by Jen Carter
Blearily, I saw Stella roll her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the clarification. Do you two want to go over our plans for once we land in Italy?”
“Nah,” Holly said. “I’m on a need-to-know basis. Just point me in the right direction, and I’ll follow your lead. I trust that the arrangements you’ve made are perfect.” She put a set of earbuds in her ears and closed her eyes. “But feel free to tell Jill all about those incredible plans of yours.”
“Actually,” I said thickly, “can we talk about this when we’re there? I took a sleeping pill, and it’s kicking in.”
Stella might have answered. I didn’t know. The next thing I remembered was waking up, sprawled across Holly’s lap. Holly was also sleeping, sitting straight up, her head tilted back and mouth hanging open. She was snoring so loudly that I would have woken earlier if it hadn’t been for the sleeping pill.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t enjoy waking up normally—who did? But I hated the feeling of waking up after a sleeping pill, which I only took in an emergency, like flying. I blinked a couple times, willing away the hung over feeling, and looked at Stella. She was tapping furiously on her iPad.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” I yawned. “What time is it?” I leaned over to see the time displayed on Stella’s tablet, and she quickly closed out the app she had open. I hadn’t gotten a good look, but it seemed to have been a note taking app. And I had caught the words Mom and Dad somewhere in the middle of the paragraph she had been writing. She was probably planning out more activities for our trip.
“We’ll be landing in less than an hour,” Stella said, flipping the cover over her iPad.
“Do you have any water?” I asked.
Stella leaned forward and dug through her carry-on stowed beneath the seat in front of her. “Yes,” she said. “I bought six bottles in the airport right before we took off so that we each would have two.”
Of course she did.
The rest of our travels were a blur. Despite sleeping for most of the thirteen-hour flight, I felt tired and out-of-sorts as we deplaned, retrieved our luggage, found our way to the train station, took two trains, and arrived in Vernazza. I recalled getting ice cream from a huge cooler in one of the train stations, but I couldn’t remember which. Stella made me drink both water bottles she had bought for me and then one that she had bought for herself. By the time I finished the last one, I was starting to feel like myself again.
It was just about twenty hours of travel from the time we left my apartment in Carlsbad to the time we arrived in Vernazza. How did anyone travel like that on a regular basis? Even though I slept more than half that time, it was still exhausting.
But that exhaustion evaporated the second I stepped off the train in Vernazza.
Ah, Vernazza.
FIVE
Vernazza was a seaside village along the Italian Riviera. It was the fourth of five villages that made up the Cinque Terre, or five lands. Prior to arriving in Vernazza, my experience with seaside villages had been limited to 1000-piece puzzles I put together with my mom as a child, and not surprisingly, Vernazza blew those puzzles out of the water.
Off the train, I made sure that my little carry-on backpack had been securely attached to my huge traveling one and then slung the whole monstrous thing onto my back. With an overdramatic oof, Holly did the same. Stella dropped her pack to the ground and dug through the little carry-on attached to it.
“Let me just find our room information,” she said under her breath. “I know it’s in here somewhere.”
I took the moment to look down the cobblestone path toward the town center. The buildings lining the walkway were mustard yellow, burnt orange, and rusty red—so wonderfully Italian. All were different heights, some boasting three stories and some four, but all were marked by rows of dark green shutters. Sheets and towels hung across clotheslines in front of windows, waving gently as though welcoming us to town.
Aldo was from somewhere in Tuscany—about three hours south by train—and I wondered if he ever came up this way. It was strange to think that Aldo grew up in this country and this sort of beauty was normal to him. He probably thought California was unique and breathtaking when he first arrived there. What a funny thing perspective could be.
I looked at Holly and smiled. Her weird top knot had come loose and fallen to the side, but her fancy sunglasses—most certainly Stella hand-me-downs—almost gave the impression that the hair was on purpose. I reached for her arm and squeezed it. “We’re here!”
Holly let out a deep breath and then returned the smile. “Thank goodness.”
