Love & Gelato

by Jenna Evans Welch

  Before I could catch it, my heart slammed straight down to my feet, leaving me with a massive hole in my chest. It was amazing how I could just be going along, doing okay, and then suddenly—wham—I missed her so much even my fingernails hurt.

  I looked down at my cone, my eyes stinging. “Thanks, Howard.”

  “No problem.”

  Howard ordered his own cone, and then we made our way out onto the street and I took a deep breath. Hearing Howard talk about my mom had kind of thrown me, but it was summertime in Florence and I was eating bacio gelato. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be sad.

  Howard looked down at me thoughtfully. “I’d like to show you something at Mercato Nuovo. Have you ever heard of the porcellino fountain?”

  “No. But did my mom by chance swim in it?”

  He laughed. “No. That was a different one. Did she tell you about the German tourist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard in my life. I’ll take you there sometime. But I won’t let you swim.”

  We made our way down the street. Mercato Nuovo was more like a collection of outdoor tourist shops—lots of booths set up with souvenir stuff, like T-shirts printed with funny sayings:

  I AM ITALIAN, THEREFORE I CANNOT KEEP CALM.

  I’M NOT YELLING, I’M ITALIAN.

  And my personal favorite:

  YOU BET YOUR MEATBALLS I’M ITALIAN.

  I wanted to stop and see if I could find something ridiculous to send to Addie, but Howard bypassed the market and led me to where a ring of people stood gathered around a statue of a bronze boar with water running out of its mouth. It had a long snout and tusks and its nose was a shiny gold color, like it had been worn down.

  “ ‘Porcellino’ means ‘boar’?” I asked.

  “Yes. This is the Fontana del Porcellino. It’s actually just a copy of the original, but it’s been around since the seventeenth century. Legend is that if you rub its nose you’ll be guaranteed to come back to Florence. Want to try?”

  “Sure.”

  I waited until a mom and her little boy cleared out of the way, then stepped forward and used my non-gelato hand to give the boar’s nose a good rub. And then I just stood there. The boar was looking down at me with his beady eyes and creepy little molars and I knew without asking that my mom had stood right here and gotten gross fountain water splashed all over her legs and hoped with all her heart that she’d stayed in Florence forever. And then look what had happened. She’d never even come back to visit, and she never would again.

  I turned around and looked at Howard. He was watching me with this kind of sad/happy look in his eyes, like he’d just had the exact same line of thoughts and now he suddenly couldn’t taste his gelato all that well anymore either.

  Should I just ask him?

  No. I wanted to hear it from her.

  Conditions at the Duomo had not improved. In fact, the line had gotten even longer, and little kids were breaking down left and right. Also, Florence had decided we could all handle a little more heat, and makeup and sunscreen and all hope of ever cooling off was pretty much dripping off of people’s faces.

  “Maybe we should have just stayed hoooooome,” the little boy behind us wailed.

  “Fa CALDO,” the woman in front of us said.

  Caldo. I’d totally recognized an Italian word.

  Howard met my eye. We’d both been pretty quiet since the porcellino, but it was more of a sad quiet than an awkward quiet. “I promise it’s worth it. Ten more minutes, tops.”

  I nodded and went back to trying to ignore all the sad feelings sloshing around my stomach. Why couldn’t Howard and my mom just have had a happy ending? She’d totally deserved it. And honestly, it seemed like he did too.

  Finally we were to the front of the line. The Duomo’s stones had some kind of miraculous ability to generate cold air, and when we stepped inside it took effort not to lie down on the stone floor and weep from happiness. But then I caught a glimpse of the stone staircase everyone was filing up and suddenly I wanted to weep for a whole different reason. My mom had described walking up lots of stairs, but she’d left out the tiny detail that the staircase was narrow. Like gopher-tunnel narrow.

  I shifted nervously.

  “You okay?” Howard asked.

  No. I nodded.

  The line fed slowly into the staircase, but when I got to the base of it my feet stopped moving. Like stopped. They just straight-up refused to climb.

