Pasta Imperfect

by Maddy Hunter

  “Hi, Em.”

  “EHHH!” I spun around to find my mother propped up on my bed, surrounded by orderly piles of paper, a modest stack in her lap. “Mom!” I screamed, my heart in my mouth. “What are doing in here?”

  “You’ve been shopping,” she announced, marking the clothes in my arms. “But it would have been nice if they’d given you sacks for your purchases. Looks like you bought quite a bit.”

  “How did you get in here? The door was locked!”

  “The light’s so bad in my room, Emily. I was about to go cross-eyed reading all these manuscripts. So I went down to the front desk to ask if I could borrow your key to see if the light in your room was any better, and no one was there, so I wiggled your key off its hook and let myself in. And I’m so glad I did. The light really is much better in here. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “You wiggled my key off its hook?” I dumped my clothes onto the bed.

  “It’s not very hard. All the keys are hanging on the wall right there in the open by the front desk.”

  It certainly made me feel secure knowing that if the front desk was unmanned, our rooms would be accessible to anyone.

  Mom wrinkled her nose. “My goodness. What’s that awful smell?”

  “Me,” I said, dragging myself around to her side of the bed. I sat on the edge and twisted around so she could see the back of my head. “I had a run-in with a Zippo lighter. Other than smelling awful, does it look really bad?”

  “Tilt your head back a little, Emily. That’s good. Oh my!” I heard a little intake of breath. “Well, to tell you the truth, it burned in a real pretty pattern. Kind of like one of those English crop circles. And the ends of your hair have an attractive crinkle to them now. Much prettier than the split ends you sometimes get. And I bet if you pin your hair up in a French twist, no one will ever notice that semi-bald streak down the center of your head. It’s nice the sides are still long. If you could only do something about the smell. Maybe room deodorizer would help.”

  I patted the back of my hair for the first time, my hand freezing in place when it grazed a patch of roughened bristles where corkscrew curls used to be. “Oh, God.”

  “It looks far better than the hairdo your grandmother came home with from Ireland.”

  Which wasn’t saying much. Poor Nana still looked like a denuded rabbit, and she’d been cut and styled by a pro.

  “How did this happen?” Mom asked, giving me a motherly pat on the back.

  So I told her the whole story about the incident at the leather market and when I was done, she shook her head and offered me a grim smile. “You’ve started smoking, haven’t you?”

  “No! That’s the truth! I even have a witness!”

  “Accidents like that don’t happen in real life, Emily.”

  “They do to me!”

  “Really, hon, maybe you should put the escort business on hold and try something else. You were always good in English, and you have your grandmother’s beautiful penmanship. Maybe you could write a novel. I’d have an easier time reading a manuscript handwritten by you than by the person I’m reading now. I think it must be a doctor. Tell me, does this sound right to you?” She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose and angled the paper in her lap toward the bedside light. “ ‘She gently caressed his cork with her lily white hard.’ ‘Hard’ could be ‘hand,’ but I don’t know where the cork comes in. They weren’t even drinking wine.”

  Euw boy. I returned to the other bed and began sorting through my clothes. “Maybe she caressed his ‘coat.’ ”

  “Coat?” She chewed on that for a while. “Hunh. Coat might work, but this person really needs help with syntax.”

  “So how are the entries looking?” I asked as I noticed a huge coffee stain on my yellow sundress. Damn!

  “These are the ones I’ve read,” she said, sweeping her hand over the neat piles on the bed. “There are entry numbers instead of names on them, so I’ve arranged them alphabetically by title to keep them in order. And I have to give these people credit, Em. Some of them are really talented. And their stories are so original.”

  I inspected my rosebud sheath to find the zipper slide off the track and the tape pulled away from the fabric. Keely had obviously been in a huge hurry to get out of it, but how was I supposed to wear it with a broken zipper?

  “There’s one about a pirate who kidnaps a headstrong Irish girl off a sailing ship and takes her to his pirates’ den in the Caribbean, where they eventually fall in love. And one about an Indian who kidnaps a headstrong Irish girl off a wagon train and takes her to his village on the plain, where they eventually fall in love. And one about a highwayman who kidnaps a headstrong Irish girl from her carriage on the moors and takes her to his cottage in Cornwall, where they eventually fall in love.”

