Dolci di Love

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  But she was.

  She just knew it. The timing, the nausea, the enormous incongruity of it all. It had to be! Still she ran down to the pharmacy at the bottom of town, foregoing the prying eyes at the busy pharmacy that was closer to the pasticceria, and bought a pregnancy test. It was positive. So she ran back and bought two more. All three said the same thing, but they didn’t even have to—she felt it. She felt it in her skin, in her hair, in her eyes. She felt it everywhere.

  And this time, something inside her whispered that the little angel already nesting there, despite the complications it was going to deliver, had fought this hard to get this far and would keeping fighting all the way to the end. Or the beginning. This little angel, she truly believed, was hers for keeps.

  Sitting in her tiny bathroom, the third positive stick in her hand, the terrible wonder of it all flooded through her, starting at her toes, stopping for a moment to spin about the tiny new life forming in her centre, then shooting up past her chaotic heart to her whirring mind.

  She was having Alessandro’s baby.

  It was a disaster. A wonderful, amazing, awful, joyful, frightening, extraordinary disaster.

  There was so much about it that was wrong! Alessandro didn’t want a baby with her. He hardly knew her. She hadn’t even seen him since this most miraculous of conceptions. And she didn’t want a baby with Alessandro, either.

  There was her age, her career, her marriage, the fact she was in Italy and had promised to help with Francesca, the Ferretti sisters, the amorucci…

  There was so much that was wrong. But the kaleidoscope of complications was overshadowed by what was right. Lily wanted this baby. More than anything else in the world, she wanted this baby. She had always wanted this baby.

  She walked to her picture window and sat on the sill, watching the ridiculous countryside crawl out of its sleepy state the same way she did every morning. She laughed to herself, delighted, then bit her lip to keep from crying. More than anything else in the world, she wanted this baby.

  ‘Lillian!’ she heard Francesca call from the kitchen. ‘Where are you, Lillian?’

  ‘I’m up here, sweetie,’ she called back. ‘Come for a visit.’

  The clatter of her footsteps up the little stairway swelled Lily’s already overflowing heart and when Francesca burst into the room and came running toward her, she couldn’t keep the tears from flowing.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Francesca asked, as she fell into Lily’s arms. ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘No, honey, I’m not. I’m happy. I know it seems silly but sometimes grown-ups cry when they’re happy.’

  ‘Why are you happy?’

  Her life was so far from the perfection of her dreams that it was laughable. The picture of that huddle of children gathered around her and Daniel as they grew old together lost in the mists of their broken marriage.

  And yet she had found the closest thing on earth to a daughter and was now, finally, God and all the saints willing, going to be a mother.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said to Francesca, giving her a squeeze. ‘I just am.’

  ‘Come on,’ Francesca said, holding out her hand. ‘The Ferrettis need you to go on an errand.’

  Relieved to have some time to herself to digest the topsy-turvy turn her future had just taken, Lily agreed to deliver a carton of amorucci to a trattoria in Montechiello, another tiny hilltop town about a forty-minute drive away.

  ‘Your first commercial order,’ she remarked as she picked up the box. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘You cannot miss trattoria,’ Violetta said, virtually shoving her out the door. ‘Is only ristorante in town.’

  Lily could barely remember driving there, her mind was whirring so fast. Should she go home to New York now? It seemed the most appropriate course of action—she needed to see specialists, go through the usual testing rigmarole after all. Or did she? She thought of the smile she kept finding on her face. Tuscany seemed to have put it there so firmly after such a long absence. She had a lot to thank this beautiful corner of the world for.

  She parked at the portal to Montechiello and started to climb up to the trattoria with her box of amorucci. Red geraniums spilled over the edge of the ancient stone fence that ringed the town, a bright green and yellow lizard basking in the heat flicked out its tongue at her. She poked her own tongue back at it. It was a perfect temperature, the sun dancing across her back, a slight breeze tickling her face.

