explain the structure to me, please? I have only worked on a very simple Second Door, nothing like this,” she said to Bernardo. He nodded and took her on a guided tour that included me, sweating over a corner.

“And this is your cousin, who’s gotten very good at framing,” he said.

Anna Maria pretended to look at me like a tourist, wide-eyed. “Ah!”

Bernardo had Anna Maria hold a chalk line for him.

“So I met this guy at Plastic last night,” she said, pressing the end of the line tightly against the wood. Plastic was a nightclub, a place where Nonno and Nonna would almost certainly never let me go, for reasons that probably dated back to the Middle Ages.

“Yeah?” Bernardo asked, snapping the line so that it left a long mark in blue chalk all down the wood.

“He totally reminded me of Rodolfo. Only more conceited.”

“
More
conceited?” asked Francesco.

Bernardo laughed and pulled out his tape measure, telling Anna Maria, “Up. Hold it. Let me measure. My poor brother,” he added, moving the line into place. “He’s really not so bad, you know.”

“I know. Really this guy just looked like him,” said Anna Maria. “And he had spent a year in Egypt, and he wanted to tell me all about it, about how crazy Cairo was. And I thought, cool, especially since a girl doesn’t go to Plastic to meet guys, you know, just to dance. But he was straight and cute. Until he kept shouting over the music for what seemed like hours. I never even got to ask if he went to see the pyramids.”

“People can have the most extraordinary experiences without really benefiting from them,” agreed Bernardo.

“Yes. He told me all about meeting some really great Arab poet in a café and I wanted to say, ‘Did you let
him
talk at all?’ ”

“Be fair,” Bernardo said. “Hold it there,” he added, snapping the line again. “He was probably nervous.”

“Too nervous to have any manners?” said Anna Maria.

“You never have any manners, and you’re never nervous,” Francesco pointed out.

I looked up in time to see Anna Maria look startled, then frown and aim a kick at her brother.

“No horseplay on the worksite!” barked Bernardo. I had never heard him so stern. I thought Anna Maria would bark back, but she said, perfectly seriously, “Pardon. I will kick him later.”

I couldn’t help laughing, and neither could the guys.

“But pay attention. This is how people get hurt,” Bernardo told her, stern again.

“I know,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I won’t do it again.”

I could see she meant it. Even in the midst of my jealousy, I liked her better for making promises I knew she would keep.

“What did you end up saying to him, the guy at Plastic?” I asked when they had moved the chalk line again.

“Oh, eventually he paused for breath long enough to tell me we should go home to his place, he really felt a connection.”

At this point, we all had to stop work, we were laughing so hard.

“Did he mean it?” asked Francesco.

“I think he did,” Anna Maria said meditatively. “I told him that if he’d actually given me a minute to talk we might have had a connection, but I was ready for some quiet time at home, thanks all the same.”

“Oh, wow. You’re so mean to them,” Francesco said. “My mean sister.”

Bernardo smiled faintly to himself as he placed his carpenter’s square along a chalk line.

“Meaner than making a girl listen to you talk about yourself
for two hours? I don’t think so,” Anna Maria retorted.

“She has a point,” I said.

Bernardo looked over at me.

“Honesty over politeness?” he asked.

“If the other person is being rude, maybe,” I mumbled. “He sounds like he was kind of a jerk.”

I wanted to say,
I wish I could be so tough. And I wish I was always having to turn guys down
. But I didn’t really wish that last part; I just wanted one man in Milan to ask me out so I could say yes. And maybe,
But I’m busy tonight
. I stole a glance at that one man. Listening to him and Anna Maria, I thought sadly that he wouldn’t be asking
me
out. I tried to pay attention to what I was doing, but I still ended up stripping screws.

“Mia, we need to make a run to the hardware store,” Bernardo said suddenly, breaking in on my thoughts. “Want to come?”

Absolutely not. I didn’t want to come along and watch them flirt even more.

“No, that’s okay,” I replied over my shoulder.

“Oh,” he said, his voice oddly flat. I turned around and he smiled his wide-open smile. “I was hoping for some company, but I can go it alone.”

I froze as he climbed down the ladder and started walking away. I was an idiot. I would never ever ever get this right, and I would die young and alone, swallowed by a demon, having been kissed exactly twice.

“We’ve got things going fine here, Mia. Why don’t you go catch up with him? You look like you could use a break,” said Anna Maria as she held a board steady for her brother.

I stared at her, but she didn’t look up. Bernardo had already started the van. I slithered down the scaffolding, landing so hard my feet stung, and broke into a run. He was pulling away when he saw my face in the window. His eyes crinkled and he jerked his head toward the other door, the brakes squeaking. I climbed in, hearing the roar of the car heater, taking in the smell of diesel fuel and his cologne. He grinned at me, and I blushed, hating my burning face, and turned to look straight ahead.

“Figured you needed someone to supervise you,” I heard myself saying in a severe tone. He laughed. I felt the way I had the time my mom and I had taken the elevator in the Chrysler Building—stomach dropping, heart rising.

