Cold Comfort
Cold Comfort
By Kathleen Gerard
Copyright 2014 by Kathleen Gerard
Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by
Ginny Glass
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Also by Kathleen Gerard and Untreed Reads Publishing
How to Become a Bodyguard for Celine Dione’s Larynx
In Transit
Tangled
Last Licks,
in the Untreed Reads Anthology
The Killer Wore Cranberry
COLD COMFORT
By Kathleen Gerard
One
“Be back in an hour,” Aunt Minnie said, handing me a shopping list longer than my arm. “I don’t want to be late for my appointment at the chiropodist.”
I didn’t know what a chiropodist was any more than I could read Aunt Minnie’s warbling scribble. The intensity of her penmanship—the shape and form of each carefully constructed letter, both upper and lower case—could be felt like Braille bleeding through the post-marked and addressed business-sized envelope. She’d cut it open length-wise in order to accommodate her long list of instructions.
Frugality
, even when it came to recycling uses for paper, was Minnie’s middle name.
“I can’t read this. What does this say?” I asked, pointing to one of the many stops listed on the itinerary.
“Let me see.” Aunt Minnie slipped on the pair of bifocal glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. She peered down at the list and spouted, “Okay, we’ve got the turkey, gizzards and hot and sweet
saus-seige
from Arturo the Butcher; potatoes and parsley, pinnolis and lemons from Dutchy at the
veg-a-table
stand; cannolis and strufuli from Palermo’s… With the cod, you tell Giacomo that I want four
fill-its
, as big as my hand, half-inch thick.” She gestured at the length of her palm then held up her thumb and forefinger to demonstrate what she meant.
“
Fill-its
? Do you mean
fillets
, as in fish fillets?”
“Yes, fill-its…fillets.” She waved her hands in the air as if to brush off what she considered to be my ridiculous pronunciation. “No worries… Just tell Giacomo I sent you. He’ll know what to do. Now, you go.
Andiamo
.”
She pressed her rusty, folded up rolling shopping cart against my hip and practically pushed me down the concrete front stoop of her brownstone.
Oh, what have I gotten myself into!
A canopy of withering leaves clung to branches above me as that rusted shopping cart jiggled and shuddered. The wheels bumped loudly down each concrete step that led to the sidewalk.
“Okay, smile!” she hollered.
When I turned, there was my silver-haired aunt standing in the doorway. The mid-day November gloom was brightened by the faded yellow and blue flowers dotting her housedress. With her arms outstretched, her cane draped over her elbow, she snapped a picture of me with her Smartphone.
Enthusiasm oozed through her tone as she said, “I’m documenting our whole weekend together for my blog.”
“Since when do
you
have a blog?”
“Since I took a class at the Senior Center. You’re not the only creative one in this family, you know.”
“Well, let me teach you how to use my camera?”
“No. I don’t want to use that big complicated thing. Besides, no cameras for you this weekend—you promised.” She wagged a finger at me to reinforce her point. “You need a couple days of vacation from all that. And you need to live your life like a normal person for once.”
“Normal?” I let out a big, walloping guffaw. “And would you call a computer and Smartphone-savvy 96-year-old
normal
?”
She smirked.
Beneath a low mid-morning sky, cluttered with stubborn gray clouds, golden orange and red leaves from the tree-lined street sputtered down. They sent up a
swooshing
sound as a fierce gust of chilly fall wind scattered them across the pavement. I looked over my shoulder at Aunt Minnie who stood framed in the doorway, leaning on her cane.
“Burrrrrr! It’s cold out here,” she said. “Feels like snow.”
She bundled her ratty old cardigan sweater over her housecoat while I gathered my Polar fleece jacket around my neck to buffet against the chill. I blew warm air into my cupped hands.
“What exactly is a chiropodist anyway?” I asked.
My aunt raised one leg, pointing the tip of one of her orthopedic shoes my way, trying to do what looked like an elderly-looking version of a Rockette kick. “Foot doctor. I think you young people call it a podiatrist nowadays,” she said. “Need to have my
tootsies
tended to.”
Great-Aunt Minnie was the last of a dying breed—literally. She had never married and had long outlived every member of her immediate family. I was an only child and, with both of my parents now gone, Aunt Minnie, who was actually my father’s aunt, was a last vestige of an immediate blood-line family for me, and vice-versa. I found myself clinging to her more and more tightly as the years went on. She was like a rare and treasured antique, one that required continued care and maintenance, and I was eager to help preserve her longevity—even if it meant I’d have to muster more patience than readily available to my good nature.
Aunt Minnie was a woman of great contradiction. One part of her—the part that was never without her Smartphone and had a propensity for blogging—was updated for the 21st century. While the other part was steeped in the tenets of
The Old World
. It would’ve been nice, and it certainly would’ve made my life a lot easier, if the two worlds could’ve overlapped someplace in between evoking Aunt Minnie’s belief in contemporary American supermarkets.
“Too many germs,” she’d told me. “And the way the world is today, I can’t afford to take any chances. And I want to know who I’m buying from, so if they foul things up, I can go back and hit the
stu-nod
over the head with my cane.”
