“It just feels good to make some headway,” I say, shrugging.
“Olive,” he says, grinning as he puts the plastic hood on the cake and fixes his eyes on me. “Please consider not selling.”
Everything inside me squeezes hard. I breathe slowly out.
“If there is even a shadow of doubt—”
“I need to sell it,” I say, the slight hitch my voice betraying me. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget about me,” he says. “Just think about yourself. Because... I could see you there, notebook in hand, cracking the whip.”
“Cracking the whip?” I say, something dark zipping through me.
Leo shakes his head slowly. “Olive. Olive. Olive,” he says.
“Yes, Chef?” I reply, undoing my apron and tossing it into the laundry bin.
He glances back at me, the hint of a wicked glint on his face, and then back at the sink, and I hear a little breath squeeze out of him. “You shouldn’t be a critic,” he says. “It’s a waste of all that joy you have for food.”
I laugh lightly, a heaviness in my heart.
“Celebratory glass of Spumante?” he asks.
“Not tonight,” I say. “I actually need to work tonight.”
“Right,” he says, nodding, disappointment flickering across his face.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I did ask Rocco if he had time to go somewhere, drink Italian beer, and, you know... man talk.”
“Man talk?” I ask, eyebrow raised.
“Older manly life advice?” he says, with a touch of boyish vulnerability, shoulders forward, hands in pockets. “That one might get from a father?”
What to do next. Where to go after Nicky’s. Leo needs that kind of advice.
I give him a spontaneous hug, and when my body melts into his, I almost whimper. That feels very good.
Olive. Pull away now.
“See you in the morning,” I say, pulling back.
“Va bene. Ci vediamo in mattinata,” he says.
I CURL UPon the balcony with a half bottle of Marsala and take a deep breath. It’s time to read this manuscript. My eyes sting at the dedication: FOR MY OLIVE.
I was not forgotten. I take a steadying breath and turn to the first chapter.
PUGLIA—AUBERGINE
I made the decision to become a cook the first day I was in Puglia. I was eighteen years old.
For my birthday I’d asked for a new car, but my mum gave me lire and a rail ticket around Italy. “Go see the mainland,” she’d said.
As a kid, I saw this as an insult. I was too young to appreciate the magnitude of this gift, but now, as a man nearing my seventies, I am filled with gratitude for the experience that changed my life forever.
I took an old train with pull-down windows and green leather seating, striking up a conversation with a tenente in the army returning home in his fatigues. I remember vividly the carriage’s stale smell of cigarette smoke and fresh coffee with a background of rusting metal. Mum had given my packed lunch away to a homeless boy at the train station,so I arrived starving. A starving, scared eighteen-year-old with no taste.