“Got it,” Stella said, pulling a folder from her backpack. “Okay,” she continued, opening to the top page. “We are staying in a little apartment on Via Carattino. I’m supposed to call now that we’re here and ask for Francesco. He speaks English and handles reservations.” She pulled her cell phone from her carry-on pack to place the call.
“Can we walk while you talk?” Holly said. “I’m hungry. I could use some focaccia.”
Stella nodded, her eyes darting back and forth between the paper in one hand and the phone in the other as she punched in the number.
The three of us headed down Vernazza’s one and only street, which was lined with colorful little shops and full of pedestrians. There wasn’t a car in sight. I wondered if cars were even allowed—it didn’t look like there was anywhere for them to go. Holly and I took the lead while Stella followed along, trying to keep up and connect with the apartment manager at the same time.
Three-quarters of the way down the street, which was to say about a three-minute walk, Holly grabbed my arm and stopped abruptly. She pointed at a store on our right.
“Look,” she said. “A wine shop. Our first Italian wine shop.” She smacked my arm with the back of her hand. “Let’s go in.”
Sure, why not? It wasn’t even noon, but we came from a family of winemakers. Perusing the shelves of a wine shop in Italy at eleven o’clock seemed fitting.
I followed her through the front door. The shop was smallish and darkish. The lighting was low, and the bottles lining every wall made the space feel dense and dim. The shop was almost deserted, except for a large man at the bar in the back. And the guy standing behind the bar—the guy whose hazel eyes almost made me run right into Holly as she stopped to snatch a sample of bread and olive oil from a display.
Wait, no. His eyes didn’t make me almost run into Holly. I wasn’t one of those girls who got swept away by beautiful eyes. I was neither seventeen years old nor the heroine in a romance novel. I almost ran into Holly because she stopped abruptly in front of me. That was all.
The man behind the bar smiled. He was tall and athletic-looking, and between his hazel eyes, his nearly-buzzed hair, and his olive skin, he looked just like an Italian soccer player. It wasn’t a bad look.
“Benvenuto,” he said.
“Benvenuto,” I said back.
His smile widened.
“You goof,” Holly said through a mouthful of bread and jabbing my side. “Benvenuto means welcome. You can’t welcome him to his own store.”
Oh, sheesh. What was wrong with me? “No, sorry, no benvenuto. Just, I mean, arrivederci. Or, wait, ciao. Or—”
Holly jabbed me again. “Just stop.” She swallowed her bread and turned to the shopkeeper. Before she could launch into some perfect Italian and put me to shame, he spoke.
“It’s okay, I’m American. English is happily spoken here,” he said. He threw a smile at me and I felt my cheeks burning. “What can I do for you?”
Stella pushed by me and Holly toward the bar. “Excuse me, sir,” she said. “We need some help. We’re trying to find the apartment we booked, and I’m having trouble understanding the gentleman who’s supposed to take us there. You speak Italian?” She held her cell phone out to him. “Can you tell me what he’s saying?”
Hazel Eyes took the phone and put it to his ear, listening.
Holly sidled up n
ext to Stella at the bar. I was right behind her. “Hey, why didn’t you ask me to talk to the reservation guy?” Holly asked. “I’d understand what he was saying.”
“Yes, but you said that you were on a need-to-know basis,” Stella said. “So I’m leaving you out of as many details as possible.”
Holly considered Stella’s explanation and shrugged. “Yeah, that’s probably for the best. I don’t want to be a go-between.” She went back to the display of samples for more bread and olive oil.
Hazel Eyes behind the bar said grazie into the phone, ended the call, and handed the phone back to Stella. The expression on his face did not say, Good news, just make a left at the end of the street and you’ll find the apartment. The expression on his face said, Um, I’ve got bad news, and I don’t really want to be the one telling you.
“It looks like there was a mix up,” he said. “The apartment you reserved was double-booked and already given to the other party.”