  She pushed open the door to the restaurant. It was dark, with no one behind the counter, but a set of double doors opened out on to a terrace that overlooked the pretty valley she had just driven through.

  ‘Hello!’ she called as she stepped out on to it, catching a whiff of the jasmine that crawled up the trellis behind her.

  A single table with a white tablecloth that flapped slightly in the breeze was set up at the edge of the terrace. A bottle of wine and two glasses sat on top of the table. Behind it was Daniel.

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said.

  He laughed, and in that moment he looked just like the Daniel she had fallen in love with all those years before. A slightly smudged version, admittedly, a little lined, a little crestfallen, but still, the very same Daniel.

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Would it be too corny to say we must stop meeting like this?’

  She smiled back at him and sat down at the table. ‘I never minded a bit of corny,’ she confessed.

  ‘I’m supposed to be meeting a new winemaker here, his wife called me first thing this morning, but our hostess now tells me he was held up. She just left me with this bottle before rushing off on some emergency of her own. I know it’s early but would you care for a little wine?’

  He went to pour her some, but Lily held her hand over her glass. ‘Not for me, thank you, no.’

  ‘I’m sure I could find a white, if you preferred, or a prosecco. It’s not champagne, but—’

  ‘No, Daniel, really. I am not drinking.’

  ‘Not drinking?’

  He looked at her, concerned, and just like that she knew that she did love him, that she felt love more strongly than anything else, and whatever the history, it was up to her to roll those boulders away from the difficult access to her heart. She could do it if she wanted to.

  And right then, sitting in the lazy sunshine, a new life radiating in her belly, she wanted to.

  Her timing was off, to say the least, but now that she was looking at the future instead of the past, she felt certain again. It was as simple as that; she felt certain about him.

  Of course, he might not feel so certain about her, in the circumstances, but there was only one way to find out.

  ‘Will you really love me always, Daniel, no matter what?’

  He looked taken aback, but answered nonetheless. ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘Even if I’ve done something that will change everything between us forever?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’

  ‘Trust me, Daniel, it’s possible. In fact, it’s a dead certainty.’

  ‘You’re scaring me, Lily. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m better than fine, but I still need you to promise that you’ll love me, no matter what.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what the “no matter what” would be, but yes, Lily, I mean it when I say it: I will always love you.’

  ‘Because I think I know now how you felt after you met Eugenia and found out about Francesca, about having all the right things but with the wrong person. I think I know that.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lily. I know you don’t want to hear it anymore, but that doesn’t mean I will ever stop being sorry.’

  ‘No, Daniel, things are different now. It’s me who is sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’ And even the look on his face could not take away the thrill of those words.

  ‘I met someone here. I don’t love him, in fact I hardly know him. And I know you will think I did it to hurt you, but I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking about y
ou, I was thinking about—well, I don’t know what I was thinking about. And I don’t know what is going to happen now because I have my job in New York, but I have never been happier than I am baking amorucci with your daughter. I don’t know where I should go or what I should do, but I can’t honestly say I wish none of it had happened because I’m pregnant, Daniel. I’m pregnant, and I really feel that this time it’s going to work out. I really do. Somehow without anything to back me up and all the usual evidence to the contrary, I think this time it’s going to work out.’

  Daniel put his glass slowly back on the table. A seed pod crackled nearby in the heat. A motorcycle roared past on the road below them.

  ‘Please say something,’ Lily said.

  ‘I’m in shock, Lily. What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to say that even though we’ve made a mess of everything, you still love me and you want to help me and together somehow we’ll figure it all out.’

  ‘You want me to be happy you’re having another man’s child?’

  ‘Under any other circumstances I would not even contemplate asking you to be happy I was having another man’s child,’ she said. ‘But under these circumstances, that’s exactly what I’m asking.’

