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I lapped up the last drips of espresso. Two to three hours before I could lie down and get some real sleep. I could smell myself. I needed a bath and a real meal of something besides butter and sugar.
“We’d better get going, then.”
“Would you like to see anything in Palermo before we go? I can take you on a walking tour of the historic district, through the beautiful Quattro Canti, a masterpiece of baroque architecture. We have the very best cathedral, the most spectacular palace. Our Capuchin Catacombs are much more interesting than the ones in Rome, not so big, but much better. And there is the Teatro Massimo, the third-largest theater in Europe, and the fish market. Oh, you must see the fish market.”
I cut him off more abruptly than I meant to.
“I’d love to get to the town while it’s still daylight,” I said with all the conviction I could muster even though I knew Rosie would have wanted me to linger. Maybe it was lack of sleep. Maybe it was the intense familiarity this man seemed to have with my dead aunt, but I was on edge and ready to know exactly how this story would unspool. I hated surprises as much as Rosie loved them.
Pippo mumbled something in Italian under his breath but stood quickly, slinging my battered old duffel over his shoulder and gesturing to a shiny yellow Fiat parked practically on the curb.
Traffic around Palermo was a special breed of chaos. There might have been lines on the freeway but they were clearly a suggestion since no one acknowledged them. Cars and motor scooters wove in and out of them without using turn signals. With its rugged cliffs leading to faded golden hills tripping down to the sea, the landscape reminded me of Northern California where Jack and I once went to the wedding of one of his colleagues. We’d snuck out after dessert and had sex in the crumbling old wine cave, passing out naked and surprising the vintner with a view of our bright white butts in the air first thing in the morning. The memory brought me a twinge of joy before I could catch myself.
I let my hand float out of Pippo’s car window and bobbed my head up and down to an Italian pop song with the English refrain “Baby, you ate my heart.”
The same vines and olive trees they had in Sonoma terraced the Sicilian mountains, except instead of neat rows of grapevines, these plants trailed up the hills in chaotic clusters, interspersed with fat palm trees and prickly pear cacti.
When Pippo pulled over for gas and a pee, I called Carla, and despite the early hour in Philly, she answered right away.
“How’s your road trip with Aunt Rose?”
“Great. We’re just arguing over who gets to be Louise and who has to be Thelma.”
Carla flicked a lighter. Both of us had recently started smoking again and we were trying to hide it from everyone else. I did it because of the stress. Carla did it in silent protest against her wife’s ultra marathon training. I could picture my gorgeous older sister inhaling on her back patio, her two boys about to wake up for school. She probably had a black leather jacket wrapped around her slight frame, her curly red hair loose and messy. Carla began dressing like Mick Jagger when she was fifteen: spandex pants, tight T-shirts, and tiny leather jackets. At thirty-nine not much had changed even though she was a fancy-ass lawyer now.
“You’re so Thelma. You would never have done this unless Rosie made you. I feel like a good old-fashioned road trip is exactly what she had in mind. An adventure for the two of you.”
“Rose even hired a driver.”
“I bet Rosie made a bunch of secret money in the end at the slots. She loved the slots.”
“Maybe.”
“Is the driver hot?”
“He’s, like, Dad’s age.”
“Which means he would definitely hit on you.”
Our parents’ forty-year marriage and the fact that they’re still together confounded the both of us. Mom probably got Stockholm syndrome from being with Dad for so long. She’d been an honor student at Archbishop Ryan, only a junior, when they met. He was at least ten years older, a jack-of-all-trades—a bartender, a welder, a drummer in a wedding band, and an extra in Rocky IV. Dad spent the better part of the past forty years living up to his high school superlative, “most likely to hit on your mom.” He’d allegedly curtailed his extracurricular activities ten years ago though, right after his first heart attack. Mom had convinced Father O’Brien to inform my father, in no uncertain terms, that God was punishing him for all the other women.
“Stop tomcatting and whoring, John Marsala, or the Lord is going to nail you to your cross,” Father O’Brien told him. Powerful words from an eighty-year-old Irish priest who’d survived Bloody Sunday and probably had a crush on my mom.
I peered through the window of the gas station, where Pippo appeared to be telling the attendant an elaborate story, judging by the fluttering of his hands in the cashier’s face. “The driver’s not my type,” I told my sister.
“Not a self-important mamma’s boy with intense delusions of grandeur about his place in the world?”
“That’s an OK description of Jack.”
“Thanks. I’ve been waiting to use it.”
Carla was never a fan of Jack’s, not even in the beginning, when all of us were still on our best behavior. He once made some comment about how it must be nice to sell out to Big Law, and Carla retorted that it must be nice to have rich parents footing the bill for your Ivy League college, top-ten law school, and civil service job. I spent a lot of time trying to make them love one another as much as I loved each of them.
It was actually Jack’s mom who gave me his number when she met me at the farmers’ market out in the suburbs. I had been running my own little butcher shop and food truck out of a refurbished Airstream I bought on Craigslist. “The roving meat monger,” they called me.
“I like the way you trim a roast,” Jack’s mom, Zelda Grossberg, informed me the second time she bought a steak from me. I told her it would be my last day at the market since I needed a new special permit to stay there. “My son’s a lawyer. You call him,” she’d said. “I’m not losing this brisket.”
Zelda was just looking to do me a favor, not hook me up with her son. I did call Jack because I wanted that permit and he called a friend in the local municipal office to get it for me. I offered to cook for him at my place to thank him. When I saw how cute he was I decided I would try to sleep with him too.
