Italian for Beginners

by Kristin Harmel

  He laughed again. “It’s named after my father, who ran a restaurant in Italy with his brother before he died. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So,” he said after a moment, looking amused. “Do you want to tell me what you’re doing back here?”

  I felt a little color rise to my cheeks. I did look pretty foolish. “Well,” I said slowly. I didn’t know where to begin. “I’m the maid of honor in the wedding.”

  Michael smiled again. There was something about the way his green eyes danced that made me melt a little. “I know,” he said. “I was sent to look for you.”

  “You were? By whom?”

  “The groom. He said you vanished, and he was worried. Actually, come to think of it, so am I. Or is hiding among the olive oil barrels some strange new wedding tradition I’m not aware of?”

  I laughed, despite myself. “Yes, the hiding always precedes the cutting of the cake.”

  “Ah, I see.” He looked at me closely. “So do I have to guess what’s really wrong? Or do you want to tell me?”

  I looked down and felt the smile fall from my face. “No,” I mumbled.

  “No?” Michael repeated.

  “I’m totally okay,” I said.

  “Of course,” Michael said. “Women who are totally okay are always sneaking away to hide in my kitchen.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I didn’t say anything. After a moment, Michael sat down on one of the barrels and motioned for me to do the same. I paused, glanced from side to side, and sat reluctantly back down.

  “So it’s your little sister’s wedding?” he asked after a moment. “How much younger?”

  “Five and a half years.”

  “Is that why you’re upset? Because she’s getting married before you?”

  I looked up sharply. “What? No!” I took a breath. “I mean, she’s my sister. I’m nothing but happy for her.”

  “Of course,” Michael said slowly. He was looking at me like he didn’t quite believe me.

  “I’m really not upset about that,” I insisted. “I mean, I’m so not ready for that, you know?” I paused and took a deep breath. I didn’t know why I was telling him all this, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop once I’d gotten started. “It’s just that my grandmother made a scene in church, and everyone keeps asking where my boyfriend is and what’s wrong with me that I’m about to turn thirty-five and I’m not married yet,” I blurted out.

  I looked at him miserably. He raised an eyebrow.

  “And?” he asked.

  I stared. “What, now you’re asking me why I’m not married yet?”

  He laughed. “No, I’m asking you where your boyfriend is.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him again. I hesitated and mumbled, “I broke up with him a month ago.”

  “Hmm,” Michael said instantly. “Why?”

  “Is that any of your business?” I asked, bristling.

  Michael shrugged. “Probably not.” But he seemed to be waiting for an answer.

  I glanced down at the barrel I was sitting on and took a deep breath. “Fine,” I said. I thought about my answer for a minute. “He just wasn’t the right guy,” I said. “I liked him, but I didn’t love him.”

  “Okay,” Michael said. He looked interested.

  I took a deep breath, looked down at my lap, and continued. “He was good on paper. We should have fit. I guess I thought that if I stayed with him long enough, maybe I’d fall in love, you know? But it doesn’t work that way.”

  “No,” Michael agreed. “It doesn’t.”

  I looked at him again, then back down. “It just seems like everyone wants me to settle, you know? And I apparently just turned down the best chance I had at getting married.”

  Michael was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Would you really want to spend the rest of your life with someone you’re not in love with?”

  “No,” I said softly.

  “Then you did the right thing,” Michael said. “And who cares if you’re thirty-five?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Everyone, apparently.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s stupid,” Michael said. “No offense to any of your family and friends. But thirty-five is just a number.”

  I shrugged.

  “You want to hear another number?” he asked.

  I looked up, wondering what he meant.

  He smiled. “Sixty. Or, if you’re lucky, sixty-five or seventy.”

  “What?”

  “The number of years in the rest of your life,” he said. “By that count, you’re only a third of the way through, right? Do you really want to spend the second two-thirds of your life with someone you know isn’t right for you?”

  I smiled. “No.”

  “Okay, then. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Our eyes met, and for a moment, I couldn’t look away. I had this sudden, crazy, overwhelming feeling that there was something more between us than there should have been. I held my breath without meaning to, and I had the distinct feeling he was holding his, too.

  And then, just as quickly as it had started, the moment was over. I blinked and took a deep breath. He coughed and looked away. And Becky chose that moment to come bursting through the kitchen doors in a cloud of ivory silk.

  “Cat!” she exclaimed, her eyes alighting on me. She glanced at Michael and looked confused. “Hi,” she said warily.

  “Hi,” he responded cheerfully, as if this was the most normal situation in the world. “It’s the new Mrs. Cash! How’s the reception going?”

  “Um, it’s good,” Rebecca said. She cleared her throat and looked at me. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her eyes darted to Michael and then back at me.

  I smiled. “I’m fine. Michael here was just helping me out with something,” I said. Becky still looked confused, so I added, “This is his restaurant.”

  Becky just looked at me. “I know,” she said. “I met with him last month about the food. A meeting you skipped, by the way, because you were supposedly too busy with some accounting emergency.” She looked back and forth between us. “What on earth was he helping you with in the kitchen?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but Michael answered for me. “Your sister was asking me about various olive oil varieties,” he said quickly. “I was just explaining the difference between virgin and extra-virgin.”

