“No!”
“We had a violent argument and said many ugly and hurtful things. Ultimately, I packed my bags and followed Günther to Germany. My own family was dead, and there was no reason to look back. Besides, your father had asked me to marry him. When I got over my rage, I wrote to Giuseppa—and tore up every single letter. Then I got pregnant with you, and there was no more reason to look back—until two months ago, when the postcard arrived.”
I can’t breathe. “Giuseppa wrote to you?”
“She wanted to meet me on June eleventh, at a pastry shop two streets away from our apartment. Who knows how she found me after all those years.”
I groan. June eleventh was the day she died.
Mamma continues. “I contemplated not going there, but then I sat in that café for more than two hours and jumped every time the doorbell jingled. But Giuseppa never came. She probably didn’t have the heart to do it after all.”
“Mamma . . .” My heart races as I get up and cross to the windowsill, where Giuseppa’s urn sits. I pick it up and close my eyes. “What you said before about tears—that one sheds them for love or death”—I set the urn on the table—“I’m afraid someone did die—and on the exact day you were supposed to meet her.”
For a long time my mother gazes at the urn, which now looks like a harmless—and quite ugly—vase.
“It would have been a miracle if our story had really ended with reconciliation.” My mother touches the urn with her fingertips. “I have no idea how she ended up in your apartment, but I like to imagine that she did plan to come to the pastry shop.”
“I’ll tell you the entire story another time, Mamma. As to your meeting”—I wrap my arms around her and hug her tight—“if Giuseppa was just a little bit like Fabrizio, she must have been looking forward to it.”
Mamma looks at me. “You really love him.”
I can’t return her gaze. “I just think he’s someone who fixes his mistakes.”
“He’d be stupid if he didn’t,” my mother says, a strange undertone in her voice.
“Mamma, I’m not talking about me.”
“But I am.” She sits up straight. “When are we going to drink that liqueur? I think now’s a good moment to find out whether she made it the way she used to.”
I get two water glasses from the kitchen, making a note in my head to buy a set of liqueur glasses. When I return, Mamma is sitting in front of Giuseppa with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, mumbling. So I’m not the only one who talks to the dead. She carefully pours a glass of the orange-colored liquid and sniffs.
“The aroma is perfect,” she says with obvious appreciation, and takes a tiny sip. I watch her closely as she swirls the liqueur in her mouth.
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
My mother takes a second sip and smiles. “You can say that again. Giuseppa and I created the recipe together.”
“You did?” Something clicks in my mind and I shiver. Does fate actually exist? “Does that mean you know how to make this liqueur?”
My mother looks up. “Of course I do.”
Dear Lucia,
I am so sorry that I’m only contacting you now, and in this way. I really wanted to hug you one more time and thank you for making my time at Tre Camini a very special experience. You were the one who made me feel not only at home but also like part of your family. For that I can’t thank you enough. You are a wonderful person, and getting to know you meant more to me than you can imagine. I miss all of you very much—yes, even Rosa-Maria and her barking orders. It is very quiet in my small apartment in Berlin. I do hope you forgive me and I beg you to believe me when I say that leaving was the only thing I could do, and that my hasty departure had nothing at all to do with you.
You’ll be happy to hear that I had a long conversation with my mother today. Obviously past wounds can’t be cured in one evening, but I think that now we’ll cook with each other often. I’ll call you one of these days and tell you an amazing story. Here is just the gist of it: apparently there was a connection between your Nonna and my mother, Isabella Colei. And this leads me to ask you a very important favor—the main reason I send this letter via courier.
Enclosed is a sealed envelope addressed to Fabrizio. Something very valuable is inside. I know that it will mean a lot to him. Could you please give the envelope to him without telling anyone about it, not even Marco? It’s really important.
Considerer yourself hugged and kissed.
