THE MOST MAGICAL THING HAPPENED on the morning of my grandmother’s wedding in Tuscany. It snowed.
This is definitely Italian snow, not the New York City variety of midwinter precipitation. It doesn’t fall in big, chunky flakes, nor is it heavy February hail that stings faces and turns sidewalks into solid sheets of ice. Rather, this is a flurry of white glitter that sifts through the air and melts instantly when it lands on the stone streets.
From my window at the Spolti Inn, it seems the entire village of Arezzo is swathed in a lace bridal veil. I sip hot milk and espresso from a warm mug as I watch an old horse-drawn carriage pull up in front of the inn to take us to the church. It doesn’t feel like 2010. It could easily be a hundred years ago, not a modern touch in sight. Time stands still when people are happy. The ticking of real time resumes as soon as the rings are exchanged-for all of us.
Gram and Dominic’s wedding plans were made quickly and effortlessly (the beauty of an eighty-year-old bride is that she really knows what she does and doesn’t want). The airline tickets were bought online after a series of negotiations that eventually led to the splendid group rate that brought the Angelini and Roncalli families to this Italian village, into this moment, this morning.
We’ve all got roles in this romantic tale. The great-granddaughters are flower girls and the great-grandsons miniature groomsmen. My sisters Tess and Jaclyn and I are bridesmaids, as is our sister-in-law Pamela, while my mother is matron of honor. Dominic’s granddaughter Orsola will represent his side of the family in the bridal party. My father will walk his mother-in-law down the aisle and into the arms of Dominic Vechiarelli.
“It snowed that day,” I imagine I’ll tell my children. I’ll explain that after ten years as a widow, my grandmother found love again. Teodora Angelini’s story relies on fate, timing, and the best of luck. It’s also a story filled with hope-reminding all of us who haven’t found love that, regardless of age, experience, or locale, it’s a bad idea to close the book before “The End.” You just never know. Not one of us, not even the bride, saw this day coming.
“Somebody shoot me!” my mother shouts from the hallway. “My hair is a wet mop!”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Mike. We’re in a freakin’ hotel. Pipe down,” I hear my father bark back.
“Do you have to yell?” Tess hollers from her room. “Why does this family always have to yell?” she yells.
“Shh. You’ll wake the bay-bee!” Jaclyn whisper-shouts from her doorway.
My door bursts open. My mother stands in her full black slip with her hands on her hips. “I blew out my flatiron,” she announces. A flatiron blowout in my family is worse than finding a lump. And we have found our share of lumps.
Mom’s face is made up, alabaster-perfect and powdered down, ready for photographs from all angles. Her fake eyelashes give her enough oomph to pass as one of Beyoncé’s backup singers. Her cheeks have a peachy Bobbi Brown glow, but that’s all that’s sparkling about my mother. She’s beyond frazzled and close to tears.
“What’s the matter, Ma? You’re not yourself.”
“You noticed?”
“What can I do to help?”
“I don’t know. I’m just a-a-a…mess.” She plops down on my bed. Half of her head is done, straight, glossy strands of freshly dyed chestnut brown, and the other half is still damp and crimped. Mom has naturally curly hair, but you would never know it from her left profile. From the front, however, she looks like a split-screen hair model on the Home Shopping Network: before and after the anti-frizz cream has been applied. She smoothes the front panels of her black slip over her thighs and pulls the hem over her knees.
I sit down next to her. “What’s the problem?”
“Where do I begin?” Her eyes fill with tears. She pulls a tissue from under her slip strap and dabs the inner corners of her eyes so as not to irrigate the eyelash glue and cause the mink spikes to float away in her tears like paper canoes down the Nile.
“You look great.”
“Do I?” The tears insta-dry in my mother’s eyes, and she sits up straight. All it takes is a compliment to pull my mother back to her emotional center.
“Like a million bucks,” I promise her.
“I brought my Clarisonic. So at least I’m exfoliated. That didn’t blow in the outlet, thank God.”
“Thank God.”
“I don’t know, Valentine. I just don’t know. I’m completely off my game. I’m shaking. Look.” Mom holds up her hand. It flutters partly from nerves, and partly because she’s making it flutter. “This is so strange to me. To be a maid of honor at my own mother’s wedding.”
