“Portofino, right?” Rocky said.
“No, Tullio, my husband, his mamma was from Portofino. His father from Sicily. That’s how I met him. He was at this hotel visiting. I was born three hours from here. In Triora.” When she said the place, her accent became more pronounced. It was there all along, but she’d mostly buried it.
Rocky did a quick search on her phone. “They had witch trials there in the fifteen hundreds!”
“Yes.” Kitty’s voice was somewhat quiet.
“You can’t get any dirtier than that,” Georgia said.
“Exactly!” I felt a rush of excitement push out the worry and ache I’d been feeling the last couple of days. It had been months on the worry front. But I had a feeling I was just burying too. I hoped this trip helped me uncover it, or just gave me a chance to catch my breath so I could.
Rocky was muttering about tours while she stared and tapped at her phone.
Kitty sighed and looked at the three of us. “If we’re going to do this, we’re all going to need more sensible shoes.”
* * *
Lidia,who was always like a ray of warm Italian sunshine, even in Vegas, was going to drive us. Kitty called shotgun. She said she knew the way and could direct Lidia. She told Lidia to put it in the GPS just in case, and then she started complaining about GPS because they didn’t have it in her day.
Georgia and I took the middle seat, and Rocky took the very back. She’d called dibs on DJing, and as soon as we were in the car, she slid a USB cord between me and Georgia and told me to tell Kitty to plug it into the connection to the dash stereo system.
“Keep it low,” Lidia said. “I need to hear when to turn!” She took the cord from Kitty and leaned over, plugging it in when Kitty started cursing at the thing.
“I understand now why some men have trouble with this,” she said, cracking her window when the car started to roll.
“Trouble with what?” Lidia asked.
“Finding the hole and keeping the connection,” Kitty said without missing a beat.
There was a beat of silence in the car before everyone but Kitty exploded with laughter. It would have been awkward to say it out loud, but…her grandson hadnoproblem with that. He was an excellent hole-finder and keeper-inner for the long haul.
I sighed at the thought of Big, and how he looked at me before we left. It was so full of ache that it made me almost go to him. Then the thought of him crashing into the wall came back to me, and how it all could have ended because he wanted to seriously injure Mario for winking and smiling at me. It turned my heart cold, and I’d left without either of us saying a word to each other. I wasn’t sure if he thought he was in the right or not, but he was keeping quiet too.
“Not that I would know,” Kitty went on after the car died down. “Both of my husbands were excellent in bed. The faulty hole-finders were just hearsay from my girlfriends.”
“Okayyy,” Rocky said from the back seat. “Moving on. Let’s talk about the dresses and boots situation instead. It feels sort of meant to be, doesn’t it?”
Before we left, Rocky offered each of us a pair of boots to try. Oddly enough, her boots fit all of us. Then Kitty said she had dresses stored in the attic of the hotel from when she left Italy. Even odder than the boots, her dresses fit all of us. Even her after all that time. We took sandals from our own closets in case our feet got hot after exploring.
Georgia nodded. “It does.”
“It’s like that book, or was it just a movie?” Rocky asked, sliding forward, setting her head between me and Georgia. “The traveling jeans, or whatever it’s called. I’ve never seen it, but I read the description on Rotten Tomatoes. All the friends fit into one pair of vintage jeans, and they each take turns with it on special trips.”
We all just nodded because it didn’t seem like any of us had seen that one either or heard of it.
“What happens if we each have something that fits, though?” Lidia asked. “And we’re wearing the items at the same time?”
“I don’t know,” Rocky said. “But it’s bound to be good, right? It has to be.”
After a few minutes of driving, I watched as Lidia’s eyes kept flicking to the rearview mirror.
“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s having us followed.”
In Vegas, especially after the shooting, Big always had someone with me or tailing me. The one security guy, whose name I still didn’t know, had racked up enough membership points at Dynamic to become a VIP member, since Vinny was trying a new rewards system.
“I didn’t doubt he would,” Kitty said. “I’ll tell them to keep their distance once we get there.”
The car grew quiet until Georgia interrupted the silence with a question for Kitty. “Tell us about where you grew up, Ms. Kitty. Where we’re going.”