Your friend,
Hanna
Fabrizio
While I stare for at least ten minutes at the piece of paper, Lucia focuses on my forehead as if she wants to burn a hole into it. The energetic handwriting, slanted to the right, flows across a piece of paper that—ironically—is apricot colored. My eyes return to the heading again and again: Il liquore di albicocche della Nonna. Ricetta originale.
“So? What does it say?” Lucia asks, biting her nails. That’s when I regret having told her she could stay while I opened Hanna’s envelope.
“Stop biting your nails. It makes your hands ugly.” I put the note facedown on the desk. Strangely, I have only one thought, and that thought has nothing to do with the incredible content of the letter. I’m annoyed that there’s not one personal remark. And it annoys me that I am annoyed.
“Can I look at the letter Hanna wrote you again?” I ask. Lucia purses her lips, thinks, and then shakes her head.
“Only if you tell me what your letter says.” She reaches out quickly, but I’m faster.
“Ouch! Really, Fabrizio.” Lucia grimaces and rubs her wrist. Then she reluctantly pushes Hanna’s letter across the desk.
I read it again, and then again.
So Isabella Colei is her mother. Now I remember where I heard the name before—she was the unfriendly woman on the phone, the one Nonna had wanted to meet in Berlin. But what does this Isabella have to do with . . . I lower the piece of paper and study my sister-in-law, who sulks in the visitor’s chair. Sighing, I nod and Lucia picks up the letter. Her eyes grow bigger—big as espresso cups—as she reads. “But this is . . . it’s Nonna’s liqueur recipe!”
“Possibly.”
“What do you mean, ‘possibly’? Of course it is.”
“So what?”
“So what?” Lucia jumps up and her chair scratches across the wooden floor.
“Watch the floor,” I say coldly. Lucia throws the paper at me, and it flutters to land next to me on the floor.
“Is that all you have to say?” she hisses.
“The parquet was expensive.”
Arms akimbo, she shakes her head. I pick up the paper, hold it for a while, and then put it in the lowest desk drawer, the one for items marked “Done,” for filing later. Some things lose their meaning when circumstances change. That was one of Nonna’s sayings, too. Lucia raises a brow.
“What are you doing?”
“Putting the past where it belongs.”
Lucia collapses like a pricked balloon. “Did Hanna hurt you that much?”
Without planning to, I pound my fist on the table. “Hanna has nothing to do with this.”
Lucia jumps so high that I regret my outburst immediately. I try a mellower approach. “In case you forgot, I made an agreement with your husband. Even if this is Nonna’s original recipe, which I doubt, what are we going to do with it? There’s no guarantee that the liqueur would be a success. Even under the best of circumstances, it would take years to be able to live off it, and until then we’d have to invest in the fields and the distillery with money we don’t have.” It hurts to see how the sparkle goes out of Lucia’s eyes. But I take a deep breath and point to the file cabinet. “That piece of paper cannot change the fact that we’d lose the estate. And so it’ll stay in the drawer.”
“Now you’re talking exactly like Marco.” Luc
ia’s voice trembles. “The Fabrizio I once knew would have done everything to make his dream a reality, because he believed in it—because he believed in Tre Camini and in himself. Because of that, it would have worked.” She carefully folds Hanna’s letter three times. Then she gets up and looks at me with a mixture of contempt and compassion. “To be honest, I liked that Fabrizio more.”
Hanna
“You managed to surprise us—in a very good way,” Hellwig says with his toothpaste-ad smile. He folds his arms behind his neck and rocks back and forth on his ergonomic chair.
I feel myself blushing. The boss has ordered me to his attic office several times during the last few months, but mostly to give me a piece of his mind. I haven’t heard such praise from him since the day I showed him my master’s thesis.
Fortunately he doesn’t seem to expect a reaction, but gets up and goes to his electric kettle and the collection of colorful cups on the sideboard.
“Will you join me for a cup of tea?” he asks in a tone that makes it clear that he wouldn’t accept a no. So I answer yes and watch him go to the roof terrace, where he picks some green stems from various pots with great care.
