“Get dressed.” My voice comes out thick, and I distract myself with the fallen pancake, but I can see Ava lingering at the door in my periphery.
When the soft padding of her feet on the tile reaches me, I sit back on my haunches and let out a breath. It’s getting difficult not to blurt out everything I want when she’s in the room—to yell from the terrazzo how I feel about this woman—but the floor around us is covered with more than just fallen pancakes. The eggshells we are tiptoeing around are sharp as knives and I know I’ll bleed out if I step on one and find out she’s not there with me.
I hear the shower turn on and Ava starts singing the song she heard the gondolier belting out on our way into Cannaregio. Her Italian is still shit, but I can’t help the slow smile that creeps across my face.
I stand, abandon the pancake, and head for the shower, while the sound of a thousand eggshells crunching echoes through my skull.
QUARANTOTTO
Ava
I’m more nervous than I was for my fourth grade solo when I had to dress as Pumba and sing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” in a gym filled with parents and peers. I’m about to meet my mother’s lover—a man she hid from me for my entire life, never bothering to mention that during her beloved study abroad experience she had a torrid affair with her handsome professor.
Is this why she went back to America? Did he break her heart and send her packing back to the States? Or was it worse? Oh my God! Was she pregnant with his love child? Am I an Italian love child!?
I do some quick math and debunk that theory, and James squeezes my hand tighter.
“You alright?” he asks.
I nod but keep my eyes on the giant wooden door before me.
“Are you going to ring the bell or would you like me to?”
Good question. My arms seem to be frozen by my sides.
“Can you do it, please?”
He reaches out and presses the buzzer. The longest minute of my life passes before a raspy male voice comes on and says, “Pronto.”
Then James takes over in Italian, and the only thing I understand is my mother’s name and the sound of us being buzzed into the building immediately after.
“Ready?” James asks, pushing the heavy medieval door inward.
“No,” I say brushing past him.
I’m not too nervous to notice the way he stiffens when my hip touches his thigh as I pass. Nor to feel the flood of warmth that pools when he puts his hand on my lower back to guide me up the marble steps. Those hands—the things they can—
“Ava, if you keep looking at me like that, we’re gonna need to go back to the apartment. Stat.”
Ooops.
“Sorry not sorry,” I tell him with a smile and then focus on getting up these steps without jumping him.
“Fourth floor,” he tells me, and all I can do is breathe because there’s no oxygen in the stairwell and I’m only hitting the second floor landing.
By the time we hit the final flight, I’m sucking in air like a Dyson and the shower I took (that was happily interrupted by James) is null and void. The man standing at the open door when we arrive on the landing takes away whatever breath I have left in my lungs. Salt-and-pepper waves brush against his broad shoulders, and his jaw is chiseled from the same marble this godforsaken staircase was built with. This man makes Clooney look like the boy next door.
Well played, Mom.
I accidently let out a whoosh of air that sounds like a whistle, and James clears his throat beside me.
“Mio Dio,” the man says, stepping forward. “You look just like her. Ava …”
He trails off and wraps his arms around me, and I’m unsure how he knows my name or if this hug is for me or my mother, but it feels nice—like I’m somehow being touched by a piece of her. A secret hidden piece of her, but I’ll take it.
“I’m Alessandro,” he says into my hair. Then lets me go slowly and gestures toward the open door. “Come in. Come in.” He holds his hand out to James to introduce himself while I step over the threshold and into a dream.
The walls are filled with art. And I mean filled. Oil paintings. Watercolors. Photographs. Canvases leaning against walls, hanging from hooks, and at least a quarter of them are the familiar strokes of the reason that I’m here.