  I examined tops, pants, cardigans, and dresses to find jam stains, split seams, cigarette holes, lipstick stains, missing buttons, and broken snaps. How could they have been so careless? I couldn’t wear anything now! I dug through the pile again. Where was my one-shoulder sweaterdress with the leather shoulder strap?

  “And this one’s really original, Em. It’s about a Montana cowboy who kidnaps a young woman from her best friend’s wedding ceremony and takes her to his cabin in the Rockies! Isn’t that different?”

  I threw her a confused look as I tossed my stuff right and left in search of my coral sweaterdress. “I don’t think I get what’s so different. Is this one where they don’t fall in love at the end?”

  “Ofcourse they fall in love, Emily. But she’s not a headstrong Irish girl. She’s Lithuanian!”

  No sweaterdress. Unh. I pouted in complete despair at the clothes on the bed.

  “You could do something like this, Em.” Mom waved a page at me. “I know you could. Have you ever dreamed of writing a book?”

  I sank down on the bed. I dreamed about Etienne…and obscenely large body parts. “Can’t say that I have.”

  She clutched the page to her chest, looking suddenly nostalgic. “I probably never told you this, but when I was younger, I dreamed of becoming a stewardess. There was nothing I wanted more than to fly the friendly skies in a stylish little uniform and matching cap.”

  Mom had wanted to be a flight attendant? Serving peanuts and beverages to people? Showing them how to fasten their seat belts? Instructing them what to do should the plane lose cabin pressure? Who knew? But her revelation gave me pause. I guess I’d never really looked at Mom as being anyone other than my mom. “So why didn’t you follow your dream?”

  I caught a twinkle in her eye behind her wire-rims. “Because I was kidnapped from St. Kate’s College by a strapping man on a John Deere tractor and carried off to his grain farm in Iowa, where we fell in love.”

  Aw, life imitating art. That was so sweet! Despite my depression, I felt my mouth curve into a smile.

  “You know who else wanted to fly the skies years ago?” Mom continued. “The Severid twins. Britha told me when we were shelving aviation books at the library one afternoon. That would have been the six hundred section, located in the northeast corner of the building by the restrooms.”

  “They wanted to travel the world?” I asked, testing the back of my head again in the hopes that my hair had miraculously grown back. “But they’ve hardly set foot outside Windsor City their entire lives.”

  Mom shrugged. “Britha said her father didn’t want them parading around in those skimpy uniforms or demeaning themselves by serving demon liquor, so they never got to go. But Barbro did the next best thing. She wrote a book about the romantic adventures of a stewardess from a little town in the Midwest. She was even thinking of turning it into a continuing series. Can you picture Barbro writing a book like that?”

  I’ll say. Love and romance written by a woman who’d probably never dated a man in her life.

  “What an imagination she must have, Emily. Think about it. She wrote that entire book without ever having set foot on an airplane!”

  I stared
at Mom for a long, numbing moment. Mmm, okay.

  “Too bad it never got published, but writing it made Barbro realize she really liked tinkering with words, so her greeting card career grew out of the whole experience. She’s made a wonderful contribution to the industry. Did you know she was the first person to pen the rhyme, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’? And once, when she had writer’s block, she even came up with, ‘Have a nice day.’ I don’t know how she does it.”

  Me either, but I wish she’d stop. I gave Mom a hard look. “Have you been outside the hotel today?”

  “Not yet. With all this work who has time to sightsee?”

  Iowans were so responsible. Even the ones like Mom, who’d been born and raised in Minnesota.

  Knock knock knock.

  Had to be Jackie. I crossed the room to let her in.

  “I found the perfect salon,” she announced, when I opened the door. “It’s not too far from the Duomo and according to the ad, they specialize in damaged hair. It’s called ‘Donatella.’ Sounds pretty upscale, hunh? Hey, you got some of your clothes back!” She wandered into the room. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Andrew. I didn’t know you were in here.”