  Howard turned around and looked at me. He kind of had to hunch over to even fit in the staircase. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

  I shook my head. I’d just never faced the possibility of being squeezed through a stone tube with a bunch of sweaty tourists.

  The people behind me were starting to bottleneck and a man muttered something under his breath. My mom had said the view was amazing. I forced one foot onto the stairs. Wasn’t a staircase this narrow a fire hazard? What if there was an earthquake? And, lady snorting nasal spray behind me, could you please give me some room?

  “Lina, I didn’t tell you the whole story of the porcellino.” I looked up. Howard had walked back down to the stair just above me and was looking at me encouragingly. He was going to try to distract me.

  Well played, Howard. Well played.

  “Tell me the story.” I looked down at the stairs again, focusing on my breathing and finally beginning to climb. There was a smattering of applause from behind me.

  “A long time ago there was a couple who couldn’t have a child. They tried for years, and the husband blamed the wife for their bad luck. One day after they’d gotten into a fight, the woman stood crying at the window and a group of wild boars ran past the house. The boars had just had piglets and the woman said aloud that she wished she could have a child just like the boars did. A fairy happened to be listening in, and decided to grant her wish. A few days later the woman found out she was pregnant, but when she gave birth she and her husband were shocked because the baby came out looking more like a boar than a human. But the couple was so happy to have a son that they loved the child anyway.”

  “That story doesn’t sound true,” a woman behind me said.

  I winced. Four hundred more steps?

  Chapter 14

  THE CLIMB WAS TOTALLY WORTH it. The view of Florence was just as stunning as my mother had described it, a sea of red rooftops under an unblemished blue sky and soft green hills circling everything like a big, happy hug. We sat up there roasting for about a half hour, Howard pointing out all the important buildings in Florence and me working up the courage to climb back down the staircase, which turned out to be way easier. Afterward we stopped for lunch at a café and I left Florence with an unsettling realization. Regardless of what I was reading in the journal, I kind of liked Howard. Was that traitorous?

  Ren’s scooter pulled up just after nine.

  “Ren’s here!” Howard yelled from downstairs.

  “Will you tell him I’m still getting ready? And don’t scare him!”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I looked in the mirror. As soon as we’d gotten home I’d figured out how to use Howard’s arthritic washing machine, then hung a bunch of stuff to dry on the porch. Luckily it was still sweltering outside, so my clothes had been dry in no time. No more crumpled-up T-shirts for me. If Thomas was going to be there, I wanted to look amazing. No matter what my hair insisted on doing. I’d tried the flat iron again, but my curls were feeling extra-rebellious and had basically spat in its face. At least they were mostly vertical.

  Please, please, please let him be there. I twirled around. I was wearing a short jersey dress my mom had found for me more than a year ago at a thrift shop. It was kind of amazing and I’d never really had anything to wear it to. Until now.

  “Looking sharp tonight, Ren,” Howard boomed scarily from downstairs.

  I groaned. Ren answered, but I couldn’t make out the rest of their conversation except for a couple o
f “yes, sirs.”

  After a few minutes there was a knock on my bedroom door. “Lina?”

  “Hang on.” I finished putting on my mascara, then gave myself one last look in the mirror. This was the longest I’d spent getting ready in ages. You’d better be there tonight, Thomas Heath.

  I flung the door open. Ren’s hair was wet, like he’d just taken a shower, and he was wearing an olive-green T-shirt that set off his brown eyes.

  “Hey, Lina. Have you—” He stopped. “Whoa.”

  “Whoa what?” My cheeks flushed.

  “You look so . . .”

  “So what?”

  “Bellissima. I like your dress.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should wear dresses more often. Your legs are really . . .”

  My blush spread like a wildfire. “Okay, you should totally stop talking about my legs. And quit staring at me!”

  “Sorry.” He gave me one last look, then made this stiff forty-five-degree turn to the corner, like he was a penguin that had just been put on time-out.

