This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015
A Kindle Scout selection
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For Glenn,
my very own hero.
He believed in me for a long time,
even when I didn’t
and for my son, Connor,
my reason for everything.
Contents
Start reading
Lucy
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Lucy
Paolo
Jack
Belladonna
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Lucy
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Belladonna
Lucy
Belladonna
Jack
Jack
Lucy
Lucy
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Belladonna’s Secret Sauce
“Life is full of mysteries in which unfathomable forces produce mystical results.”
Deane Keller
Lucy
Applebury, Massachusetts
Present Day
Lucy Parker celebrated her fortieth birthday by burying her grandmother. The following day, her only child would go off to college. And the day after that, Lucy would figure out what to do with the giant blank that was the rest of her life.
Lucy stood—wearing her only dark suit, too hot and too tight—on a grassy hill in the Applebury cemetery, between her beautiful teenage daughter and her fighting-old-age-with-all-she-had mother, as the crimson roses on Nonna Belladonna’s casket fluttered in the late summer breeze. They scheduled the funeral for early morning, before the baking summer heat took hold. A wicked heat wave gripped Massachusetts so the weather was already hot and humid, ripe for another miserable scorcher of a day.
An airplane zoomed overhead, leaving fluffy white contrails across the cerulean sky. Cars whizzed past on the nearby freeway. The world still turned even as Lucy’s life lost its axis, leaving her disoriented, wobbly, and shaken in her one good pair of shoes. The gleaming mahogany casket reflected the three Castillo women, surrounded by an ocean of mourners, blurry through Lucy’s tears. The ancient priest mumbled prayers, the same prayers they always used . . . dust-to-dust . . . eternal rest . . . perpetual light . . . blah, blah, blah. Her vibrant, vivid grandmother could not be in that box. She couldn’t possibly . . .
“Ma, do you have a mint?” Juliet, her eighteen-year-old, leaned over to whisper. Lucy dashed at her face, swiping the tears away, and shook her head. Her mother, Susan, leaned over Lucy to hand Juliet her designer purse. It probably cost more than the monthly rent on Lucy’s apartment. Juliet rummaged through and, in the front pocket, came up with a small, dusty white wafer. Juliet bit it and handed half to Lucy who absently stuck it in her mouth, as her eyes strayed to the scorched brown grass on the slight mound over her husband’s grave. Andrew. Already gone a year, and her a widow at only forty . . .
The mint dissolved on her tongue, leaving a bitter, chalky aftertaste. Coughing discreetly, she glanced at Juliet. Her daughter screwed up her face into the same expression of disbelieving disgust she made when Lucy tried to feed her baby cereal all those years ago. Give the bambina my pastina, Lucia! See how she likes the little stars . . .
“It’s a Tums!” Lucy hissed, swallowing hard against the chalky aftertaste. Susan and Juliet met her gaze, both of them dissolving into laughter on the spot with Lucy joining in. The three women embraced, holding each other up, in a tight huddle of grief and laughter, as the priest droned on and bumblebees buzzed among the flowers. Lucy raised her face to the sky, focusing on the fluffy clouds scudding across vast blue expanse. When the sunbeams pierced through the clouds, like a celestial wave, Lucy knew somewhere up there, Nonna laughed too.
* * *
After the service, as the family greeted fellow mourners under the shade of a nearby oak tree, Lucy’s stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t had more than black coffee for breakfast. Maybe they could grab lunch after this.
Still so many people to greet. Everyone in Applebury knew Nonna. They all wanted to share stories and recipes as they reminisced through their grief. Standing under the shade of a sprawling oak, as the heat of the day crept upward, Lucy wanted to scream as her makeup melted off her face to puddle in her good pearls and her only good pair of shoes sank into the damp ground. Still, she plastered a smile to her face. She owed it to Nonna.
“Lucy, I’m so sorry.” Jack Hamilton stepped up, his wavy dark hair fluttering in the welcome breeze before flopping over his forehead, sunglasses hiding his eyes. He took her sweaty hand, pressing it between his own palms, surprisingly rough and callused. She wondered if he’d been sailing more since his divorce. “We all loved Nonna.”
“Jack!” She said, smiling at her former brother-in-law in his well-cut dark suit, hanging loosely from his broad shoulders. He’d lost weight since his divorce. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Not since . . .” Andrew’s funeral, she thought but didn’t say. His father handled the settling of Andrew’s estate, so she rarely encountered Jack. “How are you?”
“Your grandmother left you a rather unusual bequest we should chat about.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead, his mouth pressed to a thin line. His dress shirt gaped at the neck. “I wondered if I might stop by and talk to you sometime this week.”
What had Nonna done now?
“Of course. Is Tuesday afternoon convenient for you?” He nodded, dropping her hand. Despite the heat of the day, she missed his warmth. She gave him her home address and contact information before turning to the next mourner, her thoughts still with Jack. Her closest childhood friend married Andrew’s sister, making them all one big happy family. Fractured now, in the aftermath of Andrew’s untimely death. Once Jack and Jenny divorced, her friendship with Jack slipped under the excuse of their hectic schedules.