“Matron,” I correct her. “The last over-sixty maid of anything was Mother Teresa.”
Mom ignores the comment. She continues, “There’s something so out of kilter about this whole thing.”
“Gram is happy.”
“Yes, yes, and I’ve adjusted to all of it! It began with the news that my mother, eighty years young, fell in love. Then once I swallowed that, she decided to marry. I accepted her decision. Then she announces that not only will she become Dominic’s bride, she has decided to move to Italy. For good. It’s been a series of whammies, I’ll admit it. One beaut after another, I’ll tell ya. But I survived the shock of each little bomb she dropped and put aside my doubts and misgivings and went with it. Don’t I always go with the flow?”
“Always. So what’s the problem?”
“I feel disloyal to my father.” Tears fill her eyes once more.
“Mom. He’d be happy for Gram.”
“You think? He didn’t much worry about her happiness when he was on earth.”
I look at my mother. She never says anything unkind about her father.
“See what I mean?” Mom throws her hands in the air. “This wedding is bringing out the worst in me. I’m even judging my dead father. What the hell is wrong with me?”
“I wish I knew,” my father says. He stands in the doorway wearing his pressed blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts (yes, my mom irons his underwear) and starched formal dress shirt, which is so long it mimics one of Ann-Margret’s mini-dresses from Viva Las Vegas. His thin, hairless, sixty-nine-year-old legs are covered to the knee in black stockings held up by elastic braces.
My mother has placed two half-moon-shaped Frownies under each of Dad’s eyes. When he makes an expression, the sharp corners of the anti-wrinkle patches poke his eyeballs, so Dad keeps his eyes open wide without blinking, which gives him the look of a threatened gorilla. “Get these goddamn patches off my face.”
Mom checks her watch. “Five more minutes, Dutch, and you won’t have lines or bags.”
“Remove them. I want to be able to see now. I can’t look down. Or sideways. Believe me, it won’t be pretty if I fall down and break a hip. Can you imagine the medical care around here? They probably tie you to a plank with rope and make you lie there until the bones fuse.” Dad tries to yank the Frownie patches off his face.
“Don’t try and remove them on your own!” my mother yells.
“What is this adhesion?” Dad pats the patches.
“Adhesive. It’s a natural glue of some sort. I’ll get the rosewater spray to dissolve them. Dutch, I mean it. Don’t pull at them. You’ll make scabs.”
“Get the spray,” Dad says clapping his hands together in a tick-tock beat. “Get the spray. We got a schedule to keep here. You don’t want to be late for a wedding that features two eighty-year-olds. Anything could happen.”
Mom rushes out.
“What is wrong with her?” my father asks. He looks out the window, his eyes bulging out of his head like a pug’s. “Snow. I thought it was balmy in Italy. What the hell is going on?”
“It’s good luck.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying.” I shrug.
“Have you ever noticed that whatever clime blows through on a wedding day, somehow it’s interpolated as good luck?”
“Interpreted.”
“A mushroom cloud of poison gas could linger over Tuscany and by God, that would be a good sign.” My father shakes his head.
“The triumph of love over nuclear annihilation.”
“As if that could be true. It rained when your mother and I got married. But we were twenty-one and twenty-two, and what the hell did we know? Rain, shine, we just wanted to get to the Inn at Oldwick.”
“Thanks, Dad. I like to imagine you and Mom on your honeymoon. Especially right after breakfast.”
“When you’re young, it’s all in front of you, when you’re old, well, you got your memories and the occasional stirring of your adrenals to remind you of what you once were. Between you and me, your grandmother and Dom are a ticking time bomb. If they get a year out of this deal, they’ll be lucky.”
“Don’t say that, Dad. Don’t even think it.”
“Excuse me for being a naturalist.”
“Realist,” I correct him.
My father places his index fingers on the Frownies and holds them down to blink. “Whatever. I’m happy for Teodora, I think it’s all great and well and good. But lest we forget, they are a coupla old people. I mean old. They’re merging when most people are done. So I guess, good for them. Right? What the hell.” Dad sits down in the rocking chair by the window. “Big changes.”
“Yep.” I sigh.
“For you the most.”
