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By Root 437 0

barely nine o’clock. Dad and Fiona are still at the Brian Greene lecture. Chloe is long asleep, and I’m already in my pajamas, teeth brushed and Waterpikked. But I’m unsettled and jumpy, so I pad down to the kitchen where I flip absently through a pile of junk mail on the counter. I sit down at the kitchen table and pour myself a glass of wine, even though I’ve just brushed my teeth. It’s prime dinner service, and I allow myself to imagine Grappa, first the dining room, the deep golden walls, the exposed brick, the white tablecloths and candles; then the kitchen, frenzied, pots steaming, braziers glowing, the scrape of a well-worn copper pan sliding over a burner, its contents tossed effortlessly with one hand by a line cook. Jake reaching for a splash of olive oil to finish a dish; the intensity of his gaze as he meticulously wipes the rim of the dinner plate, the small movement of his mouth as he places his composition, perfect, steaming, on the line.

Renata and Michael aren’t home when I call, and I don’t bother leaving a message. I’m not sure what I mean to say, but when I hear Renata’s softly lilting accent I’m reminded of home and of Italy and I don’t trust myself to speak. Hope, though, answers on the third ring. “Mira, how are you, dear?” There is noise in the background, the sound of people talking and laughing. Hope is having a party in my apartment.

“Just a few friends over for a housewarming,” she says. I try not to imagine the spread of crescent rolls and deviled ham, the Cheese Whiz dips and Ritz crackers arrayed on what once had been my dining room table. I tell Hope I’m not calling about anything important and she should get back to her guests.

I finish the wine and pour myself a hefty shot from a bottle of brandy I find in my father’s liquor cabinet, a bottle that probably has been in there since I was in high school. Fortified, I call Grappa using my father’s house phone, which has an unlisted number that doesn’t show up on caller ID.

I don’t stop until the brandy is finished and I’ve booked two Saturday night dinners on successive weekends and one banquet for twenty, occupying the whole upstairs room. I’ve made up names and given fake telephone numbers with which to confirm the counterfeit reservations. I’ve even used different voices, my repertoire increasing in direct proportion to the amount of brandy I consume. The highlight: a tour de force impersonation of an Italian contessa Jake and I had met on a trip to Capri.

The next morning Richard shows up with a large cup of coffee, a liter bottle of San Pellegrino, two Extra Strength Tylenol, and the Post-Gazette.

“What, no Times?” I ask when he throws the paper at me.

“No, you’re in Pittsburgh now. Pittsburghers read the Post-Gazette,” Richard says as he sits down on the side of my bed. Although he doesn’t play, he’s dressed as if he has just come from a tennis match, a white cotton sweater knotted nattily around his neck. “Here, take these,” he says, opening the sparkling water and handing me the Tylenol.

I groan when I try to move my head, which feels like someone has removed the top of my skull and replaced it with the chittering lid of a pressure cooker.

“Look, what you are doing here, it’s not good. You’ve got to get out of this bed.”

“I’m sick,” I tell him. “Go away.”

“No, you’re hungover. Or maybe you’re still drunk. It’s a wonder you don’t have alcohol poisoning. A disgusting display from what I heard of it.”

Richard proceeds to outline in excruciating detail how my father and Fiona found me head down on the kitchen table, the phone still clutched in my hand. When they’d tried to rouse me, I’d insisted on speaking only in Italian, unleashing a torrent of epithets that, although my father understood them, were fortunately beyond Fiona’s meager grasp of Italian conversation. It had taken the two of them to get me upstairs to bed, and I’d woken Chloe in the process.

What I can’t explain to Richard, to my father, or heavens, to Fiona, is that there is something wrong with me.

“I’m dying,” I tell him, hoping that he will hear the desperation