  “I like your hair better curly.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. Last night I thought you didn’t really look like yourself.”

  “Huh.” My cheeks were on fire.

  He cleared his throat. “So . . . how’s the journal? Have they crashed and burned yet?”

  “Shh!”

  “He just left to check on something at the visitors’ center. He can’t hear us.”

  “Oh, good.” I pulled him into the room, then shut the door. “And no. Their relationship is still secret and he seems kind of hot and cold, but for the most part I’m still reading about the good stuff. It’s all pretty lovey-dovey.”

  “Do you mind if I read it?”

  “The journal?”

  “Yeah. Maybe I could help you figure out what went wrong. And I could find more places to take you to in Florence.”

  I hesitated for approximately three-tenths of a second. This was way too good of an offer to pass up. “Sure. But you have to promise, promise me you won’t tell Howard. I want to finish reading it before I talk to him about it.”

  “Promise. So Space doesn’t really open until about ten. How about I start reading now?”

  “Good idea.” I fished the journal out of my nightstand. “It’s pretty much half writing and half photographs, so it should go pretty fast. I marked where I left off, so don’t read past that.” I turned around and he was staring at my legs again. “Ren!”

  “Sorry.”

  I walked over to him, flipping open the front cover. “Look what she wrote on the inside cover.”

  He made a low whistling noise. “ ‘I made the wrong choice’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “I think she wrote it as a message to me.”

  He flipped through the pages. “This should only take me like a half hour. I’m a really fast reader.”

  “Great. So . . . do you by chance know who is going to Space with us?”

  “You mean, will Thomas be there?”

  “And, um, other people.”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that Elena sent out a mass text.” He looked up at me. “And I think Mimi is coming.”

  “Nice.”

  There was a pause, and then we both looked away at the exact same second.

  “So . . . I’ll be on the porch.” I grabbed my laptop and ran out of the room. I sort of hadn’t been able to stop staring at him, either.

  Weird.

  Ren met me on the porch. I’d hoped that the Italian Internet gods would smile upon me and I’d be able to check my e-mail or watch a YouTube cat video or something, but I’d had no such luck. Instead I was lying on the swing, kicking off the banister every so often to keep me moving.

  “Your mom reminds me of you.”

  I sat up. “How so?”

  “She’s funny. And brave. It’s cool that she took such a big risk, dropping out of nursing school and everything. And her photographs are really good. Even though she was just starting out, you can tell she was going to be a game changer.”

  “Did you see the series of portraits of Italian women?”

  “Yeah. That was cool. And you totally look like your mom.”

  “Thanks.”

  He sat down next to me. “It’s nine thirty. Ready to go to Space?”

  “Ready.”

  “I told Howard we’d honk on our way out. We had a good conversation earlier. I think we really made some progress.”

  “I told him to be nice.”

  “Is that why he kept smiling at me? It kind of freaked me out.”

  LINA’S RULES OF SCOOTER RIDING:

  1. Never ride a scooter sopping wet.

  2. Never ride a scooter wearing a short skirt.

  3. Try to pay attention to light signals. Otherwise, every time the driver accelerates you’ll smash into him and you’ll have this awkward untangling moment and then you’ll worry he’s thinking you’re doing it on purpose.

  4. If by chance you aren’t abiding by rule number two, be sure to avoid eye contact with male drivers. Otherwise they’ll honk enthusiastically every time your skirt flies up.

  Ren turned down a one-way street, then pulled up next to a two-story building with a long line of people wrapped around its perimeter. “This is it.” Music pulsed from the windows.

  My stomach sank down to my sandals. “This is like a club club.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do I have to actually dance?”

  “Ren!” Elena was attempting to run across the street to us, but her high heels were making it difficult. The effect was sort of Frankenstein-ish. “Pietro put us on the list. Ciao, Lina! It is nice to see you again.” She pressed her cheek against mine and made a kissing sound. “Your dress is very beautiful.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for getting us in. I really wanted to see Space.”