“For me the most.” If only my father knew how much I dreaded this day for selfish reasons. I am losing the most important person in my life. Gram is my master craftsman, my confidante, and my friend. I don’t even want to think about going home without her, much less back to work.
“Has it sunk in yet?”
“Not really, Dad. But it’s happening. It’s done, so I have to do what I have to do.”
“That’s all you can do.”
Mom comes in with the rosewater spray. “Dutch, lean back. Close your eyes.” Mom hovers over Dad as he tilts his head back.
“I feel my carotid artery pulsing.” He places his hand on his neck. “Is it normal to hear your heart beat in your ear?”
“This will only take a second.” Mom spritzes the wrinkle patches.
“In my eye! In my eye!” Dad covers his eyes with his hand. “I’m burning! I’m burning!”
“Get a towel!” Mom barks at me. “Soak it!”
I bolt into the bathroom, turn on the water, saturate the towel (or try to-it’s one of those thin Italian towels that are more moppeen than bath towel), and run back to my father. I place it on his face.
“Cold! Cold!” he screams.
“Flush. Flush them, Dutch!” my mother tells him.
Tess rushes in wearing black tap pants and a hoodie that says JUICY FOREVER across the chest. “We are not the only patrons in this hotel!” Then she sees our father swabbing his eyes like he’s been evacuated after a gas explosion on his favorite TV drama, 24. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
Dad hangs his head and dabs his eyes with the towel until the Frownies are damp enough to peel off. He holds up the half-moons and hands them to Mom. “Don’t ever make me glue this crap on again. I like my wrinkles. I’m going to be seventy-everything on me is shriveled. Especially after the cancer. My balls are like prunes-”
“Dad!” Tess and I stop him before he describes them in further detail.
“Dutch, I’ve seen them before and I’ve seen them after, and there’s not that much difference in the general circumference,” Mom reasons.
“Mom!” Tess and I are disgusted.
“It doesn’t matter. My point is: I look old in pictures because I am, in actuality, old. It is what it is, and what it is, is not going to get better.”
“All right, all right,” Mom says impatiently. “As if self-improvement is a crime.”
“That’s it!” I wave them out. “Everybody out. I have to get ready. The carriage awaits.”
“Is it here?” Mom asks.
“Come and see.” I pull back the curtain. My mother, father, and sister stand in the window with me. We look out over the village and take in the enchanted scene. The horse pulling our carriage shakes his head, making the bells he wears jingle sweetly. The sheer beauty of the moment soothes us as we look on in awe and silence.
“Okay. Enough with the view,” Dad barks. “We gotta get a move on. That old nag is gonna be looking for a bucket of oats. And frankly, so will I.”
“What about my hair?” Mom looks in the mirror.
“Pull it off your face and use some Bed Head gel. Tess packed, like, three kinds. Right?” I look at my sister.
“In my room. In the red duffel. There’s a pack of bobby pins too. And a HairDini if you want some extra volume.”
“An upsweep. Good idea.” Mom goes, followed by Dad, who fluffs the ample seat of his boxer shorts like a skirt.
“Mom is losing it,” Tess says as she sorts through my makeup kit. “It’s an emotional time.”
“Why? Why can’t it just be fun? Do you ever notice our family can’t be happy for anybody that’s happy?” Tess takes a tube of mascara out of my case, unscrews it, and pumps the brush. She leans into the mirror and tries my long-lasting dark brown Rimmel. “We have to inflict negativity on every event.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“Really? Don’t you notice? We appear completely nuts to outsiders. How about last night at the rehearsal dinner? Mom got up to give a toast and started sobbing and made it all about her childhood. 1-800-therapy, anybody?” Tess throws the mascara back into the makeup case. “Thank God most of the people who attended didn’t speak English.”
“It was pretty uncomfortable,” I admit.
“Thank God Gianluca saved the night with his funny story about never having a sister and now he has one with Mom. You know Mom loved that because she’s old enough to be his aunt. But now she can shave off a dozen years because Gianluca’s, like, what…fifty?”
“Fifty-three,” I correct her.
“No way. He looks good. You know, for a guy his age.” Tess snaps open a compact of concealer and dabs it under her eyes. “He was really chatting you up.”
