by Maria DiRico
“I know.” Nicole motioned to a half-empty breadbasket. “Piero introduced himself and brought this. He said he makes everything himself, including the bread, and that dinner is on him. A ‘Family’ man. With a capital F?”
Mia nodded. “Yes. And dinner’s not on him, no matter what he says, but that’s for me, not you.”
Piero delivered the glass of wine to the women’s table and disappeared into the kitchen. The two friends spent a few minutes catching up, then Mia steered the conversation toward Nicole’s shower. “I told your grandmother that I wanted to run as much as I could by you first.”
“Thank you for that. The thought of Minnie not being reined in is terrifying. She wanted to have one of those proclamations made up when the baby is born, you know like the royal family does, where they put a big sign in front of the palace announcing the birth. I was like, ‘Where are you gonna put that, Nonna, in front of the Steinway Street subway station?’”
“Your mother can help me keep her under control.” Mia sipped her wine. “So, Minnie said you’re having more than one shower.”
Nicole slumped in her booth. “Yup. Minnie and Mom’s, my friends, Ian’s family, my coworkers . . . and Tina.”
Mia’s eyes widened. “Tina’s throwing you a shower? The evil stepmother?”
Nicole pursed her lips. “Oh, don’t think she’s doing it for me. Tina’s convinced that my dad still has feelings for my mom. She’s throwing the shower to show off and compete with her. It’s infuriating but I can’t say no because my parents just want peace in the family.”
“Where’s she having it?”
“Versailles on the Park.”
Mia’s mouth dropped open. “Versailles? That place is crazy pricey.”
Nicole gave a vigorous nod. “I know. Like I said, showing off. Bella figura.”
Mia nodded, all too familiar with bella figura, the Italian concept of presenting a positive, even superior, social image to the world. She picked up one of Piero’s homemade breadsticks and snapped it in half. “Wow. Okay, so you can’t get out of that shower. But I’m worried the rest of the lineup is gonna wear you out. I think you should combine everything else except the work event into one shower. If you’re on board with this, I’ll sell it to your mother and grandmother. It’ll up their guest list, but I’m sure they won’t care.”
Nicole straightened up. “I would love that. Thank you.”
“It’s done.” Mia looked around the restaurant. A couple of older men she recognized as Donny Boldano’s “associates” waved to her and she waved back. “Piero never brought us menus.”
“He told me we didn’t need them. He had a special order for us.’
“Whatevs. He’s an amazing cook.” Mia chomped down on half of her breadstick. She followed this up by eating the other half.
Nicole leaned forward. “So, what’s going on with you? Deets about your love life, please. You and Jamie . . .”
Nicole wiggled her eyebrows and flashed a knowing smile. Mia shook her head and held up a hand. “Not happening. Just friends. He’s got a girlfriend. And I’m not dating. No time. Belle View is taking off, which is great, but we’re understaffed. Everyone’s working really hard, even our one slacker employee, Cammie Dianopolis. But slacking was basically written into her deal, so she’s doing us a favor just by showing up. We have to hire more people, but I’m not sure where to look.” She frowned and drained her wine glass. “To be honest, I did an online search for ‘how to run a catering hall.’ I dug up some good stuff, but not enough. I wish I could crash a party at another venue to see how they run things.”
“You don’t have to crash anything,” Nicole said. “Consider yourself invited to Tina’s big fat Greek baby shower.”
Mia brightened. “Really? That would be wonderful. I can learn a lot from a Versailles event.”
Piero emerged from the kitchen holding two large plates emitting clouds of steam. He deposited one in front of each woman. “Ecco,” he said. “Here you go.”
Mia sniffed the steam. “Capers. Tomatoes. Olives. This is—”
“Pasta puttanesca,” Piero said with pride. “By special request.” He mimed tipping a hat and returned to the bar.
“Special request,” Mia repeated. She wrinkled her brow. “Nicole, did you tell your grandmother where we were eating?”
“Yes.” Nicole stared her plate. “She must have heard about Tina’s shower.”
“Oh, yeah.” Mia looped pasta around her fork, then deposited it in her mouth. “I have to say, this is the most delicious stepmother-shaming pasta you will ever eat.”