  “Oh, yes. Ren said something about your parents coming here? They’re not here tonight, are they?”

  I laughed. “No. Definitely not.”

  “Who’s coming tonight?” Ren asked.

  “Everyone says they are coming, but we’ll see who actually shows up. Don’t worry, Lorenzo. I’m sure a certain someone will make it. Vieni, Lina.” She linked arms with me, then dragged me across the street to the front of the line. Dragging me around was kind of her thing.

  “Dove vai?” a man in line yelled as we cut ahead of him.

  She tossed her hair. “Ignore him. We are much more important. Ciao, Franco!”

  Franco wore a black T-shirt and was disproportionately muscular on top, like he’d skipped leg day way too many times. He unhooked the velvet cord from a stanchion that blocked the entrance and let us inside.

  We stepped into a dimly lit hallway with big racks of clothing. Was this a coatroom?

  “Continue,” Elena said. “The party is this way.”

  I kept going, my arms stretched out in front of me, blind as a bat. It was really dark. And loud. Finally we emerged in a rectangular room with a long bar on one side. Two different songs were playing—one in English, and one in Italian—and on the far side of the room people sang group karaoke to a third. Everyone was either not talking or shouting to be heard.

  “Lina, do you want a drink?” Elena asked, gesturing to the bar.

  I shook my head.

  “We will wait here for everyone. Once we get in the actual club there is no way to find each other.”

  “This isn’t the club?” I asked.

  She laughed like she thought I was being cute. “No. You’ll see.”

  I looked around. Was this the room where Howard had uttered his first infamous “Hadley . . .”? I half expected to see him lounging against the wall, a good two heads taller than everyone else. Except this totally didn’t seem like his scene. They probably wouldn’t let him wear his flip-flops here.

  Ren nudged me. “Want to sing karaoke with me? We could pick something in Ita
lian, and I could pretend I don’t speak Italian either. It would be hilarious. How about . . . ?”

  He trailed off because Mimi and Marco were making their way toward us. Mimi was wearing a miniscule skirt and her hair was pulled back in a long, loose braid. Not a stray Medusa hair in sight. I shot a look at Ren. Did he like her legs too?

  Okay, yeah, he did. Someone needed to teach him the art of discretion.

  “Hi, guys,” Marco yelled. He had exactly one volume. “Lina!” He came at me with his arms outstretched, but I ducked. “Too fast for me, I guess.”

  “Are you going to try to pick me up every time you see me?”

  “Yes.” He turned and picked up Elena. “Ask Elena.”

  “Marco, basta! Put me down or I’ll feed you to a pack of wild dogs.”

  “That’s a new one.” Marco grinned at me. “She’s kind of creative with her threats.”

  Mimi was yelling to be heard over the music. “Ren, why didn’t you call me back? I didn’t know if you were going to be here or not.”

  I couldn’t hear his response, but she smiled at him and then started playing with the buttons on his shirt, which shouldn’t have bugged me, but kind of did. Just because she was into him didn’t mean she had to spread her Swedish PDA all over the place.

  “Lina?”

  I slowly turned around. Please let it be . . . “Thomas!”

  He was wearing a royal-blue T-shirt that said BANNED FROM AMSTERDAM and somehow looked even better than I remembered. If that was possible. I forgot all about Mimi’s button playing.

  “Elena said you’d be here. I tried to call Ren to—”

  “Hello, stalker.” Ren suddenly side checked him, sending him stumbling.

  “Ren, what the hell?” he said, straightening up.

  “I had like ten missed calls from you.”

  “All you had to do was answer one. ”

  Ren shrugged. “Sorry, man. I’ve been busy.”

  Mimi sidled up next to Ren, staring at me like she had no idea who I was.

  “Hi, Mimi,” I said.

  “Hey.” She squinted.

  “I’m Lina. We met the other night at Elena’s?”

  “I remember.”

  Elena launched herself into the middle of our weirdly tense little circle. “Ragazzi, no more talking! I want to dance.”