“I’m not interested,” I lie. I don’t have to tell my sister that when I saw Gianluca for the first time again last night, my heart pounded like a blowout on a flat tire hitting the rim at eighty miles an hour. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. I’m surprised the guests couldn’t hear it. I won’t tell her that Gianluca’s grasp of my hand as I turned away to talk to someone sent an electric shock through my entire body. I wasn’t expecting that either. Tess doesn’t need to know that I came back to this room and dreamed of Gianluca all night, woke up at 3:00 A.M., and had to open the windows for air because the mental pictures were so steamy, they drove the temperature in the room up to boil.
I take the concealer from Tess and dab it under my eyes. The dark circles we inherited are a nice complement to the dark secrets we carry. Gram’s love affair with Dominic was the last big reveal. She had been seeing him for ten years, since my grandfather died, and nobody knew it. Only after I saw them together at the tannery last summer did I realize that Gram had a lover. And even when I found out, I kept the secret, as only a good Angelini/Roncalli girl can. I lean into the mirror. Eight layers of this yellow putty will cover generations of intrigue.
“If I were single, I’d be all over Gianluca. He is one hot Italian,” Tess continues.
“I’m all the hot Italian you can handle.” My brother-in-law Charlie stands in the doorway.
“You see? I could never cheat. I even get caught talking about it.” Tess sighs.
Thankfully, Charlie is dressed. The sight of another pair of boxers on yet another male relative might put me over the edge. Furthermore, Charlie’s legs are so hairy that in shorts, he looks like he’s wearing felt pants.
“How do I look?” Charlie opens the front panels of his jacket to reveal a lavender silk vest under the jacket of his morning coat.
The minute Gram announced her nuptials three months ago, Tess put Charlie on a diet. She also sent him to the gym. It doesn’t appear that he’s lost a pound, but he’s gained a few inches in his neck from lifting weights. Now his head cradles directly into his shoulders, giving him the look of a Sicilian Humpty Dumpty.
“You look buff,” Tess purrs.
“You gonna wear clothes to this thing?” Charlie asks her.
“No, I thought I’d wear tap pants.”
“I never know with you,” he says.
“Help!” Mom calls from down the hall. “Call 911!”
“They don’t have 911 here,” my brother-in-law Tom shouts back.
I follow Charlie and Tess down the hallway. Their daughters Charisma and Chiara, dressed in pale blue organza gowns, stand in Aunt Feen’s doorway with Mom. We blow past them and into the room.
My great-aunt Feen, who declined her sister’s invitation to be in the wedding party and had to be dragged overseas like my mother’s XL shoe duffel/body bag, sits on the edge of the bed with a blood pressure cuff hanging off her arm. She is dressed in a black wool suit that I’ve seen at every wedding and funeral since I can remember. Her Papagallo flats lie next to her stocking feet, which sport double toe corn pads and elastic bunion slings. I kneel down next to her.
“What happened, Aunt Feen?”
“I got dizzy. The room was spinning.”
“Were you trying to take your own blood pressure?” Charlie asks.
“Who is he?” Aunt Feen looks up at Charlie, whom she has known for twenty years, as though he’s a stranger.
“It’s me. Charlie.”
“I know who you are, but you’re an in-law. Get out.”
Charlie leaves the room.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Tess says diplomatically.
“I don’t need a crowd in here.” Aunt Feen lets the blood pressure cuff fall to the floor. “I thought I was having a stroke.”
“Then we have to take you to the doctor.”
“In Italy? Are you crazy? They’d kill me over here.”
“It’s a modern country with modern medicine,” I say.
“Really? It takes an hour to get hot water in the tub. How modern can it be?”
“If you’re faint, you need to see a doctor,” my mother insists.
“I’m seventy-eight, I’m faint most of the time. I wish God would take me.”
“Did you eat breakfast?”
“Two rolls with butter, two poached eggs, a little gabagool, and a Snickers bar I had in my purse.”
“Could be sugar and fat shock,” I reason.
“It’s not lack of nourishment!” Aunt Feen bellows. “I’m an eater!”
“Then what is it, Aunt Feen?” I rub her bony shoulder.
“This wedding. I have a bad feeling.”
“See? I’m not the only one.” My mother squeezes onto the bed between Tess and Aunt Feen.