  Mom fixed Jackie with a vacuous stare. I’d explained about Jack’s transformation into Jackie before the trip, but so far the only kind of communication she could manage with the female version of Jack was blank stares…and a brief comment on the plane about how pretty Jackie’s outfit was. But this was fairly typical. Even at her most freaked out and confused, Mom was always complimentary. She lifted her hand toward Jackie in an awkward greeting. “Lovely outfit you’re wearing.”

  “Not for long. I bought some new threads, and I’m going to jump into them right after we get Emily’s hair fixed. Hey, Em, you mind if I leave my bags here and pick them up when we get back?”

  “No problem.” But there was a problem I still needed to address, and it suddenly became clear how I might resolve it — much to my dismay. But what the heck, I didn’t have any big plans for the evening anyway. “Say, Mom, why don’t you spend the night in here with me? We can have a sleepover.”

  “A sleepover? Why, Emily, that’s so thoughtful of you. I haven’t thought of sleepovers for years. Remember the ones you used to have when you were a girl?”

  Jackie rolled her eyes. “I hope they were more fun than the one we had in Ireland.”

  Mom sighed with disappointment. “I’d love to, Emily, but I really can’t. I need to take care of your grandmother.”

  “Mom! She doesn’t need taking care of! She has a white belt in Tae Kwon Do!”

  “That doesn’t matter. She’s my mother, and I can’t expect George to keep her company indefinitely. Especially with her hearing loss. He was a saint to take up the slack for me today, but enough is enough. George Farkas didn’t come on this trip to babysit your grandmother.”

  I smiled. At least she got that part right. “Well, here’s the thing, Mom. I need to spend the evening mending and treating the stains on that stack of clothes on the bed, and it would go a lot quicker if I had your help.”

  “Stains on your clothes? My goodness, Em, what did you do? Buy them at a resale shop? That’s not like you at all.”

  I could go through the whole long explanation, but what was the point? Much as I’d like to blame someone for my clothes fiasco, I really couldn’t fault Mom. As always, she’d only been trying to help.

  “I’d be delighted to give you a hand, Em.” Mom’s face split into a smile as wide as an octave on a piano. “In fact, I’d be thrilled to help you. I even have a little sewing kit. But do you think George would feel I was taking advantage of him if I asked him to keep your grandmother company again this evening?”

  Oh, yeah. Nana was going to owe me bigtime.

  “Bless you, Emily. When I die, you’re gettin’ all my money,” Nana vowed fifteen minutes later. “You’ve earned all eight million.”

  “I thought it was seven million.”

  “Bull market, dear. My investments are all on an earnin’ streak.”

  We were standing at the northwest corner of the eight-sided baptistry that fronted the Duomo, trying to hold our own against the hordes of tourists who swarmed the square. Jackie and I had wended our way down some side streets and along the Borgo San Lorenzo to discover that it was impossible to get lost in Florence by day, because if you were headed anywhere near the Duomo, all you had to do was look up, and there it was. We’d spotted Nana on the fringe of the baptistry crowd, taking pictures of all the activity, so we’d crossed the street to join her, which is when I’d made her day with the news about my pre-arranged sleepover with Mom.

  “Don’t know how you ever spotted me in this crowd,” Nana said as she coddled a stack of Polaroids in her hand.

  “Radar,” I teased, and the fact that she was the only person in Florence wearing Minnesota Vikings wind pants and a pink teddy bear top.

  “Did you get some good shots of the baptistry, Mrs. S.?” Jackie held her hand out to indicate she’d like to see the photos. “The tour book said the building is at least seventeen hundred years old. Can you believe it? I mean, that’s older than the Empire State Building!”

  I threw her a bewildered look. Thank God we’d never had children.

  Nana lifted her chin and sniffed. “Do you smell somethin’, Emily?” Grabbing on to my arm, she checked the bottoms of her sneakers. “I hope I didn’t step in nothin’. These are the only shoes I got left.”

