Dolci di Love (11 page)

‘I think she's had too much to drink, dear,' Lily heard the woman say, to her complete mortification.

It was the grappa. She'd have been fine if she'd stuck to just wine. The grappa had been too strong and had unsettled her equilibrium.
She just needed to find her car and get back to Violetta's to lie down on those crackling apricot sheets. She'd got carried away coming up with her plan and it had been foolish to accept a liqueur on an empty stomach. She just needed to sleep, then everything would be all right.

When she felt steady enough on her feet she retraced her steps and miraculously found her car, failing on the first few attempts to get the key in the lock, but finally opening the door and sliding into the driver's seat.

She got the key into the ignition but couldn't find the lights and as she hunched over the dashboard, stabbing at different levers and buttons, Dermott lit up like a Christmas tree.

‘Please, please, I beg you, don't sweep this one under the carpet,' he urged her in his Irish lilt. ‘Please, please, I beg you.'

‘You have got to be kidding me!' Lily cried, collapsing on the steering wheel, her arms flung around it, her head dropping on to them. It was too much. It was all just too much. Everyone was against her: Rose, Daniel, Carlotta, the tiramisu, and now even Dermott, whom she'd trusted with her life. Her life!

‘I thought you were my friend,' she told him tiredly. ‘You're supposed to be my friend.'

He didn't reply but he didn't have to. Lily knew when she was beat. She closed her eyes and slept.

V
ioletta sat back in her chair and wondered if she would ever be in a good mood again. Everything hurt.

‘Tell us once more what happened,' she said tiredly to the widow Del Grasso.

‘I told you, Lily went to Poliziano and had two glasses of prosecco, then got caught up in Signora Borsolini firing someone again, but she ended up at Alberto's, just as we planned.'

‘Well, if she ended up at Alberto's just as we planned, why don't we know where she is now?'

‘I waited outside for as long as I could,' the widow Del Grasso said, ‘but nature called and I was only gone for a moment. I used the restroom at the souvenir shop, and then I suppose I, well, I got confused and then, I, then she…a person can only hold on for so long, you know.'

‘Yes, yes,' Violetta said impatiently, who among them could not attest to how long, or otherwise, a person could hold on for these days. ‘It's all right, widow Del Grasso, of course it is, but widow Mazzetti, I wonder if we need a new rule to cover this business of going to the bathroom. It's not going to get any better.'

‘You and your rules!' chortled Fiorella. ‘How about a rule to stop having more rules? You can only eat
cantucci
, you have to
wear black, you're not allowed to use the bathroom while you're snooping, and what else?'

‘You must have known the true love of a decent man,' piped up the widow Mazzetti, who took the question seriously. ‘That's actually the first one.'

‘Yup, I got that,' said Fiorella.

‘To benefit from the work of the League, to qualify as a
calzino rotto
, you must have a good heart and a clear conscience,' continued the widow Mazzetti.

‘A clear conscience? Hmm. Tricky. Yes, but understandable.'

‘And our assistance is a special one-time-only offer,' the widow Pacini added. ‘That one's quite new.'

‘What's that about?'

‘That's about a lovely seamstress we found for a pig farmer out near Aquaviva,' the widow Mazzetti explained, ‘back in late November 1982, if memory serves me correctly, and it was an extremely good match. They would have been very happy, but he left the poor woman when she became ill and was advised to give up eating meat.'

‘Doctor's orders,' cried two other widows simultaneously. They lived in fear of the same thing happening to them.

‘The pig farmer said there were some things on which he could not compromise,' the widow Mazzetti went on, ‘and refusal to eat pork was one of them.'

‘He went straight back to being sad and lonely,' Luciana added, ‘but started dropping hints left, right and centre to everyone he came upon about being on the lookout for another wife, but one with better bowels. It caused quite a stir.'

Quite a stir, indeed. Two of the widows (the two most keen on swine goods, it had to be said) wanted to give him another chance, four more wanted to shoot those two, four others wanted to shoot the pig farmer, and the whole question of who deserved love and who didn't was debated hotly for weeks.

‘The end result,' explained the widow Mazzetti, ‘was that we voted on a regulation declaring that we would help the downhearted once, but if they blew it, they were on their own.'

‘A separate clause,' added Violetta, ‘mooted by Luciana, seconded by me, widely supported, and added as a note, was that love is all about compromise.'

She looked at her sister, who looked straight back. They had barely spoken a civil word since their quarrel about the
cantucci
. Just what Violetta needed: another lump in her throat.

‘What if she'd just chosen to not eat meat?' Fiorella asked. ‘The Aquaviva pig farmer's wife. Would we have had more sympathy for the pig farmer then?'

