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I kissed him again, opening my mouth and letting my tongue meet his. It lasted longer this time, both of us losing ourselves in the moment. He kissed differently than Gio, surer of himself, confident and strong where Gio was always fumbling like a boy. Marco scooped me into his arms, careful with my broken body, and carried me over to the floor in front of the fire. I groaned into his ear as his hands roamed over my body, my hips, the softness of my belly. He stopped just shy of my breasts and I placed my own hand over his and guided it where I wanted him to touch me, laying his palm flat against my nipple, needing his mouth to follow.
“I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” he whispered into my neck.
“Me too,” I managed through lips desperate to be kissed again.
A sound. A bump in the other room. I sat up so quickly that a sharp pain shot through my side. Marco was already on his feet and back in the kitchen, as quick as a wild cat. I hoisted myself onto a chair and into a more respectable position, listening to the sounds of the house. There was only silence.
But that bump, whatever it was, made me imagine my boys walking out of their room to find their mother sprawled in front of the fireplace, just inches from where they ate their meals, entwined with a man who was not their father.
“You should go,” I said to the floor.
“I should go,” he replied out the window, not looking at me either.
I stood and walked over to him, turned his face to mine. “Thank you for coming. Thank you for helping with the bandage. Tell Cettina I will be by in the morning with pastries and gossip.”
I placed a hand on the small of his back to usher him over to the door and gave him a nudge. He was nearly out when I stopped him and handed over a bundle of mortadella and cheese to take home to his wife. “In case anyone wonders why you came. You were picking up a gift for my friend.”
He took the package and, along with it, my hand. I worried he would kiss me again, and if he did I knew that despite this being my best friend’s husband, despite what people would say, despite my own marriage vows and my children so nearby, I would not be able to stop. I would drag him back to my small room at the top of the stairs and never let him leave my bed.
“I do not regret it” was all he said, clutching my fingers and then brushing his lips over my knuckles before he walked out the door.
“This can never happen again,” I whispered to his back. I knew he heard me, but I also knew that my words were wishful thinking. Of course it would happen again. We’d started something neither of us could undo.
FIFTEEN
SARA
I parked Fina’s car outside the city walls and stumbled toward the hotel, sneaking glances behind me as I approached the medieval gate. Did someone follow me? There was no one in the lot, nothing at all except an overflowing dumpster, a few cars, and a mangy calico cat missing a leg.
I wanted to crash hard into my bed, but something made me pause next to the empty front desk of the hotel, at the door leading to Giusy’s private residence. I grabbed the knob without thinking about it, assuming it would be locked, but the metal of the old brass turned easily beneath my palm.
Outside the hotel walls, a dog yapped, a baby yelled, a young woman shouted for her friends to join her for drinks. Sounds of the town awakening for the evening. Part of me expected Giusy to materialize as I waltzed into her home, but no one appeared to reprimand me. I flinched as I flicked on the lights, mistaking a coatrack for a tall, reedy man. My nerves were as taut as well-tuned guitar strings. Things could have gone much worse for me down in the olive grove. The adrenaline had finally drained down to my toes, leaving only a residue of exhaustion blanketing my entire body.
Giusy was keeping secrets from me. She should have told me her cousin owned that land. That much I knew. I pulled the handle of a drawer, which meant I was fully committing to snooping. It was stuffed so full of crumpled receipts that it opened only halfway and I shoved it closed again. Perfectly sharpened knives lined the back wall of the kitchen on a magnetic strip. I could see my reflection in the blades, dried blood dripping down the top of my forehead onto my cheek. The gash was gnarly enough that I should have felt more pain. I reached behind me and touched the sticky warm blood still coating the backs of my legs. I had to clean myself up.
There were no paper towels anywhere in sight. I looked below the sink but found only bleach and a gallon of white vinegar. Aunt Rose used to tell me that white vinegar could clean anything. She was right, but it also made everything smell like a sad desk salad. I went into the bathroom to wash up instead and wiped the blood away with some rough toilet paper that felt like sandpaper. The wound on my head was much bigger than I thought and was going to need some kind of Band-Aid to stop the bleeding. Surely Giusy had to have a first aid kit around for guests. I wandered up the narrow stairs to the bedrooms and let myself in to what I assumed was Giusy’s room. A massive four-poster king-size bed dominated the modest space. Brightly colored clothes littered the floor like spilled Skittles.
