She sobbed, the sound of it echoing in the room. She stepped away from the counter and covered her face with her hands. There was no place to go to escape the crushing feeling in her chest. She leaned over, trying to steady the dizzying waves of hurt and sadness and loss and grief. All this time, she’d been trying not to know these things. She’d been afraid of feeling exactly this torrent, this absolute deluge of pain. And then there were arms around her, holding her tight, whispering something in her ear that she could not understand but didn’t need to. She let Andrea hold her up, hold her close, while she cried and cried and cried.
Chapter 18
“Mamma, Pa, what’s happening?” Andrea asked, rushing in the kitchen door of his parents’ house. He’d been halfway through a cappuccino at Giada’s when Franca texted him that they had called city hall looking for him. “Franca said you needed me to come over right away.”
“Your sister is on WhatsApp and wants to talk to you,” Paola said, gesturing at the tablet he’d purchased for his parents so that they could do video calls with their far-flung family. It ended up being largely forgotten between uses, often lost among the hundreds of books that lay on every possible surface in the house. After the fifth time he’d received a call asking for help to find it, he’d encased the tablet in a neoprene cover with a GPS tag glued to the front. Now, if they couldn’t find it, he’d only have to fire up the app on his phone to locate it somewhere between the Elena Ferrantes and Italo Calvinos.
“You called me over to talk to Carla?”
“She said you never respond, so—” Paola chucked her chin at the screen.
“You never respond,” said Carla, scowling at him from the tablet.
“This may not go well for you,” Antonio mock whispered, waggling his eyebrows, from the living room. “Get out while you can.”
“Ciao, Carla, I’m sorry. I’m only running a little town over here. It’s summer, you know. Lots to do,” said Andrea.
“Yes, yes, I know. So many important cultural events. Did you have thesagrawith the guy who dresses up like a giant squid to serve the fried calamari?”
“The kids love him.”
“Sure, look, I want to talk to you about something important.”
“I am going to water my zucchini,” said Paola, turning for the door.
“You didn’t plant zucchini this year,” Andrea called after her as she walked out the door. “Is this an intervention?” He turned to Carla.
“It’s an offer. Look, I know that you’re having some kind of moment of nostalgia disease back there or something, but you have been there for four years and it’s getting a little bit concerning.”
“Nostalgia disease?”
“Well, you’re too young for a midlife crisis. I know this because Alex is having his right now, and we are ten years older than you. Of course he didn’t decide to move back to Gloucestershire and become a sheep farmer, did he? No, he decided to take up triathlon and spend thousands of pounds on something called aerobars. Like a normal person!”
“Carla, I am no sheep farmer. And I don’t have nostalgiadisease. I like this work and I am doing good things. I know it’s difficult to understand, but I am really OK.”
“For now,” she said, shaking her finger at him. “What are you going to do when the term is over and you have to go back to the real world? Don’t you want to meet a single person under the age of ninety? Your résumé is still salvageable at this point, but what kind of skills are you building when the GDP of your entire town is in a close race with the revenue pulled in by a Coca-Cola vending machine at a rest stop on the highway to get there?”
“And I suppose you have a solution to this,” he said, recognizing that Carla was on a roll. Once she got going, there was no stopping her without either a natural disaster or tranquilizer dart.
“Yes. We’re hiring. It’s not in my department, but I am very good friends with the woman who runs it. Director of financial planning. You get a bonus, equity, the best benefits package there is—you know, one that will allow you to have an actual family someday? And tech is a great place to work, no matter what you’ve heard about AI destroying everything. You’ve got to at least give it a chance. Will you talk to her?”
“You’re making an awful lot of assumptions about me. How do you know what I do or don’t do?”
“Because Mom tells me everything.”
“Right, because Mom knows everything?”
“I know most things,” Paola said, pushing open the kitchen door with her good hip, a basket of plums in her hands. “Like the American girl lives in your house, and that she’s the one you took in the kayak.”
“You’re living with an American woman?!” Carla shouted from her perch on the table.
“No.” Andrea turned to his mother. “How do you know about the kayak?”
“A mother knows,” she said, waving her arm into the ether.
“Ah, yes, maternal clairvoyance and a line of hawk-eyed gossips that runs straight down to the shoreline,” Antonio said to his newspaper.
“I rented a town house to her. Temporarily. She is only here trying to get citizenship.”