“I just think it’s crazy.” Aunt Feen shakes her head. “What for?”
“What do you mean, what for? They love each other,” Tess says defensively, still chapped that Aunt Feen banished her Charlie.
“Love. Love? What good is love?”
Mom and I look at one another. We look at Tess, who rolls her eyes.
“Well…,” I begin, “love is…a start.”
“Oh, big deal. There is no happiness in this world, in this life. It’s a vale of tears that leaves you lonely and bereft. I know it firsthand-the cheat of this world. The big cheat of this life. I loved Norman Mawby, and he was sent over to France in World War II, none of youse would remember that, but he was a bright, shiny boy from Grand Street, very neat and clean, and I loved him bad. And we wanted to get married, but he died on the fields of France, a country I will always hate. He died, and I was robbed.”
“But you married Uncle Tony-”
“I never loved that hack.”
“Aunt Feen!” Mom cries.
“I didn’t. He was sloppy seconds. When I cried at his funeral, I was crying for all the years I wasted with the bum.”
We are stunned into silence. I look at the clock. “Well, Aunt Feen, the good news: I don’t think you’ve suffered a stroke. You appear to be completely normal. We need to get to the church.”
“All right, all right,” she says. “Let’s get this nonsense over with already.”
“Girls, I’ll get Aunt Feen down the stairs. You need to get dressed.” Dad comes in, filling the room with the layered scents of Aramis cologne, Brylcreem, and Bengay. With his thick hair brushed back without a part, he is a dead ringer for Frankie Valli on the reunion tour, except for two squares of red under his eyes where the Frownies were ripped from his skin. They resemble odd patches of sunburn, but will hopefully fade as the day goes on.
Tess and I go out into the hallway. Jaclyn, looking like a sprig of mint in a strapless pale green cocktail dress with a hem of tulle, comes out of her room. Her black hair is piled high on her head, as if she’s a duchess from the court of Louis XIV. “What is going on?” she asks.
“Old issues,” I tell her.
Jaclyn pulls us into her room.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Tom took her for a walk.”
“In the snow?” Tess looks at me. My sister and I are very critical of our brother-in-law, who takes the baby everywhere, including places like Giants Stadium for a football game. We should not be surprised that he’s rolling around the streets of Arezzo with her. This is nothing.
“He put the plastic hood on the stroller,” she says defensively before she leans in. “Pamela and Alfred had a helluva fight. I heard it through the wall.”
“What about?” Tess asks.
“Money.”
Our brother, Alfred, is one of the few bankers in the New York/New Jersey area that haven’t lost their jobs in the worst economic collapse of our lifetimes. That’s how good Alfred is at whatever it is that he does. I can’t imagine that they have money problems. My brother pastes his paycheck stubs in a scrapbook.
“She’s a spender,” Tess whispers, as though it’s a disease.
“Yeah, but he’s a saver,” I remind them.
I leave my sisters to their gossip and go to my room. Closing the door behind me, I throw off my robe, relieved to be alone. My dress is hanging in its linen bag on the back of the door. I slip it off its hanger and step into it.
The silver lamé sheath glides over me. I slide on a pair of matching metallic pumps. I open my jewelry case and pull ropes of faux pearls out of its pockets, layering the strands until Coco Chanel might stick her head out of her grave in approval and say, “Très élégante!”
I grab my purse and meet my sisters in the hallway.
Tess wears a forest green velvet gown with a matching bolero. Her thick black hair falls in loose curls. She whistles when she sees me.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You’re going to knock Gianluca out with that number.”
I blush.
“I knew it,” Tess says smugly. “A sister always knows.”
The idea of a horse-drawn carriage is a lovely one, unless you’re cramming nearly every member of my immediate family and their children into one vehicle. Which is what we did. The wet streets made the wheels slide to and fro like a rusty Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride, and even Aunt Feen, who hasn’t broken a smile since 1989, had to laugh when it skidded around a sharp corner and we all wound up on top of her.
The Basilica of San Domenico is tucked into the village like an antique book in a cupboard. Built of sandstone with a simple facade, its only hint of color comes from the mosaic of midnight blue and ruby red in the stained-glass rose window over the entrance. A tower with dual church bells on metal beams hovers above the entrance. Those same bells rang on the wedding day of my great-grandfather and his beloved Giuseppina Cavalline, over one hundred years ago.
