Charlotte snickered underneath her arms. “If you were born a mouse, your life would’ve been a short one. The first one to put out cheese would’ve had you. Cut your head straight off.Cha!” She lifted a hand and came down with it against the table—a pretend guillotine.
“That would’ve been you,” I said. “A snake in the grass, sneaking up behind the innocent field mouse. Mouse murderer.”
She shrugged. “Be smarter.”
“Be kinder.”
“Dovolj!” my mother shouted in Slovenian.Enough!Her favorite go-to word to stop our bickering. She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and asked Eunice to pour her a glass of sherry.
Charles started to wail again. I picked him up, shushing and whispering soothing words in Slovenian. After some patting, he settled again, but I didn’t put him down. I enjoyed the warmth of him in my hands, his tiny heart beating against mine.
“You must keep your voice down,Mati,” Charlotte said, shaking her head. “You keep waking him up!”
“No,” I said. “You should expose him to noise. He needs to get used to it or he’ll keep this up.”
“Best advice. Ever.” Carmen said, popping out her breast and putting Diego to it. “Diego sleeps through vacuuming.”
Charlotte shot her a mean look. “You don’t have to gloat.”
Carmen lifted a hand, and when Charlotte retired back to the shell beneath her arms, she stuck her the bird. Carmen grinned at me.
“Back to Countess Sibilla and Monica.” I kissed Charles’s fuzzy head. “Oh, Eunice! Check the hazelnuts!”
“Already done!” Eunice replaced the pan of hazelnuts with a saucepan full of ingredients to complete the lemon hazelnut gelato. The ice cream machine sat on the counter, amongst everything else, waiting its turn.
“I did not speak to the countess, but Monica was accommodating enough. The family knows of us—Babickasent them pictures over the years. She asked to meet us.”
“She did?” The awe and eagerness in my voice couldn’t be disguised.
My mother knocked back the sherry and asked for another. “Yes. Under one condition.”
“I’m against this!” Charlotte muttered from her hiding place. “Why do we need to meet these people? We had a grandfather! How do we even know if any of this is real?”
“What’s the condition?” I asked, patting Charles on the bottom in a steady rhythm, but my heart was beating overtime.
I wanted to meet them. I wanted to know if there was a connection there. Apart from the most obvious reasons that came to me—the dancing and the resemblance—my mother and sister were more like Maja than I ever was, and I didn’t always feel like I belonged.
Would I feel like I belonged to Matteo’s family?
My mother put her drink down, the crystal clinking against the counter with a lightchink. “She will not meet with us unless you and Brando are in attendance.”
“Why?”
“Babickatold them that if we were to ever find them, seeking the truth, you should be there. You would understand.”
“Understand what?”
Pnina Poésy fixed me with a stare so piercing that it seemed to go straight through me. “She refused to say over the phone. That is what we must find out,hci.”
* * *
After listing the menu on the board, I rubbed the residual chalk from my hands, standing back to admire what the ladies and I had done. The dining room that led out onto the outer terrace was filled with platters I had purchased in Pienza, all in the order they were to be served. Some dishes still cooked in the kitchen.
Rosaria, being as on it as she was when needing assistance, called in four ladies to come and help with serving dinner so that I would have a chance to enjoy the fruits of our labor, and Paolo’s violin when the time came.
The guests hovered around the outside stone grill and pizza oven, waiting for the four pizzas to emerge from their fiery places. A mirage wavered around the oven, the heat so great that it glistened, mozzarella rising up in gooey bubbles.
Lothario stood close to the fire, talking to my father, but he kept glancing around the party, and I knew he was looking for Brando.