“I had no idea that you grew your own tea,” I say, just to say something.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Hellwig laughs quietly, and I suddenly remember that he’s quite attractive. He has some other good traits, too—he left the large, airy rooms for his staff and volunteered to take the attic office, even though it’s so small that his desk fills a third of the room. On the other hand, the roof terrace definitely adds to the attraction of this Cinderella cubbyhole . . . My chest spasms familiarly. The prince takes home the wrong bride, no matter how much blood there is in the shoe. But Cinderella is just a story, anyway.
“I assume that’s mutual, Frau Philipp. Or may I call you Hanna?”
I look up, startled, since my thoughts have been completely elsewhere, and look directly into Hellwig’s ice-gray eyes. The rose-patterned cup he puts in front of me gives off the scent of mint chewing gum. Then he returns to his chair, walking around his desk slightly bent over to avoid hitting the slanted roof.
“Sorry? . . . Um . . . yes. Of course you may call me that . . . Sebastian . . .” I stutter. After the evening with my mother, I thought I wouldn’t be baffled by anything ever again. He is still smiling—definitely a record, since I’ve been in his office for half an hour.
“We—I mean the board and I—really didn’t think you could settle the Camini matter. But the fact that Herr Camini not only withdrew the suit but also agreed to pay our attorney fees shows how convincing you were.”
“He did . . . what?” I whisper, and my pulse hits the roof. Hellwig’s smile widens.
“They didn’t even care about your scathing review anymore. Camini’s attorney said his client wanted to have the matter over with as soon as possible. So you actually could have toned down your rave review quite a bit.”
I don’t feel any tears, but I do feel as if Fabrizio just threw a brick at me—and hit me all the way from Italy. He wants to forget the matter as soon as possible. And I had still hoped on the plane that he would sing.
Hellwig studies me, and suddenly understanding flashes across his face. “I guess you didn’t want to write the article any other way, did you?”
I nod with a lump in my throat. Hellwig looks at the ceiling beams. For a tiny moment he seems disappointed, but then he leans across his desk and pushes a piece of paper toward me. “The board needs to fill an editor-in-chief position. I think you’re the right person for the job.”
I’m speechless. “But you—”
“We’re talking about the Vienna office. The mess there needs to be cleaned up by a capable person. You have three years to turn the pigsty around. Otherwise there won’t be an Austrian edition of Genusto anymore. Think you can do it?”
“But why me?” I shake my head and count on my fingers: “I’m the black sheep that causes trouble all the time. My harsh critiques have cost five-digit lawyers’ fees. Restaurateurs hate me so much that some write me threatening letters. I’m up here once a month to confess my latest transgression, and besides”—my hands form fists and I take a deep breath—“I don’t want to write restaurant reviews any more. I want to report.”
There, I finally said it.
“That’s exactly why you’re the right person for Vienna, Hanna.” Hellwig starts to laugh. “You’re a fighter. You don’t care what others think about you, and if you screw up, you have the courage to face the consequences. You say what you want and what you don’t want, and stop at nothing to achieve your goals. That’s exactly the kind of editor in chief the board wants for Vienna. Besides, in such a position you can write poetry on the side, if that’s what you want.”
I want to argue that I’m not sure I’m still the woman he describes, but Hellwig doesn’t let me interrupt. “As for the consequences of your reviews, it’s a pure cost-benefit calculation for the publisher. Your critical reviews have won us thirty thousand new readers and fifteen thousand new subscribers—most of them restaurateurs. They might not love you, but they value your judgment as much as they fear it. So believe me, the income you generated for Genusto offset lawyers’ fees—and more.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say, silently annoyed about all of Hellwig’s past dressing-downs. But somehow I also understand him. Too much praise makes you complacent, and I might have grown bored and tired of my job. I breathe in and out deeply while he scrutinizes me with his usual emotionless gaze that makes me feel like a nobody.