There are more of us in the wedding party than in the pews (another sign that the bride and groom aren’t twenty). Aunt Feen has taken a seat in the front. Her head is bowed in nap, not in prayer. Dad, Charlie, Tom, and Alfred are outside, getting air, which is what men in my family do whenever they are dressed up.
Charisma and Chiara play hide-and-seek behind the Gothic pillars with my brother’s sons, Rocco and Alfred Jr., who seem to be, for the first time since their births, on a long leash. There is definitely something going on between Alfred and Pamela, and the kids are getting a free pass on discipline in the meantime.
“Pamela, looking good,” I say.
Pamela wears Indian chic in Italy. Her gown, panels of magenta and silver silk, has an empire bodice with geometric cutouts. The spaghetti straps show off her sculpted shoulders and thin arms. Her blond hair hangs long and straight without a single flyaway. Clearly, she remembered to bring an adapter for her blow dryer.
“Thanks.” She smiles, but it’s forced. Pamela, my sisters, and I have made up since our rift last Christmas, but the current aloof demeanor is just as bad as the cold front used to be.
“How do you like the hotel?”
“It’s rustic,” she says.
“It’s good to be together.”
“Oh, yeah.” She looks off. Her eyes follow Rocco and Alfred, who dart among the pews. “I’d better wrangle the boys before they tip over a saint or something.”
The entrance doors of the church open behind us, and Gram stands in the light, tall and lean, in a beige silk suit with staggered white sequins along the cuffs of the jacket and the hem on the skirt. I look down at the shoes I built especially for this day, an elegant eggshell pump with a kitten heel and pearl beading around the vamp. She extends her hand to me, and I take it.
“Thank you, Valentine,” she says.
“For what?”
“For everything. For helping me plan this day. For your support. You’ve been there for me every step of the way.”
“You deserve every moment of happiness, Gram. And you should never thank me. I thank you.”
Gram’s eyes fill with tears. Mom comes over with a tissue and dabs Gram’s eyes.
Tess pokes me to get in line to process up to the altar. I take my bouquet of violets in one hand and smooth my multi-strands of pearls with the other. I look straight ahead to the altar.
The priest, a scruffy Capuchin in chocolate brown robes, takes his place in front of the altar.
Dominic, in a morning coat, and his son Gianluca, emerge from the sacristy and take their places.
My heart flutters when my eyes meet Gianluca’s. It seems like a thousand miles from the back pew to the communion rail. I like the distance right now. Maybe it will take the edge off the sudden and crazy mad desire I have for him, who, when the wedding license is signed, will be family to me. Dear God.
“Valentine!” Orsola whispers in my ear.
I turn. Orsola, Gianluca’s daughter, gives me a quick hug.
“We’re late. Always late.” Orsola’s husband walks up the side aisle and slips into the front pew next to Aunt Feen.
“No worries. You’re right on time, cousin. To the second.”
Orsola wears a bronze silk wrap dress with a matching picture hat. Tess hands her a bouquet of violets. She blends into the processional line so seamlessly you’d never know she was Dominic’s grandchild instead of one of Gram’s.
Chiara and Charisma sprint up the aisle, scattering rose petals as though they’re in a three-legged race.
Mom fusses with the whimsy attached to Gram’s hat. I know it’s 2010, but when it comes to weddings and hats in my family, it will always be 1962-we love a pillbox. “It finishes a look,” my mother says.
Dad pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and takes a quick snap of Gram and Mom before they begin their walk down the aisle. I don’t know why he bothers, since anyone he’d send the photo to is right here in the church.
A violinist plays Frank Sinatra’s “All the Way.” My sisters precede me single-file as we process down the aisle. I feel like a shiny dime following two fifty-dollar bills and a bronze Manzù sculpture, but I insisted on the silver lamé, and it’s too late now for a costume change.
My mother sniffles behind me.
I look straight ahead to the priest, but then, without moving my neck in his direction, I take in Gianluca.