  Jackie shuffled through the photos. “I guess unbaptized people weren’t allowed to enter a church way back when, so the congregation had to construct a whole other building for the sole purpose of baptizing babies so they could enter the real church.” She looked suddenly perplexed. “You don’t have any pictures of the baptistry here, Mrs. S.”

  “I know, dear,” she said, rubbing her nose, “but I got some dandy shots a the crowd. Only time Windsor City gets a turnout like this is for the Hog Days Festival and parade.”

  “Where’s George?” I asked, scanning the crowd in search of his seed-corn hat.

  She nodded toward the baptistry. “He’s just north, takin’ pictures a the door some fella spent twenty-somethin’ years makin’. Too bad he couldn’t a gone prefab. Woulda saved a whole bunch a time.”

  “Well, well, well. Would you look at this.” Jackie handed me one of Nana’s photos.

  I perused the glossy photo, surprised to find three familiar faces staring back at me. But the picture could have been better. Brandy Ann’s hair looked washed out in the sunlight, and Fred’s safari hat cast a dark shadow over his face. The only thing that had photographed well was the bolt in Amanda’s nose. Funny about Fred though. After his remarks in the open-air market, I didn’t think he’d be cozying up to Brandy Ann and Amanda anytime soon. I held the photo up for Nana. She squinted at the image.

  “That’s the girl with the rugged sinuses,” Nana said in a whisper. “Amanda. She was real good about lettin’ me take her picture. They’ll never believe this back at the Legion a Mary. I bet knowin’ a girl with a can opener in her nose will be way better than knowin’ a guy who used to live in a closet.”

  “How long ago did you shoot this?” I asked.

  “Five, ten minutes.”

  “Can I see that again?” asked Jackie, removing the photo from my hand. She studied it briefly. “Aha! If you concentrate on the foreground, you can miss things in the background. You want to know what my roommate looks like, Emily? Here you go.” She handed the photo back. “She’s the busty blonde Gabriel Fox has his arm draped around in the far right corner there. Our Mr. Fox doesn’t waste any time with the ladies.”

  “He hit on your roommate?” I checked out the blonde, my eyes focusing on the slightly grainy image. “SHE’S WEARING MY CORAL SWEATERDRESS WITH THE LEATHER SHOULDER STRAP!”

  “Euw, that’s yours?” Jackie took another peek. “Nice color. Where’d you get it? Catalogue? Is the scarf yours, too?”

  “What scarf?”

  She p
oked the photo with her fingernail. “Fox’s arm isn’t the only thing draped around Jeannette’s neck. See? There’s a scarf trailing down the front of her dress. Frankly, I don’t think the neckline of the dress calls for a scarf. She might know a lot about food, but she obviously doesn’t know diddly about accessorizing.”

  I went up on my tiptoes, searching the crowd. “I wonder which way everyone went?”

  “Amanda and them was headin’ for that famous museum over by that famous plaza with all them famous statues, but I told them how I’d just read this mornin’ you might have to wait in a long line if you don’t have no advance tickets. They decided to climb to the top a the Domo instead, though the man with the hat said he didn’t much like heights.”

  I looked at Jackie. Jackie looked at me. “I guess maybe I should keep an eye on them,” she said, handing all the photos back to Nana. “But I still think it would work better if I had a disguise. Oh, God, this is exciting.” As she bounded through the crowd, she turned around and yelled back at me, “Meet you at the hairdresser’s in a couple of hours or so!”

  Nana waved her photos at Jackie in farewell, then to me, “She’s very tall, isn’t she, dear?”

  I tugged on the cloth sack hanging from her arm. “Been shopping?”

  “You bet.” Eyes gleaming, she sidled a surreptitious look over each shoulder, then opened the sack just wide enough for me to spy a big wad of black leather.

  “What is it?” I whispered. “Slingshot?” My nephews would love it. My sister-in-law would kill her.

  “Undies,” she said.

  My eyebrows shot to the top of my head. “For you?”

  “For George. I found ’em at the leather market. The fella in the stall tried to sell me a nice leather thong like the one your young man had on last month, but I knew George would balk at that.”