“What?” Stella said, her voice an octave lower than normal and quite loud for the small store.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. And he really did look apologetic.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Holly said, returning to the bar. “We don’t have a place to stay?” She popped a bread cube into her mouth. “Is this our fault? Or the apartment guy’s fault?” She sat on the stool next to the heavy, shaggy-haired man who was slumped over his drink and had been quiet this whole time.
“It’s the apartment guy’s fault,” Hazel Eyes said.
Stella took the stool next to Holly’s and buried her face in her hands. “How could this happen?”
I neared the last barstool and dropped my backpack next to it. I leaned down to find the cell phone buried somewhere inside the attached carry-on. Things like this happened. Not a big deal. It wasn’t even noon yet, so we had plenty of time to search the internet and find another place to stay.
Holly slapped the bar and said, “Well, in that case, we need your best bottle of red wine under, um, say ten Euro. Wait, no, we’re in Northern Italy. Give us your best white wine, still under ten Euro. Let’s drink our woes away.”
Stella pulled her hands away from her face and looked at Holly. “Don’t be dramatic.”
Holly chuckled. “Says the woman who looks like she’s going to faint.”
Hazel Eyes selected a bottle from a shelf behind him. “Do you want to drink it here? I have some plastic cups if you want to take this down to the beach.”
The heavy man at the end of the bar suddenly seemed to come alive. He straightened up and said, “Oh, how unfortunate. You have no place to stay? But you know, I might have an answer to this problem.” He put his hands on his chest. “I have a place here in Vernazza. You can stay there.” He held his hand toward Holly. “I am Vincenzo.”
Holly took his hand and shook it. “Really? You rent out apartments?”
Vincenzo shook his shaggy head and rubbed his unshaven chin. “Not apartments. Just my home. You can stay with me.”
Stella buried her face in her hands again. She groaned.
“Really?” Holly asked. “Wow, that’s so nice of you.”
I popped right up from my backpack on the floor and stared at my youngest sister. Did she just accept Vincenzo’s invitation on our behalf? Holly was too busy shaking Vincenzo’s hand for me to catch her eye, and Stella didn’t seem to have heard Holly accept this complete stranger’s offer.
I looked at Hazel Eyes across the bar as he uncorked the bottle of white wine. He shook his head at me. Then he looked at Vincenzo and shook his head again.
“Thanks but no thanks,” I said. “We appreciate the offer, but we need a place of our own.”
Holly turned to me. Her mouth dropped open. “What? Why?”
“Hey Vin,” Hazel Eyes said to Vincenzo. “Time to take a break. Go set up somewhere else.”
Vincenzo rose slowly and stretched his arms over his head, treating us to a view of his hairy potbelly. “Okay, Nico. Addio,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. “Here.” He handed it to Holly. “In case you change your mind, that is my phone number.” Then he stalked out of the wine shop.
I maneuvered around a still-devastated Stella, and smacked the back of Holly’s head—probably a little harder than necessary. “Seriously?” I said. “You really wanted to stay at that guy’s place?”
Holly shrugged. “Why not?”
I pointed to Hazel Eyes, whose name I now knew was Nico. “He was shaking his head,” I said. “And I trust the guy behind the bar more than the guy reeking of alcohol at the bar.”
Holly looked at Nico. Stella lifted her head and looked at him as well.
Nico set a stack of plastic cups next to the corked bottle of wine. “Vincenzo is probably harmless, but I wouldn’t risk it. I think he’s got a screw loose. Maybe two.”
“Do you have a place where we could stay?” Holly asked.
I narrowed my eyes at Holly. What was wrong with her? Before I could ask, Nico laughed.
“How do you know I’m any better than Vincenzo? Let me call my neighbor. She rents out a couple apartments.”
He stepped away from the bar and pulled out his phone. Moments later, he was speaking Italian in a hushed tone.
Holly tried to wrap her arms around both me and Stella, which was a bit awkward since Stella still had her backpack on and we were sort of sandwiched between barstools. But Holly didn’t seem to care. “See, everything will be fine. I bet we’ll have a place before we finish this bottle of wine.”
“I doubt this is how Mom and Dad’s honeymoon began,” Stella muttered.
