Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [84]
How happy Gala is to meet Etta and see me again. How delightful when she speaks rapid, machine-gun Italian with Chiara. How intrigued she is to meet Pete and share a couple of New Jersey anecdotes.
Pete takes the girls to the Cathedral of Saint Paul; Gala takes me for a cappuccino. “Who is he?” She squeals the moment Pete is out of earshot.
“Pete?”
“Who else?”
“He’s a new friend.”
“Where is your husband?”
“He decided not to come.”
“Big mistake.”
“There’s nothing going on with Pete and me.”
“Oh really.”
“Gala, I swear there isn’t.”
“Maybe not for you. But there is for him.”
“He knows I’m married.”
“Long, tall, single lattes like that don’t care about wedding rings, honey.”
I feel my wedding band on my finger. Thank God I remembered to wear it today. “He’s been a gentleman.”
“Yeah, but you’re packing two kids. Lose the kids and see how fast he jumps your bones.”
“You’re terrible.”
“You know, your scent doesn’t shut down just because you’re married. Trust me. Pheromones don’t know from vows. That’s Mother Nature’s little way of causing trouble. We’re animals. Plain and simple animals, no more sophisticated than dogs or cows or pigs. He took one whiff of you, and he’s hooked.”
“I don’t think so.” I can’t help but laugh.
“Jack Mac is an idiot. Letting you loose in Italy. Alone! You’d have to be dead here not to be thinking about sex twenty-four–seven. Is your husband insane? Leaving you alone in a pastoral friggin’ setting with lighting so flattering we all look sixteen? A woman alone in Florence? It’s like throwing raw hamburger to a starving rottweiler.” Gala winks at a man as he passes. He stops, smiles, and continues on. “How I love my mother country!”
As Pete promised, the churches in Florence are filled with art so astonishing that I almost cannot take it in. In the Cathedral of Saint Monica, there is a mural of the saint with her son, Saint Augustine. It’s the moment when he becomes a priest, a dream she held for her rogue son all of his life. The look in her eye, of complete joy at giving her only son to God and yet deep grief at losing him, makes me cry. I look at the corals and pinks in the painting and think of my own son’s skin, how it changed from pink to pale yellow bruises when the fever came just before he died.
“Are you okay?” Pete whispers.
“How do they know?”
“Who?”
“Artists. How do they know how I feel?”
“That’s their job,” Pete tells me. Then, as quickly as I can, I find a door and go outside. Pete follows me.
The girls ask to go for gelato around the corner. Pete and I sit on a bench.
“What happened in there?”
“I don’t know.” I feel the tears come to my eyes again. He puts his arm around me. “Don’t,” I tell him. Quickly, he pulls it away.
“I’m sorry.”
“Etta’s here.”
Why did I say that? So he’ll think that it’s okay to put his arm around me when Etta isn’t around? I don’t want that. Or do I?
“Why did that painting make you cry?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” he says gently.
But as soon as he backs off, I realize I do want to talk about it. This is precisely what I have shut down and shut off for four years. Isn’t this why I came here? Didn’t I come home to Italy to learn how to feel again? I look at Pete’s face, full of concern. “I … we had a son. After Etta. His name was Joe. He died three years ago.”
“How?”
“Leukemia.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was the colors of the paint and the brush strokes. They looked like Joe’s bruises.” I look