I might have only been 32 years-old, but I had lived long enough to realize that Aunt Minnie must’ve been doing
something
right to have lived, relatively healthy, on the planet for nine and a half decades, long before the advent of hand sanitizer, maybe even antibiotics. But her resistance to the concept of one-stop shopping would have me traipsing all over Federal Hill, a tiny enclave nestled in downtown Providence, Rhode Island where Aunt Minnie had lived—in the same house—her whole life. I’d have to hurry, as her list would have me stopping at little old-fashioned grocers and specialty stores tucked on side-streets in order to gather what she needed to assemble her Thanksgiving Day feast…and all in an hour.
Not an easy task.
I had been on a photo assignment in Iraq, so I hadn’t been back to see Aunt Minnie for almost a three month stretch. It was a longer absence than usual. As I dragged her grudging shopping cart behind me along Atwells Avenue, brittle fall leaves scuffling under my feet, I took note of how much the neighborhood had changed throughout the years. When I was a kid, Federal Hill was a small, repressed community, home to poor, immigrant Italians proudly sporting red, white and green flags everywhere. But in the years that I had studied photography at R.I.S.D, aka the Rhode Island School of Design—and stopped over to have dinner with Aunt Minnie once a week
and
do a couple of loads of laundry—it had slowly started to experience a resurgence. In the years since I had graduated, it had morphed into an upscale, quarter-mile square neighborhood still deemed as Little Italy—but of late, the world of the past and that of the present had started to collide. Upscale international eateries, high-end trattorias, pasticcerias, gelaterias, as well as exclusive fashion boutiques and art galleries, had been popping up everywhere.
Places such as these were not on my radar that morning, as Aunt Minnie had sent me on a mission to find the old world in the new. I followed her shopping list, which she’d organized so that I could make all the stops in the most efficient use of time.
The meat market was packed. But when Arturo, the butcher, heard the front door bell chime and saw me enter, he spouted my full name, “Anna Maria,” and with open arms he hurried around the high counter showcasing bright-red marbled cuts of ripe red beef, pork and veal. His blood-stained, long white lab-like coat didn’t deter him from winding his way through the bustling crowd and greeting me with a kiss and a bear hug. I towered over him.
“If it isn’t the prettiest world traveler.” He rose on tiptoes to plant a wet one on my check. “I bet you’ve got a guy in every port?”
“Yup. And you’re my number one fella whenever I’m back in Federal Hill.”
“Stop. You’re making me blush,” Arturo winked, his face bright beneath the shock of his white hair.
We soon settled down to business. After he handed me a heavy shopping bag filled with the turkey, giblet and sausage, and I stuffed it inside Aunt Minnie’s shopping cart, I went on my way.
I received a similar greeting from Dutchie, a paunchy little man with thinning hair and a dazzling smile who tended a tiny little vegetable store tucked off DePasquale Plaza.
“Where’s Minnie?” Dutchie asked at the first sight of me. The rustic-looking, wooden cart parked outside his store was stacked to overflowing with fresh fruit and produce more colorful than a rainbow.
“She’s already cooking up a storm for Thanksgiving. I’m her personalized shopper for today,” I told him, while he gave me a European-style kiss on each cheek. Traces of garlic filled my nostrils.
“Well, God bless her. She’s a little workhorse. She’s gonna outlive us all—at least until she can dance the Tarantella at your wedding.”
“Wedding?” I laughed, feeling my eyebrows crinkle and a wave of nervousness and dread rise up inside of me. “Do you know something I don’t know?”
“We’re always hoping, Anna Maria.” Dutchie held up his short, stubby hands, fingers crossed, then he pressed his palms together tall as if to steeple them in prayer. “You can’t let one bum ruin you for the rest of mankind.”
“He wasn’t a bum. But, I know. I hear you.” I swept my gaze off his, not really wanting to discuss my love life, or lack thereof, with the produce man and especially not over a bunch of green beans, Brussels sprouts and shiny red and green apples. But from Dutchie’s comment, I got the sense that the whole neighborhood probably knew about my romantic tales of woe, namely my broken engagement.
I quickly bid Dutchie goodbye. With a brown paper bag bursting with potatoes and veggies set atop the bundles from the butcher shop, I hurried off to Palermo’s Pastry Shop.
The pasticceria was mobbed and infused with the scent of espresso and warm, fresh-baked bread and cookies. I weaved my way through the crowd and ripped a ticket from a dispenser on top of the counter. It was set alongside a tray filled with samples of cookie and cake crumbles. I helped myself and while my palate detected the crunchy sweetness of a chocolate dipped, almond biscotti, I looked at my ticket. Number 776. The electronic tote-board climbed to 770.
I checked my watch. I’d already used up thirty-eight minutes on my first two errands. With six more people in front of me on the line, I hoped I could finish up here, get those
fill-its
at the fish store and be back to Aunt Minnie’s place in the twenty-two minutes that were remaining. My aunt’s idea of being
on time
was actually arriving places ten or fifteen minutes early. Aware of that, I tried to mentally slow down the clock by studying the sparkling glass cases bursting with an array of artful-looking cakes, tortes, pastries and cookies. I was starving by now and, with the sample cookie having whet my appetite, I was tempted to order one of everything. But when the owner, Carmela Palermo finally called my number, I stuck to Aunt Minnie’s script and ordered exactly what she had written down—four cannolis, two rum baba and two lobster claw pastries, and a dozen pignoli nut cookies.