He seems to warm to the idea. “Sure. Pick thespot, text me, and I’ll meet you there at 12:30 on Saturday.”
Which is what I do.
When the weather’s nice, Dad plays golf onSaturday mornings, and goes into the office for a few hours in theafternoon. Mid-December does not lend itself to golf in theNortheast. Dad goes into the office on Saturday mornings, and inthe afternoons, he and my mother play bridge in a large round-robingroup that meets in the clubhouse – re-purposing after golf season– which culminates in a tournament. For my mother, bridge is acontact sport. Making it to the quarterfinals is akin to beingfirst runner-up in Miss America. Respectable, but no one remembersyou. Getting to the semifinals is winning Miss America, and makingit into the finals is winning the Olympics. So far, my parents havemade it to the quarterfinals, and that’s nowhere near close enoughto the gold for my mother.
My father couldn’t care less. He’d play justto play. He likes the game, it makes my mother happy, and gives hersomething to focus on that’s not him.
Since I know he’s coming from his office inHartford, I pick a Mediterranean place in West Hartford for lunch.My dad’s not a picky eater, but he tries to stay away from heavyfood.
I’m waiting at our table when he walks in.Laura favors our father. He’s a little taller than average height,a shade over five-ten, is lean and has the angular good looks of anorthern Italian. His family comes from the Monferrato region inPiemonte. Lots of comingling with the Swiss and the Germans went onback in the day, and you can see it in my father’s reddish-brownhair, fair complexion, and light green eyes. My sister has thoseeyes, and my father’s coloring, but her hair is dark brown, whichcomes from our mother’s side of the family. Laura’s aboutfive-four. Shorter than average, but not tiny like me. I barelyscrape five-one.
Dad leans down and gives me a kiss on thecheek. “A happy surprise,cara. We haven’t done this in awhile.”
I feel guilty knowing I’m going to ambushhim, but I figure that can wait until after we do the familychitchat.
He drapes his jacket around the back of thechair, then sits, rubbing his hands. The waiter comes over and Dadorders coffee, and I ask for herbal tea. Before I even get to askhow he’s doing, he says, “I know you’re chomping at the bit to askme about Substantial and Alessandro, and I’ve spent the weekthinking that now is as good a time as any to tell you and Laura,so if you wait a few minutes, she should be here soon. I don’t wantto repeat myself, and I figure it’s better to get all the questionsin at once.”
Yep. My father is not dumb and never hasbeen. As the waiter is putting Dad’s coffee in front of him, Laurawalks in, sees us, and begins to unwind her long, knit scarf fromaround her neck while heading toward the table. After the hugs andkisses are over, she orders a coffee and looks at me. “Were yougoing to tell me?”
“I didn’t know if Dad was going to talk to meabout it. He put me off at Thanksgiving, so I didn’t have highhopes. I didn’t want to get you riled up for no reason.”
Laura smacks her knee. “When did I become sofragile?”
Dad laughs. “You know, I miss this. I reallydo. You two going at it at the dinner table, in the kitchen, by thepool. It didn’t matter where in the house I was, I always heard yougirls butting heads. I’m telling you now, Laurie, when Val andAusten start in on each other, let ’em. You both drove your mothercrazy. Such strong, smart girls who knew their mind since you werelittle. Most of the time your mother wanted to referee or silenceyou, but I wouldn’t let her. And I was right. Look at you now.”
Well, that shut us up and good.
“Daddy.” Laura reached out and squeezed hishand.
I smiled watching them, and when Dad turnedhis attention to me, he said, “I always knew it would be you whogot to the bottom of this. Small, but scrappy. I used to tell yourmother nothing could stop you.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Iwas right about that too. Nothing has.”
I know he means the shooting. I’ll regretthat until the day he dies, he’ll always see me lying in a hospitalbed fighting for my life. I make a promise to myself. I’m going tosee him more often, and I’m going to do everything in my power togive him as many good memories as I can in the hope that they’llshove the bad memories into a small corner of his mind.
The waiter comes over and we order. When hecomes back with pita bread, hummus, and olives, we dig in likestarving wolves. As our blood sugar settles, my father sits forwardand puts his elbows on the table. Something that would make mymother crazy. Dad wouldn’t care about that either. He grew upworking hard alongside his father, and while he enjoys acomfortable life now, in his mind, he’s still a guy with dirt underhis fingernails.
He has our attention when he begins with, “Asyou can imagine, this is a complicated story. Nothing as importantas this is ever simple. I’m going to ask you to wait until I’m donebefore you bombard me with questions. All right?”
Laura and I nod, and she says, “Sure,Dad.”
The waiter brings our food, but we wait forDad to start.
“Your mother grew up poor. Dirt poor. Youdidn’t know her parents. Her father died when she was six, and herbrothers were ten and twelve. Your uncle Lorenzo became head of thefamily before he was even a teenager. Ren made sure Stefano andyour mother went to school, but he started working as a day laborerin the fields. Back then there were a lot more farms around SantaRosa, and the child labor laws weren’t enforced the way they arenow. Your grandmother took in washing and mending, and she bakedbread. As you can imagine, they scraped by. As Ren got older, hetook higher paying jobs, and for a while things were better. But inStefano’s last year of high school, their mother died. The way Rendescribed how she declined, she must’ve had cancer, but since theynever went to doctors, they don’t know what killed her.”
Dad stops and tucks into his calamari. Lauraand I glance at each other, then eat a little too. After a fewminutes, he stops eating, wipes his mouth with his napkin, drinks alittle water, then resumes.
“Ren made your uncle Stefano finish school.But Stefano was angry, sad, and angry he was sad. He joined theMarines, and was stationed at Camp Pendleton, except for the yearhe was in Okinawa. Your mother was fourteen when her mother died,and Ren was the only ‘parent’ she had. He worked seven days a weekto keep a roof over their head, food on the table, and your motherin new clothes because he knew girls could be mean about thatstuff. I met your mother at a party in Santa Rosa. She had justgraduated high school and had begun working as a receptionist for apaint company. I took one look at her and knew she was the girl forme.” He stops and laughs.
“What?” Laura asks.
“Your Uncle Ren wasn’t as sure about that asI was. Dominic and I started the Redwood Falls Winery when he wastwenty-two and I was twenty. We didn’t have a pot to piss in, andif it wasn’t for our father, we would’ve fallen flat on our facesmore times than I can count. Needless to say, Ren wasn’t impressed.But by the time I met your mother, the winery was surviving, andwhen Ren came up and saw the vineyards, he started to loosen up. Iwas twenty-five when I married your mother and she was nineteen. Itook her away from everything she knew. Especially Ren. She lovedme, and compared to the life she’d led, my family was rich. She wasself-conscious for a long time, and worried she didn’t measureup.”
Well, that explains a helluva lot.
Typical of Laura, she says what I’m thinking.“No wonder,” she says.
“No wonder what?” Dad asks.
“She’s so attached to things.”