“Amen to that,” Nicole said, mouth full.
While the women ate in companionable silence, Mia thought about the baby shower Tina planned to throw for her stepdaughter. Attending would allow Mia to snoop around Versailles on the Park and see how Queens’ toniest catering hall operated. Better yet, she’d get to see how Tina Iles-Karras, notorious puttana and “stepmonster,” operated.
CHAPTER 2
The next few weeks were a blur of long workdays stretching into evening events, fueled by copious amounts of Elisabetta’s espresso, a brew so strong that family members joked it should only be available by prescription. Fortunately, planning Nicole’s baby shower proved to be a breeze. Nicole dictated an all-women party, eschewing the trend toward co-ed baby showers. This would bring down the liquor bill significantly. In Mia’s experience, men generally found baby showers a bore, choosing to congregate at the bar and wait for something to go horribly but hopefully hilariously wrong with the gender reveal.
Since the expectant couple chose to find out their baby’s gender when he or she popped out of Nicole, Mia didn’t have to worry about cannons shooting out a mess of blue or pink confetti and creating a vacuum-clogging nightmare for the Belle View cleaning crew—which at this point was Mia, her father Ravello, and any waitstaff willing to earn time and a half to stick around and help clean up. Mia had put out general job feelers on a few hiring websites, but while Belle View’s notoriety hadn’t chased away clientele, it seemed to have shrunk the hiring pool to squat.
Mia’s cell rang. She checked to see who the caller was, groaned, and answered the call. “Hi, Minniguccia,” she said, faking a chipper tone. “What’s up?” Mia knew exactly what was up. She’d already received several emails from the older woman, with the subject line all in caps: NO TEDDY BEAR FOR TINA!
“I wanna make sure you got my email about the favors.” For shower favors, Minniguccia had chosen teddy bears clad in little yellow T-shirts that read, WELCOME, BABY WHITMAN.
“Yes, I got your emails. Here’s the thing . . .” Mia hesitated, knowing she was about to break bad news. “Both Linda and Nicole told me they don’t want to single Tina out. They want her to get a teddy bear.”
“What?!” Minniguccia squawked this, following it with a string of Italian invectives. “Why are they being nice? That strega, that witch—” There’s one I haven’t heard before from Minnie, Mia thought to herself. “She put a spell on Ron and snatched him away from my bambina, my Linda. He had no reason to go anywhere, believe me. My daughter was making him happy, very happy, if you know what I mean.”
‘Oh, I do,” Mia said, eager to end the conversation before it became any more uncomfortable.
“No teddy bear for her. Do you hear me? No. Teddy. Bear. For. Her!”
“You talk to Linda and Nicole about this. I’m sure the three of you will figure it out. I’ll let you know when the bears come in. Bye-yee.” Mia ended the call and dropped her head in her hands. The angry octogenarian was wearing her out.
“Mia, help. Help!”
The cry came from event planner Cammie Dianopolis’ office. Ravello had hired Cammie, a neighborhood friend, to help him run Belle View when Mia’s move home to Queens from Florida hit a bump. Palm Beach police had tagged her as a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of her husband Adam Grosso and his cocktail waitress mistress. Fortunately for Mia but not so much for the waitress, a boat
washed ashore containing the adulteress’s body. Adam was assumed lost at sea and Mia was free to move about the country. Cammie had agreed to stay on at Belle View with the proviso that she work as little as possible. The crush of activity at the catering hall was seriously cutting into Cammie’s personal schedule of beauty treatments and gym visits.
Mia raced into Cammie’s office. She found her co-worker crawling around the shabby carpeting under her desk. “Cammie, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
No, I am not okay.” The fortysomething woman held up a hand. Each finger but one featured a long nail colored in a shade of mauve popular in the nineteen eighties, the decade where Cammie’s style stood frozen in time. “I lost a nail. I’ve been so busy here I haven’t had time to get them re-glued. Help me find it.”
Mia dropped to her knees and felt around the carpet. “Maybe you should put on your readers. It’ll help with looking close up.”
“Never. I hate those things. They’re the eyewear version of saying, I give up.”
“Aha!” Mia sat back on her haunches and triumphantly held up the errant fingernail. “Found it.”