‘Yes, of course,' said half the women in the room.

‘No, not at all,' said the other half.

Another spirited debate was about to break out, and not in a good way, so Violetta called the group to attention with a single bellow.

‘It would behoove us all to remember,' she went on, quite menacingly, glowering at Fiorella in particular, ‘that when a single sock goes missing, it is sometimes never found. This is a catastrophe for the sock that remains. We have just let such a sock slip through our net, so now is not the time to stand around causing trouble and nitpicking. Now is the time to remedy this disaster.'

The widow Del Grasso took this opportunity to sneak off to the bathroom and have a good cry. It was her eyes, her pesky, cloudy, failing eyes. She'd sat on her glasses the month before and couldn't afford new ones. The truth was that after she'd been to the restroom, she had thought she was following Lily out of Alberto's wine shop but was practically inside one of the washing machines up at the Laundromat on the other side of town before she realised the person she was following was actually much younger, much shorter, and had much more gingery hair than Lily.

It was the white pants. She had simply followed the white pants and it had been her undoing.

Back in the main room, the door from behind the baptismal font burst open and the widow Ciacci bustled in, red-faced and wheezing. She'd spent the past few hours looking for Alberto, her grandson, and had finally tracked him down to a poker den behind the
piazza grande
. Of course he knew where the
bella
blonde was headed, he proudly told his grandmother.

‘She's in Castelmuzio,' she reported breathlessly to her friends. ‘Or Montefollonico. Or Pienza.'

‘My sister lives in Castelmuzio,' spoke up one widow. ‘I could make a few discreet inquiries with her.'

‘I know the baker in Montefollonico,' said another. ‘I could try him.'

‘My cousin's a waiter in Pienza,' the widow Del Grasso said, entering the room again, red-eyed but hopeful she could undo some of the damage she had caused. ‘His wife's a bit of a battle-axe and won't like it if I call this late, but I can try anyway.'

I
ngrid and Daniel sat across the table from each other at an outdoor table in the Piazza della Signoria. They had both ordered grilled tuna with asparagus sauce, but only Ingrid was eating.

‘You know, I think Florence might just be my favourite spot in all the world,' she said, taking a sip of her wine. ‘What about you?'

‘I'm not sure,' Daniel answered, pushing his food around the plate. He had no appetite for anything.

Ingrid eyed him, weighing whether she should stick another oar into his murky waters or leave him to it. His earlier emotional outburst had ended without explanation. He'd simply stopped weeping, excused himself, and emerged a half hour later looking perfectly normal.

Still, in her opinion, Daniel Turner was a study in a broken man doing an almost OK job of holding himself together. He had a good heart, she could tell that as easily as she could tell an avocado was ripe just by squeezing it. But he was in trouble.

Part of her, the vacationing part, just wanted to enjoy having lunch with a handsome man and then wander across the Ponte Vecchio to the Boboli Gardens like a normal tourist. But another part of her, the mothering part, wanted to know what had happened to him and to see if there was anything she could do to help.

She remembered a day from a darker part of her past when she had abandoned her little boys at home untended and ran to a nearby park where she hid on a bench, sobbing, until her elderly neighbour happened upon her. She'd have left them forever, she thought, if not for Mrs. McArthur's sage advice that sometimes getting to the end of the day without killing anyone was as good as it got—but that was still pretty good.

They'd held hands, she and her ancient widowed neighbour, until Ingrid felt the return of a little fault line of love for her noisy children and her distracted husband. Then the two of them had gone home, and Mrs. McArthur had helped her feed and bathe the little boys and put them to bed.

Sometimes, thought Ingrid, all you needed was someone to tell you that not committing a heinous crime was a major achievement.

She put down her knife and fork and leaned across the table to take Daniel's chin in her hand, lifting his eyes to meet hers. ‘Look at me,' she instructed. ‘I'm not interested in making anything difficult for you, so you can just relax, OK? I'm meeting my husband, whom I adore, back in Milan when his conference finishes and you'll never see me or hear from me again, but in the meantime I'd like to enjoy my outrageously overpriced lunch in this sensational part of the world so just indulge me a little, will you?'

‘I'm sorry, Ingrid,' Daniel said, pulling away from her grasp. ‘I really am. I'm just not good company at the moment.'

She thought about asking if he wanted her advice but decided she would just give it to him anyway.

‘You are a charming, good-looking man in your prime, Daniel. You should be the best company there is. Do you want to tell me whatever it is that's wrong? Fifty-three years on the planet, thirty of them happily married to the same flawed but lovable individual, I know a thing or two. Maybe I can help.'