Holly let go of us and then returned for a third time to the bread and olive oil.
I patted Stella’s shoulder. “Well, this is how our honeymoon is beginning. And already it’s been an adventure. We’ll have a lot to write about in our own scrapbook when we get home.”
Nico glanced at us. For a moment I thought he might have had a question, but then he went back to his conversation.
“Here, have some bread,” Holly said, squeezing between me and Stella. “This is the best olive oil I’ve ever had.”
I took the cube doused in fragrant yellow-green oil and popped it into my mouth. Holly was right—that was darn good olive oil. It was sweeter than I was used to. No wonder she kept going back for more.
“Good news,” Nico said, turning off his phone and stepping toward us. “My neighbor has a place. She’s cleaning it right now, but she said that she would meet you here in two hours. So,” he held up the corked bottle of wine in one hand and the stack of plastic cups in the other hand, “go have some lunch, drink your wine on the beach, and relax a little bit. You can leave your backpacks here behind the bar if you want.”
I think Stella would have climbed over the bar to hug Nico if she could have. The whole we-don’t-have-a-place-to-stay catastrophe had lasted no more than ten minutes, but she had been acting like it was life and death.
“Jill, are you okay with leaving our stuff here?” Holly said with a raised eyebrow.
True, I didn’t want to stay with a stranger in a foreign country, but I felt pretty comfortable leaving our backpacks in Nico’s shop. He seemed like he could be trusted.
Stella took her big backpack off and detached the little carry-on one. “Let me just grab some essentials.” She paused and looked up. “What do we owe you for the wine?”
“The wine’s on the house,” Nico said. “Consider it a honeymoon present.” He grinned at me. “If someone else is behind the bar when you get back, that’ll be Andrea. I’ll fill her in. My neighbor Paola will meet you right out in front, and she’ll recognize you from the description I gave.” He pointed at each of us, one at a time. “Braids, hoop earrings and—” He paused as he reached Holly. His finger drew a couple circles in the air while pointing at her. “I don’t know what you call that. A messy bun?”
“I call it a Holly original,” she said patting the poof of hair on top of her head. She grabbed the wine an
d plastic cups to take with us.
We thanked him again and then filed out of the store, Holly helping herself to one more piece of bread on the way. As I reached the doorway, I turned and waved.
“Benvenuto,” I said.
“Benvenuto,” he responded with a laugh.
I followed my sisters outside.
SIX
Outside, Stella pulled a guidebook from the side pocket of her little backpack and flipped open to a bookmarked page. “Okay,” she said. “This walkway opens into a square—the Piazza Marconi. Just beyond that is the beach.”
Holly and I followed our older sister. Sure enough, the street opened into a square surrounded by little shops on the side closest to us and on the right side. The far side was marked by a low wall and a set of stairs leading to the beach and harbor below. On the left, the walkway continued to what I assumed was the pier where Mom and Dad sunbathed in the scrapbook pictures.
“Let’s sit on one of the benches near the wall,” Holly said, pointing the bottle of wine toward the barrier between the piazza and the beach. “Who’s ready for our first Italian wine in Italy?”
We zigzagged through the crowd of tourists filling the square and sat on the only free bench. A gray cat was curled up right next to the side where I sat, and I wondered if it belonged to a local or if it claimed all of Vernazza as its home. Us sitting on the bench didn’t seem to disturb its slumber. I bet it was used to tourists coming and going.
Holly poured wine into a cup and handed it to me while Stella shoved the guidebook into her backpack and pulled out Mom and Dad’s scrapbook. By the time she had the scrapbook opened on her lap, Holly was holding out a wine cup to her.
“To our first adventure in Vernazza,” Holly said after pouring the last of the wine into the third cup and bumping it against mine and Stella’s. “Salute!”
“Salute!” Stella and I responded.
The wine was perfect. Smooth and bright and exactly like the kind of wine Aldo would make.
Thoughts of my grandfather made my heart swell. We were so blessed to have him—and so blessed that he had sent us on this trip.