  I stifled a laugh. Becky still looked suspicious.

  “Okay. But maybe you could rejoin the wedding now,” she said, “considering you’re the maid of honor. Maybe you could find out about olive oil later?” Now she just looked annoyed.

  “Yes, of course,” I said quickly. “Sorry.”

  I turned to Michael and smiled. “Thanks,” I said. He smiled, and I added, “For the lesson about olive oil.”

  “I hope it made you feel a little better,” he said. Then he glanced at Becky and back at me. “About olive oil,” he added.

  I grinned. “Thanks,” I said again. I turned to follow Becky, who had already flounced out of the kitchen, muttering to herself. But Michael’s deep voice stopped me before I made it to the door.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you want to talk olive oil again, maybe we could have dinner sometime.”

  My heart was thudding suddenly. I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t think it was my imagination that he looked a little nervous.

  Before I could stop it, a voice that didn’t sound like my own said, “That sounds great.”

  “Like, Monday?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “Monday sounds fine.”

  “Good,” Michael said. He smiled at me as I scribbled my name and number on a piece of paper. He glanced at it before slipping it into his pocket. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I shook my head and smiled. “You, too.”

  Chapter Three

  On Monday morning, I arrived at work at 7:30 a.m. on the dot, earlier than almost everyone else, as usual.

  “Why, Miss Connelly!”
exclaimed the building’s security guard, Miles, who greeted me each morning. “Didn’t your sister get married this weekend? I thought for sure you’d be late getting in today, for once.”

  “Why, Mr. Parker,” I said back, refusing, as usual, to address him by his first name until he addressed me by mine. “I would have thought you’d know me better than that by now.”

  He smiled. “That’s true, Miss Connelly,” he said. “I can set my watch by your comings and goings!”

  I laughed, but it sounded hollow to me as I stepped onto the elevator and wished Miles a good day. I knew he was joking, but he was right, wasn’t he?

  As I settled down behind my desk in my cubicle on the deserted forty-second floor, his words rattled around in my head.

  Consistent Cat Connelly.

  Consistent.

  Consistent means boring. No surprises. No taking chances. Not a second spent living on the edge.

  But consistent was good, wasn’t it? It was safe, reliable, predictable. I had always been proud of being that person everyone could count on, the one who would always be there, who security guards could set their watches by, who arrived at work early and stayed late, who held everything together while everyone around her fell apart.

  I hadn’t always been that way. But after my mother left the first time, it had been survival. The mortgage and the bills still had to be paid, food still had to be on the dinner table, the house still needed to be cleaned.

  Becky was too young. Dad was too broken.

  There was only me.

  And there had been solace in the routine and consistency I’d found after my mother left. It was harder to feel sad when I had a list of twenty chores and a timetable everyone had to stick to.

  Not that there was anything wrong with that. Indeed, I think it was that attention to detail, that consistent reliability that propelled me to straight A’s in high school, a scholarship to NYU, and a stable job as an accountant at Puffer & Hamlin, one of the foremost firms in Manhattan. I’d been here for a dozen years now, and every six months, like clockwork, I earned reliable performance reviews and a steady raise.

  I supposed that the only flaw in my carefully laid-out life was that I hadn’t seemed to be able to quite figure out dating.

  “That’s because you can’t control people’s reactions and feelings the way you control numbers,” Becky told me once. Easy for her to say. She was a giggly, scatterbrained part-time nanny, part-time dog walker who lived paycheck to paycheck but never seemed to worry about it. She didn’t exert an ounce of control over her life, and yet things always fell into place for her. Her apartment, a dirt-cheap Village walk-up, had practically fallen into her lap, thanks to an elderly client whose unit became available the exact week Becky was being evicted from her old place. Every time she lost one nannying job because the family moved or the kids outgrew her, another one magically materialized within a few weeks. She’d never gone more than two months without a serious boyfriend since she first started dating Jamie Allen in the eighth grade.

  Becky broke all the rules and seemed to be living in a fairy tale.

  I lived by the rules and seemed to be barreling toward a dead end.

  By eleven thirty that morning, I’d hardly gotten any work done, which was unusual for me. Even Kris, who sat in the cubicle beside me and had, in the past six years, become my best friend at work, had noticed.

  “Head in the clouds over there?” she asked me with an arched eyebrow as I once again sighed at the computer screen. As usual, she was decked out in a brightly colored outfit that looked as if it had dropped straight out of 1969. Before settling down, getting married, having two kids, and going into accounting, she had spent the latter part of the nineties waving peace signs and doing silent sit-ins in San Francisco.

  I felt a little color rise to my cheeks, and I hastily closed the window I’d been looking at on the computer.

  “No,” I lied. “I was just looking something up.”

  “Mmm,” Kris said. I knew she didn’t believe me. “You know,” she added with half a smile, “you are allowed to goof off sometimes.”

  “Not on company time,” I responded quietly.