He liked that she told him her age because she certainly didn't look fifty-three. He smiled, and as his face relaxed, so did some other part of him.

‘You say you're happily married yet you're here in Florence with me,' he said, half joking.

‘I'm not “with” you in a way that would worry my husband,' Ingrid said. ‘I'm worried about you. And I didn't say my marriage was perfect, I don't think any marriage is, but mine is definitely happy. How we get there is our own business. I have my ways and no doubt Richard has his, but the point is, we do get there.'

Daniel could so easily picture Ingrid and her doctor husband, laughing over a bowl of pasta and a bottle of red in their big, warm Boston house, their sons dropping by to visit their old rooms, bringing girlfriends, laundry, stories of life outside the nest. He envied her. He envied all of them.

‘My wife could not have children,' he said. ‘We tried for years, but for whatever reason, it was not to be.'

‘I am sorry to hear that,' Ingrid said.

‘We tried to adopt,' Daniel continued. ‘Privately, through an agency. Through three, actually. For a few years there, every time the phone rang, I swear…' He stopped, remembering the look on Lily's face when the call would inevitably be about something other than a pregnant woman wanting them to be the parents of her unborn baby.

‘She wanted to be a mom more than anything else in the world and it just never happened,' he said.

Ingrid pushed aside her plate, thinking of the ease with which she had produced those three sensitive boys.

‘I can't imagine how difficult that must have been,' she said.

‘It gets worse,' said Daniel. ‘The phone call finally did come one day. Brittany, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, had seen our file and chosen Lily and me to bring up her baby, so a month later
we headed down there, drove straight to the hospital and met our newborn daughter, Grace.'

‘Oh, Daniel!' His smile broke Ingrid's heart.

‘Just watching Lily pick up that little bundle,' he said. ‘Seeing that she finally had what she'd dreamed of for so long and tried so hard to get—Jesus.'

He broke off. Shook away the memory.

Ingrid thought about reaching across and taking his hand but instead stayed silent, ready to listen.

‘We visited her, the baby, over the next couple of days in the hospital and then we were able to take her ourselves to this little place Lily had rented, all cute and homely, you know, with a rocking chair and…anyway, she was such a natural, my wife, you'd have sworn she'd had a tribe of kids already. It was incredible to watch, it really was. I was in awe of her. It was like looking at a whole new person. She was just made to be a mom.'

She'd had six-day-old Grace in a papoose slung around her front when the phone call from Brittany's lawyer came. Daniel was making a snack in the kitchen and Lily was out in the garden.

According to Tennessee law, on the sixth day of a baby's life, the new parents could become legal guardians, the first step toward adoption. Daniel and Lily were headed to the attorney's office to sign the papers that afternoon.

But on the sixth day of a baby's life, the birth mother could also change her mind, and that's what Brittany did. She changed her mind.

As the attorney explained, Brittany's maternal grandmother had been kept in the dark about the pregnancy but had somehow gotten wind of it and then made a visit to her granddaughter, putting the fear of God into the twenty-two-year-old about abandoning her ‘issue' to total strangers.

Brittany lived in a trailer with her unemployed boyfriend, who was not Grace's father. She had told Lily she wanted to go to college and become a teacher, but that she couldn't do it with a baby, and she wanted her baby to have a better life than she'd had.

Still, she'd changed her mind.

Daniel could not even begin to think of this without seeing his wife curled around that papoose, the noise coming out of her soft, so as not to frighten Grace, but from so deep within her, it still made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Lily had wanted to take the baby and run, to go to Mexico or Australia or somewhere, anywhere, where she could keep what she had found in her week of being Grace's mother.

Daniel had said little, knowing that this was an impossible solution, knowing also that however she felt right now, his wife would not ultimately deprive Brittany of her own shot at motherhood.

Eventually, he figured, she would hush up and let him take Baby Grace to the lawyer's office so they could hand her over like a neatly wrapped parcel being returned to a store.

He was right. Lily's tears dried, she packed up all the baby's things, and they drove in empty silence across town to the ugly little building where Brittany was waiting. The grandmother was there, scowling and looking dangerous, while Brittany's face remained as blank as milk as she took sleeping Grace awkwardly in her arms.

‘Keep her safe,' Lily said, and that was all.

They got in the car and drove, again in silence, straight to the airport, stopping once for Lily to throw up, and a second time for her to dispose of the car seat they'd brought with them and used twice: once to bring Grace home from the hospital and once to deliver her back to who knew what.

Lily put it carefully in a dumpster outside a fast-food restaurant.

‘We won't be needing that,' she said when she got back in the car, and she didn't say much else for the rest of the journey. Or the day. Or in fact, the next week.

She hushed up all right. And she stayed that way.