Life twists and turns, Bellissima, Lucy heard her grandmother’s voice in her head, and swallowed hard against the aching void in her chest. She hadn’t expected to miss Nonna so much, so soon.
“Darling, do let’s get going. I need you to drive me to Logan,” Susan murmured at her elbow. Her mother’s strawberry-blonde hair, cut short around her face, caught the sun, picking up the brassy highlights. She wore a sleeveless dress, in a size Lucy could only dream of, showcasing her tanned, freckled arms, muscled from all the golf she played in Florida. “I’ve got a tournament tomorrow.”
“And I need to finish packing, Mom,” Juliet chimed in from the other side, her fingers playing with the end of her dark braid.
Lucy nodded, as her sister-in-law, Jenny approached with her fiancée Barb, both wilting from the heat in their best clothes.
“Hell of a way to spend your birthday, hon,” Barb said as Jenny hugged her.
Jenny called, “We’ll drop Juliet home so you can take your mom to the airport.”
Lucy glanced around, surprised to see the vast sea of mourners already dispersed, just her and the ghosts left under the now baking sun in the graveyard. She lifted her hand to wave farewell but dropped it limply to her side. Her grandmother wasn’t there. Instead, Lucy hurried to her car without looking back.
Lucy
Applebury, Massachusetts
Present Day
“Don’t you want to go out to celebrate your birthday, even if it is a belated celebration? You turned forty. Don’t you want to live it up a little?” Jenny asked, in her habitual early morning phone call, several days after Nonna’s funeral. She meant well, though Lucy often felt like a rebellious teenager to her mother-hen routine.
“Not at all,” Lucy answered. “I have the whole day off and I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to make Nonna’s summer sauce and read a book. Maybe even take a bubble bath.”
“Luce, all you do is cook . . .”
Lucy hung up the phone and tossed it aside. She crawled from the bed, leaving the tangled sheets in disarray, and tossed on frayed jean shorts and a torn Bon Jovi T-shirt. After all, who was there to see her? Who cared if her hair frizzed around her head, like a wild witch of yore? She headed out into the wiltingly-hot late August morning to the grocery store for sauce ingredients.
She returned from the store and clomped up the triple-decker stairs to her singles apartment. After Andrew’s death, Lucy no longer fit into her old neighborhood of affluent couples raising high-achieving kids, but she didn’t fit in here at the apartment complex either. Young singles or newlyweds used these apartments as way-stations to the rest of their lives. She’d boomeranged back here and didn’t belong. On the bright side, living in an apartment on the third floor helped her to tone up her forty-year-old thighs.
Still, she missed the familiar comfort of her former life, especially her expansive garden. She wished her tiny dull box of an apartment could accommodate a few planters, but it didn’t include a terrace or balcony. Even her droopy herbs on the windowsill gave up the ghost in the August heat wave.
“My grandparents grew the best garden, Frankie.” Comfortable on his sunshine-filled perch on the comfortable rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen, the white cat she’d named for her favorite crooner cracked open one blue eye before resuming his snooze.
“I remember eating tomatoes out of it—still warm from the sun—Nonna would keep a salt shaker in her apron pocket and we’d eat the tomatoes like apples. Not like these anemic things.” She waved the grocery store tomato. “Look at that—the height of tomato season and it’s still nothing compared to those delicious tomatoes my grandfather used to grow. Even the farmer’s market can’t match them.”
Today, she’d have to rely on the dismal supermarket produce to make her favorite recipe. Lucy loved summer sauce, a family recipe handed down to her from Nonna, who no doubt got it from her grandmother. Andrew hadn’t liked it much, so she hadn’t made it in years—since the first summer of her marriage, when she was swollen with Juliet and about to pop. She’d eaten it right before she went into labor. Today, she missed the taste—like summer captured on a spoon, the taste of her childhood with Nonna.
By half-past seven, she’d already salted the eggplant, smiling as she heard the echo of her grandmother’s voice in her head. “Always pull out the bitterness, bellissima. It’s like the salt in your tears pulling out the bitterness from your heart, no?” And her mother’s stern, disapproving tsk, as she flipped through endless accounting spreadsheets as she worked at the kitchen table.
Lucy chopped the bell pepper and zucchini before moving on to the onion. Tears prickled at the back of her throat and pooled at the corner of her eyes. Swallowing hard to shove the tears away, she plunged the onion into a bowl of icy water. Since Andrew’s untimely death and Nonna’s unexpected passing, she’d shed plenty of tears. Today wasn’t for crying. Today, she would make her grandmother’s summer sauce and eat a giant bowl of it, maybe two giant bowls. After that, she would think and plan and figure things out.
Like how to fill in the enormous blank that was the rest of her life.