“You can take three days to decide. After that, I’ll offer the job to Frau Durant.”
Claire. I swallow. Of course, she started at Genusto only two months after me and is as qualified as I am. Whatever I decide, I’ll lose my only friend. I get up slowly, and then Sasha’s face flashes through my mind, and the article that I put in my drawer without reading. “Could I ask you a favor . . . Sebastian?”
“If it’s a raise, you can forget it. That only happens if you accept the Vienna job.”
“Sasha Senge. She’s our intern—very sassy, very involved, and very reliable. She’s almost done with the internship.”
“What about her?”
“She wrote an article on a topic you’re interested in.”
“Is she any good?”
“She’s very good,” I say, even though I’ve never read a word she’s written. But I’ve learned by now to listen to my feelings, and something tells me Sasha needs to be given the same chance that I was given, not so long ago, by a benevolent editor named Sebastian Hellwig. And if she writes the way she talks, she might turn out to be the new face for my column.
“Then why is her article not on my desk yet? Send the girl up to me now.”
“I’ll do it right away . . . and boss?
“What else?”
“Don’t scare her off.”
Fabrizio
The door is just closing behind Lucia when I reach for the apricot-colored piece of paper. I study the list of ingredients, which I only scanned earlier and stop at the next-to-last item. My stomach feels funny. Can it be that simple? Damn it. Why didn’t I figure it out myself?
The butterflies in my stomach multiply, and I drum on the desk with my fingers. For a moment I consider shredding the page right now. But my hand won’t do it. I cross the room in four steps and fling open the door, almost running over Lucia, who is leaning against the railing, grinning at me triumphantly.
“Not one word,” I grumble and am off, running down the staircase.
I only stop after the door of the distillery building slams shut behind me. I turn the key twice and lean my head against the rough wooden door.
Then I turn around and head for the storage room, where we keep Nonna’s canned jam and preserved apricots, bottles of Rosa-Maria’s tomato puree, and Lucia’s much-loved
tomato juice. There’s also a shelf of square jars exclusively reserved for Alberto’s apricot-blossom honey. When Nonna was alive, the shelf was usually half-empty. But since her death, the square glasses have accumulated, and Alberto has even had to pack them into cardboard boxes and store them in the barn. How strange that I never questioned where all the honey ended up when Nonna was alive.
I grab three jars of honey and line them up on the desk. I should have guessed from just looking at Nonna’s hand-drawn bee on the labels. She always insisted that the farm’s products have handwritten labels, but she added her drawings to only two of them: Alberto’s apricot-blossom honey and the apricot liqueur.
I unscrew one of the lids. The honey doesn’t smell like conventional honey—there’s no waxy, unpleasant aftertaste. Instead it is fragrant with vanilla and the faint reminiscence of apricots. My senses react immediately—I don’t even have to experiment to know that this is the missing ingredient. I laugh out loud when I realize what it all means: Alberto’s honey and Nonna’s apricots, joined in a lifetime achievement. Hell, Nonna created a monument of her love for Alberto with this liqueur.
Hanna
I watch Sasha start up to the attic. White as a ghost, she presses her portfolio to her chest. I finally allow myself a satisfied smile. Claire hands me a cup of coffee and looks at me, her head tilted.
“You put in a good word for her with the boss,” she says in a flat voice.
“That’s possible.” I grin.
“And you’re reading dime novels.”
“I . . . what?”
“You . . . read . . . pulp fiction. Do you want me to spell it?”
“First, you should stop snooping through other people’s handbags,” I shoot back. Claire’s not impressed; she plucks at her lower lip.
“Are you all right?” she says at last, hesitantly.
“It’s not a crime to read romance novels. Besides, I got it for the special price of ninety-nine cents and just couldn’t resist the hero’s rippling abs,” I joke, but Claire will have none of it.
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