A framed photo on her dresser caught my eye. It was the only one in the room. Giusy and Fina, their arms wrapped around their sun-kissed shoulders. Each of them beaming into the camera. They were clearly close, but what did this photo in Giusy’s bedroom mean? Were they simply friends? Were they lovers? It felt like another mystery Giusy was keeping from me.
Every other inch of her dresser was covered in expensive makeup that I figured she stole from her guests. MAC lipsticks, Chanel eye pencils in every color of the rainbow, Yves Saint Laurent powder at least two shades too light for Giusy’s skin. A part of me adored the idea of her pocketing these treasures that no one would ever truly miss but that she would covet. It also reminded me that she was a thief. An unwrapped Band-Aid curled among the detritus, along with a wrapped tampon and a half-empty dial of birth control pills. One Band-Aid wouldn’t be enough, so I scanned the surface for another and noticed the end of a large one being used as a bookmark in a leather-bound book. The cover of the book was a deep bloodred, faded, scratched, mottled, and pockmarked with oil and water stains. It reminded me of the church registry, only smaller. Folded pieces of white paper fluttered to my feet when I picked it up. When I looked at the floor, I saw my own face staring up at me, a printout of the cover of Philadelphia mag. The queen of meat. The whole story was there, as well as every review of La Macellaia ever written, from the smallest blogs to the three-bell review from Craig LaBan in the Inquirer. There was even the Instagram account of the influencer who complained that once the restaurant expanded I didn’t come out of the kitchen and greet the diners enough. It was highlighted where she called me an uppity upstart with a stick in my ass. The words on the pages blurred and then slowly came back into focus like a kaleidoscope being turned too quickly. Giusy had also printed out an online real estate report for our row home with the estimated price and square footage. There was a map with the location of Sophie’s school and another of Jack’s office. A wild rage rushed through me even though all of it was publicly available in a deep-cut Google search. I felt exposed. Filleted.
My hands trembled when I opened Giusy’s diary to where the Band-Aid was lodged. The lines were filled with tiny tight script. Curiosity replaced some of my unease. A bunch of pages had been ripped out, leaving ragged edges inside the margins.
I stopped at a date—1924. There was no way this book belonged to Giusy.
I flipped backward to 1918. Finally, I made it to the first page. Her name was written on the inside cover.
Goddamn it, Giusy. As usual she was so many steps ahead of me. Of course she knew much more than she let on about everything I was here to learn. I traced my fingertip, still wet with my blood, along the name.
Serafina Forte.
—
There are stories we tell about women. The same stories get retold over and over with different characters in different times, but all containing striking similarities. The story I knew about my family’s matriarch was the story of a saint, a martyr, a mother, a wife. A stock character, really. A duty-bound woman who waited patiently for her wandering husband. How many of those kinds of women populate history books and great novels? A sexless being, free of passion. She was a vessel of purity who bore and raised strong children. For generations, we passed down the parts of her that the storytellers found appealing.
But none of that was true. Or all of it was true, but it was only part of her story.
These myths rarely define a woman by what she does or produces or how she contributes to the world. What really defined Serafina? Before I began reading her diary, I tried to drop myself into her life a hundred years ago. It wasn’t so hard since, for the most part, this village remained largely unchanged. At first, I imagined her as incredibly lonely with her husband far away in la Mérica as she wrote it. But once I began reading, I saw no trace of loneliness in her words. She wrote in dialect, which I discovered was much easier to read than to understand when someone was speaking. Her diary revealed a life full of friends and work. She mostly described the things she did to heal people, a part of her life that no one in my family had ever talked about. She delivered babies, both human and beast. She healed burns and scars, strange diseases. She wrote down recipes for ointments or tinctures. There was a list of ten children, none of them her own, who had been lost to a particularly violent strain of the flu.