She didn’t even know where to start. Everything overwhelmed her. She’d married at twenty-two and produced Juliet within six months of the wedding. Her life became an endless round of caring for a newborn and a house, following her military husband around from post to post before he’d retired two years ago. As they’d planned, they returned to their hometown of Applebury. She’d never been able to build her own career with their constant moving, which camouflaged the fact that she actually had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up. Throughout their marriage, Lucy’d held down a string of part-time jobs but nothing to give her life purpose like being a wife and mother.
At only forty, she was too young to be a widow with an empty nest. Her stale marriage had gone flat as day old champagne. Andrew bored her, with his dull descriptions of office life and endless meetings. Over time, their love for Juliet became their only true connection. Driven to desperation, Lucy contemplated divorce and, just as she readied herself to end her marriage, her ever-considerate husband dropped dead of a massive heart attack in the middle of third floor accounting. And instantly, she transformed from a bored wife to a guilty widow with an empty nest, the rest of her life yawning blankly in front of her like an endless, barren canyon.
“Let’s see. Make a list. Get a career. Find a new place to live. Figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Should be easy, right, Frankie? Why not add world peace to the list?”
The cat flicked his tail and snoozed on. Not the best brainstorming partner.
“What was it Barb taught me? Break it down into manageable steps?” She stared at the blank beige wall above the kitchen counter for a few seconds but no manageable next step occurred to her. A dozen dizzying possibilities ran through her head—so much freedom bewildered and intoxicated her. Her hands shook as she chopped the mushrooms. The sharp knife slid dangerously toward her fingers before she caught it and placed it carefully on the cutting board. “Careful, bellissima. Knives are not good for fingers—they cut like a lover’s words in the heart.” She heard the echo of Nonna’s patient cooking instructions.
Once she finished chopping the vegetables, Lucy poured herself a glass of water from the tap, staring out at the bleak, summer baked landscape of her suburban apartment complex. From here, all the buildings looked depressingly similar, like the rows of coffins she’d had to choose from when Andrew died. Oh, they might boast some small, distinguishing detail—an extra window there, a railing here. But in the end, the denizens of suburbia lived their lives crammed into identical boxes. Homogenized rows of the living just like the cemetery held homogenized rows of the dead.
“My husband died, my grandmother died, and my daughter left the nest. I need to rebuild my life,” Lucy said aloud to the cat, now ribboning his way through her legs. Frank meowed back, whether in agreement or a plea for his crispy treats, Lucy couldn’t tell. She sighed, tossed some treats to the cat, and started sautéing her veggies.
“The oil is just to soften them up a bit, take away their thick stubbornness. But the real magic comes during their long soak in the pot, eh, bellisima?” her grandma instructed her in Lucy’s memory. “See, I have been in the pot a long time. I am soft now.” She would poke her middle and throw her head back with her rich, hearty laugh.
Lucy tossed the ingredients into the pot, tidied up, and went about her morning as the sauce simmered, filling the tiny apartment with the rich scent of r
ustic Italian cooking and her memories of Nonna Belladonna. Towards lunchtime, she set a pot of water—as salty as the sea—on the stove to boil and stirred her sauce again.
“What do I wish for?” She wondered aloud to the cat, like a maiden in a fairytale. She and the cat spent an enjoyable few minutes, her tossing out more exotic wishes and him ignoring her.
“I wish for a handsome husband. No, I take that back. I don’t miss being married all that much. But I do miss the sex,” Lucy admitted to the cat. Having been neutered, the cat possessed no great interest in affairs of the heart. He tucked his head back into his paws and resumed his nap.
She did miss sex. She thought about Andrew and her greatest hits. There’d been the time in San Francisco; another at Disney World on the hotel balcony, so as not to wake their daughter; sunrise at the beach; thousands of times in the big cozy bed she’d sold because it wouldn’t fit through the front door of her apartment. Their sex life was the one constant in their crumbling, boring marriage, the bedrock, so to speak. And all she missed of it.
And now Andrew was gone. After she recovered from the first shock of her sudden widowhood, she missed sex the most.
“The problem is, where to get a convenient man? It’s not like they sell them at Wal-Mart or Costco. There is no Men R Us—well, not more than plastic body parts and I’ve already got plenty of those. They’ll do in a pinch. But they’re not the same.”
“That’s what I wish for! A lover!” She muttered before banging her spoon on the pot. Frankie, startled by the unexpected noise, leapt from his spot on the chair and streaked out of the kitchen, past a pair of shiny, polished black loafers.
Wait. Loafers?
Belladonna
Ali d’Angelo, Italy
May 1938
Belladonna Rossi knew, just knew, this was going to be her year. Since before she could remember, she’d wanted nothing more than to be Queen of the May. Each year, the sisters at the Ali d’Angelo primary school selected the most virtuous girl in the village to lead the May procession through the town, honoring the Blessed Mother. After leading the faithful past stunning views of Toscana in the spring, following the life-sized statue of the Blessed Virgin borne by the strongest altar boys, the May Queen crowned the statue, before laying a bouquet of spring blossoms in front of a Renaissance painting of Mary being crowned Queen of the Heaven, standing beneath a blossoming orange tree.
The Lost Art of Second Chances Page 1