  ‘Jesus, Lily, it just seems…’

  ‘Impossible? Yes, it does seem that way. But is it? I’m happy you have Francesca. I really am. I never thought I would be, and if I hadn’t come here I never would have found that out. But I did come here, I did find it out, and more than that, I’m happy I have her. I want to help you, Daniel. And I know it’s not perfect but it’s better than it was, than we were. We’ll have a family. Not the one we dreamed of, and certainly not a traditional one, but we’ll have a family. Together.’

  ‘I feel ambushed,’ he said.

  ‘I know the feeling,’ she told him, but gently. ‘The difference is I’m sitting here in front of you telling you. You’re not finding out about it in a golf shoe. You said you could help me forgive you; well, now I accept your offer. And I can help you forgive me.’

  ‘But forgiveness doesn’t work that way. Remember?’

  ‘It should. I remember that.’

  Daniel looked at her across the table, the rolling green hills of Tuscany framing her beautiful face, the veneer that had disguised her for so many years ripped away, leaving her just the way he always pictured her in his mind.

  She was blossoming in front of his very eyes, this woman with whom he had shared and lost so much. Could it work? This bizarre patchwork of unrelated children and battle-scarred parents? His wife was bearing another man’s child, which wounded him in a way he wasn’t sure he could heal. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Yet he had wanted her to do just the same. And she was looking at him now with such confidence, such faith, looking at him the way she used to look at him long ago when their future was full of undashed hope and limitless possibilities.

  The truth was, if he discounted all the things he had done wrong and all the things she had, he still felt the same way about her. But now there was this baby and it would be between them forever, reminding them of all their foolishness and the heartbreak it had caused.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Lily told him. ‘You’re thinking that this is too much, too painful, that there’s no getting over it. But Daniel, I’m probably the only person in the world who knows that you can. Maybe not this minute, maybe not this week. But you can. You still love me, you want to help me, and together we can figure it all out.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Lily, I really just don’t know.’

  She reached across the table and took his hands in hers.

  ‘Well, that’s all right,’ she said. ‘Because I do.’

  Chapter 51

  Upstairs in the trattoria, Violetta, Luciana, and Fiorella fell away from the window where they had been spying on what was happening on the terrace below.

  ‘Now that,’ whispered Luciana, ‘was the moment we’ve all been waiting for.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Violetta. ‘He had a funny expression on his face if you ask me.’

  ‘Have you forgotten what a man in love looks like?’ hissed Fiorella.

  ‘In the name of the Santa Ana di Chisa, it was the moment, Violetta,’ Luciana said. ‘It was definitely the moment.’

  ‘You need to get your eyes fixed,’ Fiorella agreed. ‘Trust us, your plan was successful.’

  Violetta looked at Fiorella, then at her sister. She did trust them.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t unsuccessful,’ she conceded.

  Chapter 52

  The first Sunday of the following July, Lily woke up and pulled back the curtain in her apartment. It was another beautiful day in Montevedova—all the better for being the inaugural feast day of Santa Ana di Chisa.

  The huge festa had been months in the planning and there was much to do, as it was an amorucci-focussed affair and there was a lot of amorucci still to be made.

  First, though, Lily did what she’d done every single morning for the past four months. She tiptoed over to the crib in the corner of the room and peeked in to see if her son was awake. This ritual, which seemed as ingrained in her now as blinking or breathing, never failed to fill her with the simple bliss of being content, of being lucky, of being exactly where she wanted to be. It was a perfect way to start the day.

  Matteo—named for the Italian neighbour of Daniel’s childhood—was awake, lying happily on his back, his big brown eyes scrunching up with delight at the sight of his mother, his fat arms reaching for her, fingers wriggling.

  She picked him up, kissed the chubby bracelets of his wrists, his dimpled knees, his soft brown cheeks then held him in the air and blew a raspberry into the warm sponge of his fat little belly. He squealed with delight, his bare legs jiggling for joy. It was a sound Lily could not get enough of.

