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I managed to stop myself from saying that out loud and kept my tone carefully casual. “Eh, you may not be too far off,” I said, sprinkling a little more flour. “My grandpa always used to say to me, ‘Dom, you can’t fake it with food. If you start out wrong, there’s not always a chance for forgiveness.’ I suspect he was actually trying to teach me something about life beyond pizza.”
“You must miss him,” she said softly.
“Of course. He was a father to me and Gio—only father figure we ever knew.” I stopped what I was doing and sighed. “He’s been dead thirteen years now. Suffered a massive stroke behind the restaurant one winter night as he carried out the trash. He never got up again.” I swallowed before continuing. “The thing is, I was supposed to be working that night, and it would have been my job to carry out the trash. I blew off my obligation to my grandfather to go party in an abandoned warehouse with some friends.”
Melanie let out a small tsk of sympathy. “You were a kid, though, Dom. It’s not good to carry around that kind of guilt for something you could never have foreseen. He would have forgiven you.”
“I know he would have,” I said. “The thing is, I’ve never really forgiven myself.”
She looked around. “That’s why, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.
“Why what?”
She made a sweeping gesture. “The reason for all of this. Why you work yourself to the breaking point. You’re trying to make it up to your grandfather.”
“Could be,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed at the way Melanie was gazing at me with such intense sympathy. I didn’t usually spill my guts like this. “Once my grandfather was gone, it only took a few years for my uncle and cousin to run the old restaurant into the ground. When we left New York, it was ... well, let’s just say we weren’t on good terms,” I said, stopping short of confessing my role in that mess.
To my surprise, Melanie nodded. “Yeah, the reporter mentioned something when I talked to her.”
“She did? What did she say?”
Melanie shrugged. “Nothing particular. A family fight. Honestly, I think she was just fishing. So what about your mother?” she asked.
Generally I avoided talking about the woman who’d given birth to my brother and me. My feelings about her were complicated. But that was the thing about Melanie; I found myself wanting to explain things to her, things I’d spent a long time trying not to think about. I stopped shaping the dough, flattened my palms on the floured countertop, and lowered my head.
“She did what she could for a while,” I said. “At least that’s what I always told Gio. She just didn’t have a lot of fight in her, I guess. So when she ran out of those resources, she gave us to her parents, figuring they could do better. She was right.”
“And you don’t keep in touch now?”
“She died years ago. We were just kids at the time. Still, I kind of wonder how things would have been different if she’d lived. Maybe she would’ve figured out how to navigate adulthood eventually. In time we might have gotten to know her.”
“Was her name Marie?” Melanie asked suddenly.
I was surprised, wondering where she’d heard that. “Yes.”
“Makes sense.” She nodded. “Your grandmother mentioned Marie. It caught me off guard for a moment. That was my mother’s name too.”
The day that Melanie had confided her parents’ fate to me, I had to use every ounce of willpower not to hold her tight to my chest and kiss her pain away. I knew it was stupid to think that anything I did could lessen the anguish of her lost family. But the sorrow in her voice had twisted something inside of me and even now, all these weeks later, I couldn’t manage to untwist it. Perhaps it was high time to stop trying.
“If you come over here,” I said. “I’ll teach you a few things.”
“And what will you teach me?” she asked in a curious, flirtatious voice. As she stood there, blushing and fidgeting awkwardly, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t the only one who was suffering from sex on the brain. Dirty thoughts were written all over her face.
I leveled my gaze at her.
“I’ll teach you every pizza trick I know,” I vowed.
She chewed her lip and then released it. “I know everything about where pizza comes from. I memorized the entire process while I was training down at Espo 1.”
“Melanie,” I said in a commanding voice, “come over here anyway.”
She stayed put for the moment. That was fine. I could wait. All the toppings and marinara sauce had been carefully contained and placed in the small fridge. I dug around until I collected everything I would need. As I laid out all the toppings, Melanie crept closer until she stood beside me at the counter. She took one of the balls of dough and slowly rolled it around in the flour.
“My dad used to make tamales every Christmas,” she said softly. “It was an old family recipe that his grandmother had passed down to him. My sister, Lucy, and I used to help when we were little, but by the time we hit our teens, we’d lost interest. Eventually he couldn’t drag us into the kitchen.” She stopped rolling the dough around. “I really wish I had that recipe now. I didn’t realize then how important it was. It wasn’t just food. It was a connection to who he was, who his parents and grandparents were.”
I spooned some marinara sauce over my circle of prepared dough. “If you want,” I said, “I can help you try to figure it out sometime. A friend of mine owns a Mexican restaurant, so I’ll ask for some tips.”
She brightened. “You think it’s possible?”