“Thank God.” Cammie grabbed the nail and stood up. She pulled a small tube of nail glue out of a drawer and stuck the nail back onto her index finger. “This is a temporary fix. I gotta get back to the salon. And for my hair, too. Look.” Cammie bent at the neck and pointed the re-nailed finger at the scalp of her frosted hair. “Roots. On me. I’m devolving.”
“I’m sorry. I’m working on getting more help, I swear. It’s harder than I thought it would be to staff this place. Dad and I are so grateful to you for helping out.”
“Hey, this is the best job in the world except for when I actually have to work. Speaking of which, I’m taking off the entire month of January.”
“It’s a slow month. You got it.”
Cammie held out a hand to Mia, who grabbed it and let Cammie pull her to her feet. Cammie eyed her. “I gotta wonder . . .”
She hesitated. “Wonder what?” Mia prompted.
Cammie studied her friend. She tapped a finger against her pink frosted lips, then spoke. “If you’re booking all these parties so you have an excuse not to date.”
Mia gaped at her. “What? Are you serious? Cammie, you know exactly why I’m working this hard. If this place folds, Dad goes back to the Life. Secrets. Danger. Jail time. I cannot—I will not—let that happen.”
“I appreciate that, bella,” a male voice said. Mia and Cammie turned around to see Ravello Carina standing in the doorway. “But I don’t want you ever using me as an excuse not to move on with your own life.”
“Dad.” Mia went to her father and kissed him on both cheeks.
The tall, broad man enveloped his daughter in a bear hug, then released her. “Your brother sends his love.”
“You went to see Posi?” Positano Carina, Mia’s sole sibling, was finishing up a jail stint for car theft at the nearby Triborough Correctional Facility. “How is he?”
“Good. He’s trying to talk the prison staff into putting out a calendar featuring him doing different prison tasks. Bare-chested.”
“Of course he is.” When Posi Carina wasn’t working some illicit angle, he was trying to jumpstart a career as a male model. So far, he’d had more luck jumpstarting the expensive cars he was stealing and selling to China until the Feds nabbed him. “I owe him a visit. I haven’t had time.” Mia turned back to Cammie and said in a triumphant tone, “See? It’s not about dating. I don’t even have time to visit my own brother.”
“I can’t talk. My nail fell off again. I am living a nightmare.”
Ravello excused himself and, after locating Cammie’s errant nail a second time, Mia returned to her office. She checked her phone and saw a text from Nicole: Ignore my nonna. Tina gets a teddy bear. See you tonight at her shower. Remember, it’s formal attire. Which is insane.
Mia texted back, Yes, it is. See you there. She checked the time on her phone and decided to put in a few more hours at Belle View before getting ready for the baby shower blowout, if for no other reason than to prove Cammie wrong. I’m not avoiding dating. I do have to work this hard. Mia ignored a niggling feeling of skepticism as she scrolled through her emails.
* * *
Rather than be fashionably late to the baby shower, Mia chose to arrive on time so that she could take in every aspect of the Versailles on the Park experience. The ornate building, which had only recently been kitted out as a party venue, sat in the middle of Flushing’s largest park. The building was a holdover from France’s contribution to a long-ago World’s Fair. Built as an homage to one of the world’s most iconic sites, the stately replica was currently bathed in a sea of pink and blue lights, an obvious nod to the night’s festivities. Mia exited the cab onto a cobbled drive that made walking in four-inch spike heels a challenge. She hiked up her full-length black jersey halter dress so she could see the ground beneath her feet and made her way onto a red carpet that extended from the drive to Versailles’ grand entrance. On either side, massive fountains featuring statues of half-clothed women shot up choreographed sprays of water. Each statue extended a marble hand to the walkway as if to welcome guests. Men in tuxedos and women clad in the black gowns dictated by the invitation stopped to pose in front of the kind of step-and-repeat usually found at a movie premiere.
Mia climbed the banquet hall’s stone steps, following the red carpet into a clone of the Hall of Mirrors where a string quartet played. She sunk into a depression. The banquet hall business in Queens was fiercely competitive. In a bella figura battle between Versailles and Belle View, her humble workplace didn’t stand a chance. She looked around, unsure where to go, and was relieved to see Nicole waving to her. She went to her friend, and they hugged. “So?” Nicole said with a grin. “What do you think?”