  Kris rolled her eyes and shook her mass of black curls. “Oh, please!” she said. “When else would you goof off? You’re always here!”

  I smiled and shook my head. She always teased me for my perfect attendance record and my tendency to arrive early at the office and to be one of the last to leave at the end of the day. She had actually stood up and booed me, only half joking, at last year’s holiday party, when I was given the award for best attendance for the third year in a row. “That’s just weird,” she had murmured.

  But it wasn’t weird. Not to me. I hardly ever got sick, so why waste a sick day when I didn’t have to? I didn’t really have anyone to go on vacation with, so what was I going to do, take time off and sail around the world by myself? My friends from college were all married; my sister only took trips with her boyfriends; and my dad lived in Brooklyn, close enough that I didn’t have to take time off if I wanted to go see him. Plus, if I took a vacation, my work would just pile up and stress me out when I got back. Who needed that hassle?

  The only impulsive thing I’d ever done was a summer abroad in Rome between my junior and senior years of college. And that was only because Dad had convinced me that I had to get out and see the world, and that he and Becky would be fine without me for two and a half months.

  It had been a big mistake. I’d worried excessively about the two of them for the first twelve days. And then I’d met Francesco, a Vespa-riding, dark-haired, green-eyed Italian guy seven years older than me. It was the only time in my life I’d ever really been impulsive and irresponsible. It was the only time I’d really been in love, even though now I wondered whether I really had been. Could you fall in love that quickly? Maybe it was just the excitement of being somewhere new, someplace where I didn’t have to take care of anyone but me for a few blissful months. But it was also the only time my heart had been broken, although I was the one to leave at the end of the summer. I still couldn’t believe I’d lost control so much. After that, I had vowed not to be so careless again.

  But as the years ticked by, I was beginning to wonder, just a little bit, if maybe that was a mistake.

  I snuck a look at Kris’s desk. She had turned her back to me and was once again typing furiously.

  I turned back to my own computer. Looking once more at Kris, I reopened the page I’d been browsing a moment ago. I had, in fact, been goofing off. But the thing was, I couldn’t shake the cute restaurant owner from my mind. And worse, he still hadn’t called. Granted, I’d met him only a day and a half ago. But hadn’t he asked me out for tonight?

  So there I was, on a Monday morning when I should have been hard at work crunching numbers, browsing the Web site of Adriano’s and, when I discovered there was no bio of its owner (only a listing of his full name, which was Michael Evangelisti), Googling him, hoping for some tidbit of information.

  The only thing I could find was a brief article in the New York Post about the opening of Adriano’s two years ago. I clicked on the link and leaned in hungrily, waiting to digest whatever tidbits of information the Internet might throw my way. I snuck another glance at Kris, who was absorbed in her work, and reasoned that if she glanced over, I’d look equally absorbed in mine.

  The Post article, which was brief, materialized on my screen, and I read it quickly, taking note of all the scant facts and gazing a little too long at the thumbnail-size head shot of Michael, who looked just as attractive as I remembered him.

  Michael was forty-two when the article was written, making him forty-four now. Older than I’d thought. Older than me by a decade, in fact, despite his boyish dimples and youthful laugh. He had been in publishing before opening the restaurant. He’d gone into business with a silent partner, who financed the start-up of the business while Michael agreed to be the managing partner. As for why Michael had quit his old job
and suddenly started the restaurant, the article quoted him as saying it was because his mother had just died, and opening a restaurant was always something they’d talked about together. Her unexpected passing had made him realize that you couldn’t just sit and wait for dreams to come true. You had to make them happen before it was too late.

  “My dad died when I was 20,” he said. My heart thudded with the familiarity of the statement as I read on. “He was huge into cooking, and he used to take me back to Rome with him all the time to visit his family. I spent every summer there with my cousins. They all live there; it’s where my dad grew up. That’s where I learned to cook and where I learned to be passionate about food. My mom and I always talked about opening a restaurant incorporating that same passion, and what better way to do that in my dad’s honor than to name it after him?”

  The article ended with a brief note from the reviewer that called the cuisine “haute Italian” and lauded the restaurant’s low lighting and lofty ceilings, its rustic wood-fired pizzas, and its appetizing aroma of breads and olive oil. Reading the last quote, I laughed aloud, recalling the olive oil barrel conversation I’d had with Michael. Unfortunately, this made Kris look up with a smile on her face.

  “You are goofing off!” she said triumphantly. “I knew it!”

  I felt the color rise to my cheeks. “No, I’m not,” I protested weakly.

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please,” she said. “When’s the last time someone’s expenses made you giggle?”

  I tried unsuccessfully to stifle a small smile. Arching an eyebrow, Kris stood up and crossed the few feet between our cubicles to come stand behind my chair. “So?” she asked. “What are you looking at?”

  I shrugged, but she was already reading over my shoulder.

  “You’re giggling at a restaurant review?” she asked after a moment. I glanced back at her. She looked confused.

  “It’s where Rebecca’s reception was,” I responded weakly.

  “Oh,” Kris said slowly. “Okay. But I still don’t get what’s so funny.”