Why does he have to look so good? I repeat why, why, why, to myself with every step/pause that I take behind my sisters. This would be so easy had there been a decline in his appearance over the Christmas holidays. Why couldn’t he be one of those guys who ages overnight? No, he looks better than he did a year ago. Better than he did on our roof in the leather jacket last fall. The gray silk morning coat is the exact shade of his hair. He stands out in the dark church like a light feather against a cloudy morning sky. I almost miss a step, the stone floor gives, as though I’m walking on clouds.
“Watch it,” Mom whispers from behind.
I regain what’s left of my composure.
Gianluca looks out over the pews, his eyes as blue as the boots of Saint Michael in the statuary behind him. He is truly handsome, in that distinguished Cary Grant-in-the-later-years sort of way. Like Cary, Gianluca’s profile is strong, his nose and jaw chiseled by God with a straight edge. Okay, maybe Gianluca resembles Saint Thomas More by way of Bay Ridge slightly more than Cary, but in the morning coat, in this color scheme, in this place, he’s pure movie star in the golden age of Hollywood. The right suit makes a man royal.
I remember when Gianluca kissed me on the balcony in Capri last summer, and how I didn’t want him, and after he kissed me, he was all I wanted. Maybe I broke up with Roman after that because I wanted more of Gianluca’s kisses. Stolen kisses are one thing, but relationships are legit, at least, that’s how my mother raised me. Gianluca was clear with me then; he wanted more than a little romance. But this morning, I wonder if he still wants me. Probably not. He was very friendly at the rehearsal dinner, but not in pursuit. Why would he be? When he came to New York and wanted something more, I told him plainly that I didn’t want him or any man, and he believed me. I meant it.
Then why do I stare intently at him, as one would at a priceless painting under a pinlight on a museum wall? As each step in the wedding caravan brings me closer to him, I’d like to stop and sit down in an empty pew and catch my breath. Gianluca feels my stare. He smiles at me. I’d like to die right about now.
The priest rattles off the vows in Italian so quickly Gram could be agreeing to anything, including upgrading the plumbing in the church rectory. But she looks up at the priest with reverence and a full understanding of what she is promising to do. (In general, Italians move slowly, unless they’re in church, where Mass is on fast-forward.)
The service becomes a blur to me as I’m overcome with my own emotions. I’m not alone. My sisters are weepy, my mother is blotting tears, while my brother stands off to the side surveying the ceremony in his disaffected, remote way, as if he’s watching a report about a mini-merger on Maria Bartiromo’s show.
Gianluca gives his father the ring and kisses him on the cheek. My father looks to the floor as Gianluca expresses his affection for his father. Dad and Alfred have never had that kind of bond.
As Dominic places the ring on Gram’s hand, it’s a wake-up call for their children. Mom won’t be able to jump on the E train to see Gram whenever she wants. Gianluca will have to move out of the home he shares with his father to make room for his stepmother. I’m not the only person in this room whose life will change, but somehow I can’t help feeling that I have it the worst.
I’ve been in full-tilt denial about losing my grandmother to her new husband and her new country. I will be all alone at the Angelini Shoe Company, upstairs in the living quarters and downstairs in the shop. As Gram and Dominic’s marriage begins, our old life together ends. The years I’ve spent as Gram’s apprentice have been the best years of my life. Now, I’m going to have to take all I’ve learned from her and build upon it.
My eyes mist with good memories and deep regrets. I mourn the conversations that we won’t have over coffee in the morning, the afternoons when we sat on the roof, roasted chestnuts on the old grill, and laughed. I’m sad that she won’t be there when I launch the Bella Rosa, which I pray will build the business to a new level and give us revenue to survive. The problem is all mine. I don’t like change, and enough is never enough. A hundred years with my grandmother would not have been enough. But Gram’s happiness is more important than all of that.
The priest holds his hands over Gram and Dominic as he blesses them. The flames in the candles, once clear and bright, become murky white puddles through my tears. I hold my small bouquet of violets tightly. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but I can’t help it.
I feel a hand on my wrist. Gianluca smiles gently and gives me his handkerchief. Before I can thank him, he is back by his father’s side. I wipe away my tears. Tess nudges me. Gianluca’s chivalry is not lost on my sister.
Gram and Dominic kiss. The priest makes the sign of the cross over them.
Aunt Feen stands, balancing on her pearl-handled cane for support. “Hallelujah,” she says. “Let’s eat!”