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“Sara Marsala. Buongiorno. Come stai? Spero tutto bene.” I translated in my head. Good morning. How are you? I hope all is well.
The meatball kissed both of my cheeks like we were old friends and switched to a heavily accented English.
“I am so sorry for the loss of Rosie. Such a woman! A good friend. A compadre.”
His intimacy surprised me. “You knew Rosie?”
“Of course I knew Rosie. We spoke many times on the computer and the WhatsApp. Many times. She was looking for a driver for you, but she got a friend in me.” He pounded on his chest like a proud ape.
I wanted to interrogate him, to know everything they talked about, what saucy jokes she served up, whether she flirted with him the way she did with gas station attendants, bank tellers, and supermarket cashiers, whether she told him all the things she never got to tell me.
“Rosie is the best.” He said it like an indisputable fact.
“She is.” I managed. “She was.”
“Let me feed you. She would want me to feed you.” Before I knew it, he’d led me by the elbow to a small outdoor café just past the taxi line. He introduced himself properly while we walked. “I am Pippo.” It was pronounced Peep-poh. He drilled down hard on the last syllable like it was a surprise, a puppet jumping out of a jack-in-the-box. Pippo abandoned me at an unsteady table for two and quickly returned with a tiny paper cup of espresso and a soft sugary doughnut the size of a baby’s head.
“Ciambella!” He announced the name of the pastry like he was presenting me with an Oscar.
I could almost see my reflection in the pastry’s thick sheen of butter before I devoured it in seconds. For the past couple of months nothing had tasted good. In fact, almost everything I put in my mouth since I learned I’d have to close the restaurant tasted like cardboard. Eating, once my greatest joy, turned into the most mundane activity of my day. The ciambella was the first time in a long time that I actually derived pleasure from something.
“Your aunt was very proud of you. She sent me this.”
He reached into his bag and I knew what he was gonna pull out before he showed me.
“You are famous in America. The queen of meat!”
The Philadelphia magazine cover with my face on it was a printout from last year’s July issue when La Macellaia won an award for the best new steak house in Philly. The photographer for the piece, a hawk-nosed twentysomething in thick glasses and a polka-dot dress that smelled like an old lady’s closet, asked me to grab the biggest knife I could find. On the cover I’m brandishing a massive meat cleaver over a pearly pink pig belly ready to coax a coppa steak out of an obstinate pork shoulder. Given the state of world affairs, a lot of people saw a picture like that and created a story about empowerment and agency and how the future really was female. Others hated it, particularly the establishment chefs who thought I got recognized only because I was a woman.
I once thought I looked strong and powerful in that cover photo. I loved everything about being a butcher and a chef and owning my own business. I loved the little ecosystem of local farmers that I could pay a fair wage for their meat. Success for me was never about being on a magazine cover, though I did get off a little seeing my picture on newsstands. Success for me had always been about feeding the people in my neighborhood really good food, sometimes things they had no idea they’d love until I convinced them to try them. I relished the art of carving a perfect steak, of knowing exactly how to slice any cut of meat to find the most tender and juicy morsel. My restaurant gave me a purpose, made me feel useful, needed, and loved.
Yet, when I saw the picture of myself in Pippo’s hands, I cringed. Look at that ridiculous woman holding a knife as a prop, someone in costume. That’s not me, I wanted to say. Not anymore. The picture had come to represent what can happen when, for once in your life, you thought you actually deserved all the nice things that were happening to you. In the end I had wanted too much. I wanted success and love, a career and a child, a marriage and freedom.
I’d wanted it all and I’d ended up with nothing.
The article didn’t mention that my restaurant was leveraged to the hilt, that I’d maxed out all my credit cards to keep it going, to keep expanding the space, building out the back deck and a bigger kitchen. It didn’t say that no banks wanted to give me another loan, that our landlord, a skeezy slumlord who owned half of South Philly, tripled the rent after I won Best in Philly and then charged me extra for all the renovations I’d done, claiming he hadn’t approved them. The magazine never printed the rumors started by my competitors, the ones that said I sourced my meat from disgusting factories instead of the local farms printed on our menus. I had no idea winning that award would shatter the eggshell egos of the mostly male chefs in the meat industry who had previously treated me like a precocious little sister. Those kinds of whispers in such a close-knit business quickly turn to murmurs and then shouts and then accepted truths. Most of my competitors found a certain amount of glee in declaring me a fraud, and maybe they were right because I had screwed it up. I’d been sloppy with the renovations, taken shortcuts, ignored codes, in order to get everything done in time, to expand, to make more money, so I could finally take a break and enjoy the life I had built. But the truth about the restaurant business is that you never get to slow down. So when someone called the inspectors on me I didn’t stand a chance. They fined me for violating three archaic codes. It was the final straw for my investors, who had already stopped putting up any more cash because we didn’t see fast enough returns. The restaurant failed because of me and in spite of me. Both things can be true.
But that was too much to explain to a stranger in an airport parking lot and my heart surged a little remembering how proud Aunt Rosie had been when I was on the cover of that magazine. I managed a humble smile for Pippo and shrugged like it wasn’t that big of a deal before attempting a change of subject.
“You must have much better restaurants here in Sicily. And you probably know the best ones with your job, with showing people around. You’re a taxi driver?” I asked.
“I drive here in Palermo, but mostly longer trips. Foreigners, especially Americans, do not like driving here in Sicily. None of you can drive a manual and we do not have many automatic rentals for you. How do you live your lives without knowing how to drive a real car?” When he grinned, I noticed he was missing his left incisor, which would have made him look menacing if his smile weren’t so wide and honest.
I didn’t tell him I could drive stick; Rosie had taught me in her pristine Mustang convertible. We began lessons when I was ten because Rosie said you never knew when you’d need to “get the hell out of Dodge.” We were the same height by then, so reaching the pedals wasn’t a problem for me.
Pippo nodded to the box I placed on the seat next to me. “You brought Rosie with you?”
He said it as though she sat in the seat next to me on the plane, sipping a chilled martini.
“I did.”
“She told me she wanted her ashes to be scattered in the town where her relatives were from. Is it close to here?”
“The village of Caltabellessa. It is ninety kilometers south,” he explained.
Less than sixty miles. “A quick drive.”
“The roads here are different than in America. Not so good. And the traffic will be bad. We will be there in two hours, maybe three. But the views are spectacular, the most beautiful you will ever see.”