“A red carpet? A step-and-repeat? A string quartet? For a baby shower? No words.”
“This is only the beginning.”
Nicole took Mia’s hand and led her into an enormous room decorated with the most ornate selection of carved molding Mia had ever seen, all colored with gold gilt. The walls were upholstered in rose damask and a line of chandeliers, each twice as big as Belle View’s solitary chandelier, cast a warm light on the room, which featured an array of buffet stations. A combo played jazz standards as waiters wandered through the crowded room offering hors d’oeuvres. Mia opened her mouth and closed it. She’d partied in some fancy venues during her lifetime—the Family was not known for subtle shindigs—but she’d never seen anything like this. “It’s supposed to be the Throne Room at Versailles,” Nicole explained.
Mia found her voice. “Wow. Okay. Well, at least Tina made this only a cocktail party.”
“Wrong,” Nicole said. “This is the cocktail hour.”
Mia followed her friend to a door sporting florid carving. Nicole pushed it open a crack and Mia peered inside. Like the room she was in, this one was slathered in gilded Baroque trim, but with white upholstered walls instead of red. The barreled ceiling showcased frescos of babies floating in clouds. The theme carried over to the table settings, where each of the many, many tables featured a centerpiece comprised of white flowers shaped to form a cloud that a ceramic statue of a baby floated above. “II—” Mia searched for a response. “Where’s Ian? What does he think of all this?”
Nicole let the door close. She motioned to a nice-looking man in his thirties standing by one of the many buffet stations. Next to him, a WASP-y middle-aged couple clung to each other. All three looked lost. “He’s over there with his parents. They just got in from St. Louis. I’ll introduce you. I think you’re the only person Ian will know here. You’re practically the only person I know.”
The two women were about to start toward Ian and his parents when there was a drumroll. The combo’s bassist called for everyone’s attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming your host and hostess, the guests of honor for this evening . . . Ron and Tina Karras!”
&n
bsp; Mia did a double take. “Excuse me. Aren’t you and Ian the guests of honor? You know . . . the parents-to-be?”
“It’s Tina,” Nicole muttered. “She had to make an entrance.”
Mia glanced at her pregnant friend, who was clearly trying to suppress her anger. Worried for Nicole, Mia took her hand and squeezed it. “Think of this whole thing as a joke,” she whispered. “It’s gonna make for some great stories.”
Nicole relaxed and smiled. “You’re right.”
The combo played a flourish. Waiters pulled open the room’s grand doors, and Nicole’s father, Ron Karras, walked in with a stunning woman on his arm. Mia stared at her fascinated. There was no denying Tina Iles-Karras was beautiful. Nicole had mentioned her stepmother was somewhere in her mid-fifties, but perfect bone structure aided by subtle facial procedures took ten to fifteen years off Tina’s real age. Still, there was a tightness to her that went beyond shots of wrinkle-erasing toxins. She gave off the vibe of a sleeping cobra, dangerous whether awake or at rest.
While the guests had all hewed to the invitations and dressed in black—including Nicole, who Mia had naively assumed was the actual guest of honor—Tina wore a silky, fire-engine red gown. Her arms sparkled with what must have been a dozen rainbow bracelets—bracelets comprised of either sapphire or topaz stones arranged in the color order of a rainbow. Mia, who’d always wanted a mere single rainbow bracelet, was consumed with jealousy. Ron, an average-looking man in every way including height, led his model-thin spouse to the combo, where she took the mic from the bassist. “Welcome, everyone,” she said in a throaty voice with the tiniest hint of an accent. “Ronald and I cannot thank you all enough for coming tonight and helping us celebrate this wonderful occasion. We are so thrilled and grateful that we have the honor of sharing it with you.” Tina beamed at her guests and threw her hands up in the air. “Now, kalí diaskédasi! Have a good time!”
The guests applauded and the combo struck up a jazzy tune. It occurred to Mia that Tina never mentioned her stepdaughter in her welcoming remarks. The party might as well be a celebration of Tina. Which, Mia surmised, is exactly what the stepmonster wanted.