As we rattled through the streets of Milan, I knew I should make conversation, but I had no idea how, alone with him like this. Signora Gianna would tell me to act mysterious, I thought, or play hard to get; I felt fairly sure that wasn’t the same thing as sitting like an embarrassed stone in the passenger seat. Bernardo didn’t help, his eyes fixed on the road. As we wove through the traffic, an older guy in a snappy Alfa Romeo cut him off. He slapped his hands against the wheel, then he laughed and turned to me.

“Doesn’t that get you, when someone does that?” he asked.

I smiled shyly. “I don’t know how to drive,” I said.

“Really?”

“I was learning when I left the United States, but I didn’t have a license yet.” I thought about this. “I guess I’ll have to do it all over again when I go home,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“You’re going home?” he asked. I thought he sounded slightly bummed.

I shrugged. There was a place on his neck, just beneath his jaw, where his five o’clock shadow was coming in. I imagined what it would feel like under my fingers.

“Maybe. I don’t have any idea, to tell you the truth,” I said, and smiled at him. “I’m supposed to stay here, with the family.”

He nodded. “The family is best,” he agreed. “Your family, especially. They’re good people.” He turned down a street and asked, “Do you miss your family back home? Your parents, your sister?”

I didn’t remember talking about my parents and sister to him. “Yeah,” I said. “Actually, this is awful, but I don’t miss them as much as I should. I love it here,” I added.

“Really? Milan, or Italy?”

“Milan, I guess. I haven’t really traveled around at all. Italy, I guess, too.”

“Ah, no, they are not the same thing. Milan, it’s different. We’re so industrial here; we’re in love with the future, with change. The rest of Italy, it’s in love with history. But all Italians are in love with food,” he said. “And maybe the Milanese
are the only ones who admit that the cooking might possibly be better in another city. Like Bologna.” He paused. “But not much better. We have dishes here no one else has … the best.”

After fitting the van into an impossibly small space in front of a crowded shop front, Bernardo got out and held my door open. “You don’t miss your family?” he repeated.

I pretended to give this due consideration, because standing so close to him was making it hard for me to think.

“A bit,” I smiled, then added quickly. “My sister’s amazing, we’re lucky to have our mother, and my dad, he’s tough, but he takes good care of us.”

“You have to be tough to do that, sometimes. To be a father, I think,” he said, opening the door of the hardware store. “It must be harder with girls, too. I have only brothers, so I don’t know.”

I felt offended. “Why harder with girls, though? It seems like boys give their parents a pretty hard time.”

He smiled at me as we walked between the shelves, which were packed full of everything, piled, stacked, crowded. The section for nails, screws, and bolts had rows of drawers with unreliable labels. Bernardo sighed and started opening them, pulling screws from his pocket to compare. As he sorted, he looked at me, his eyes twinkling.

“I’ve offended you, about raising girls. I have an answer for you, but it would just get me in more trouble,” he said.

“Probably,” I said. I was curious, though, and asked my next question before I could be too embarrassed.

“Are men and women really so different, though?”

He looked me straight in the eye, and I felt my face get hot for the millionth time.

“By God, I hope so,” he said.

I examined my shoes, wondering exactly how much I’d given away. I wished I could ask Signora Gianna for advice. This game was way, way too hard for me.

I looked up. He was busy choosing bolts and screws, putting them in sacks.

“Why does it bother you,” he went on, “that we might be different, or girls might be harder to raise because … because of the kinds of trouble they can get into … the things that can happen to them? Why should that bother you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, picking up a box of nails and turning it over in my hands. “It just bothers me. Like …”

I wanted to tell him how Anna Maria had to push and push to become a demon catcher, but Emilio just got to be one. I had a notion there were other things that bothered me, too, but I couldn’t put words to them.

“… like the girls in the bar, who thought I was a boy, just because I wearing these work clothes,” I said, gesturing at my canvas shirt and pants, torn and stained after only a few days.

He nodded at this. “That really got to you, didn’t it? I think they know you’re not a boy now, though,” he said. He smiled and added, “It’s not that difficult to see that you’re a girl, you know.”

I felt my stomach jump again. There we were, standing in our dirty work clothes in a hardware store, and I felt like we were on a movie set.
Mia’s Romance. Love in Milan. That Tedesco Boy
.

“Thank you,” I managed. “I guess it did bother me. But that’s not the point,” I added, and then wished I hadn’t.

“I know it isn’t. I don’t have any answers, though. And so many of the differences, they are pleasant.”

“I guess so,” I said, uncertainly, wishing again that I could talk this over with Signora Gianna, or Anna Maria at least.

He seemed about to say something else, but decided against it, and led the way to the cash register. The old man behind the counter said, “
Ciao
, Bernardo. And who is the beautiful girl?”

Bernardo turned to smile at me, as if to say,
See? Not so hard to tell you’re a girl
.

“This is Mia Della Torre,” he said.

“You make your girlfriends work, now? Shame on you,” said the old man.

I waited for Bernardo to say I wasn’t his girlfriend, or that I was a feminist, or something clever and funny. He laughed at the old man and said, “We can’t bear to be apart. What can you do?”

I didn’t expect the old man to get misty-eyed, either, or to cry, “Wonderful! I remember what it was like.”

He reached across the counter and patted my arm, “This is good, too. If you work together well now, you know you
can always do so. It’s good to know that before marriage. It’s important.”