  ‘Will you turn that thing down,’ Daniel grumbled from the bed, sitting up to see his wife and child silhouetted against the window, early morning Tuscany shaking itself gracefully awake behind them.

  The baby turned to him and held his fat arms out in his direction, wriggling his fingers and squealing some more. Lily then delivered him to Daniel’s arms for his morning cuddle.

  ‘I’ll feed him,’ she said. ‘Then I’m due at the pasticceria so could you watch him till the next feeding time and then bring him over?’

  ‘What do you say, Matteo?’ Daniel asked the baby. ‘Shall we do man stuff while the old lady’s in the kitchen?’ Matteo waved everything he had, which they both took to mean yes.

  Lily watched her husband and son nestle down together among the pillows. He was such a natural, loving, hands-on father it took her breath away every day. He took her breath away.

  Not that it had been easy—she suspected that forgiveness never was—but they had managed over the past year to put so much behind them that it was once more what lay in front of them that mattered.

  She had gone back to New York only once, in her first trimester, to see Rose, have a checkup with her gynaecologist, resign from Heigelmann’s, and collect a few things from the apartment.

  But after that, she had let go of her old life as easily as a helium balloon and not even stayed to watch it float away.

  Tuscany was her lucky charm, Montevedova now her home. Her job was being a mother, making amorucci, and helping Daniel establish his new business exporting table wines back to the States.

  She could not imagine being happier, being more loved or in love. It brought gooseflesh to her skin, tears to her eyes, and a contentment to her heart that she had thought was lost forever.

  ‘I don’t need to say it, do I?’ she said as she kissed her husband and son, her eyes glistening.

  ‘No, you don’t.’ Daniel smiled. ‘Now go to work. Matty and I have got a lot of talking about NASCAR and strip joints to get through.’

  As Lily walked from their new apartment to the pasticceria, the Santa Ana di Chisa banners flying from windows above her snapped gently in the war
m summer breeze.

  The festa had been her idea, way back when Matteo was just an egg in her nest.

  ‘So who exactly is Santa Ana di Chisa?’ she had asked Violetta one day when she was rolling out a batch of candied orange and pine nut amorucci. ‘I keep hearing her name.’

  ‘Yes, I am asking the same thing,’ said Fiorella, another elderly but sprightly villager who had moved into Lily’s old upstairs room by then, and who spoke excellent English.

  ‘This could be tricky,’ the widow Ciacci said in Italian to Luciana. She had become a regular fixture at the open window, the amorucci being far more agreeable to her taste now that it was less likely to be on fire.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Lily asked Fiorella. ‘I got the feeling she was someone special around here.’

  ‘I try Googling her,’ said Fiorella, ‘but nothing is there. I Google myself better.’

  ‘She is patron saint of widowed darners,’ Violetta insisted.

  ‘She is?’ asked Fiorella.

  ‘Let’s see her dig her way out of this one,’ Luciana said to the widow Ciacci.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought there were enough widowed darners to get their own patron saint,’ said Lily.

  ‘We have a league of them here in Montevedova,’ Violetta said carefully. ‘And there are perhaps other leagues in other towns. We meet and we fix things and we talk.’

  ‘That’s what you do downstairs?’

  ‘What stairs?’ Violetta asked, fixing her with an intimidating glare.

  ‘So where is Santa Ana di Chisa coming from?’ asked Fiorella by way of a distraction. ‘And when is the feast day?’

  ‘Oh, yes, there must be a party,’ Lily said. ‘Or a holiday.’

  ‘She does not have feast day,’ Violetta said. ‘She is new.’

  ‘How do you even get a new patron saint?’ Lily asked.

  ‘There isn’t one when we first start to look,’ answered Violetta. ‘There is Santa Anne for sewing but no one for darning. Santa Catherina di Genoa look good for some time, but we lose her when we find out Genoa claim to invent pesto and everybody know pesto starts here in 1927, but nobody like it so they don’t make a fuss.’