Page 67 of Mafia Bride
Our glasses touch in sisterhood, but I know I’ll only be able to push it as far as she allows.
The wine is sweet and cooling to the tongue; I don’t think I’ve ever actually enjoyed a sip of alcohol the way I enjoy this one.
“How are you adjusting?” she asks, leaning forward, glass of wine cupped in both hands. She studies me and I know exactly what she means. I calculate what honesty will cost me, and I decide it’s cheaper than a fabrication.
“It’s hard.” I swirl the wine in the bowl of the glass. “I had no warning, and suddenly I’m in a different house, married to a guy I barely know, and any plan I made for myself is poof…gone.”
“They raised you too American.” Loretta plucks a coin of hard salami from the tray and leans back with one leg crossed over her thigh, comfortably reclining on a couch.
“But we’re in America.”
“Are we?” She shrugged and looked over the view of the town. “Look at it. When the sun catches it the right way it could be Abruzzi, or Trecase, just south of Vesuvio, not a country that didn’t exist three hundred years ago. We come from a culture with a history…how long? Four thousand? Five thousand years old. Pompeii was destroyed in 79AD…almost twothousandyears ago, and we know because Pliny the Younger’s letters survive. Letters written and sent far away. A system for doing this existed. We—our culture—was reading, writing, painting, sculpting, conquering, beforeStati Unitiwas a twinkle in God’s eye.” She takes a sip of wine, then looks over at me with the compassion of a teacher telling a student their thesis is built on a shaky intellectual foundation. “The culture we built has survived invasion, war, famine. It’s real. These American ideas are just ideas until they outlive our reality.”
It’s my turn to look away, over the little town that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years, when the first wave of Neapolitans settled close enough to a small city to have jobs, but far enough away to maintain their way of life.
“How’s that worked out for you?” I ask. “These traditions. You happy?”
Shetsksand pours us both more wine. It’s relaxing me enough to eat. I pile hard cheese on a slice of bread, then a jarred pepper and eat it in one bite.
“Are you?” she asks as I chew. The food awakens a dormant hunger, and I take a plate to pile with more.
“I could have been.”
“Sure,” she scoffs.
“You didn’t answer me, though.” I lay a slice of mozzarella and a slice of tomato on a crust of bread. “Are you happy?” I say before eating and pinching crumbs off my fingers.
“It’s a silly question. Ask me if I’m safe. Ask me if I have everything I need. Ask if I know where I belong.”
“If I cared about all that I would have asked about it.”
She laughs, and I smile into my glass.
“Touché, my American guest.” She holds up her wine. “Touché.”
Our glasses clink again.
“These tomatoes,” I start. “Amazing.”
“Thank you. I grow them from seeds I brought over.”
I look around for a garden, but don’t see anything but a flagstone terrace, a brick oven, and cast iron.
“Come,” she says, dumping fruit from a large porcelain bowl before she stands. “I’ll show you.”
She hands me the bowl. I have it in one hand and my wine in the other as I follow her down a set of stone steps to a terrace garden of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Herbs like basil, oregano, and rosemary grow from long planters.
Below us, Secondo Vasto is only twenty feet closer, but it seems as though I’m seeing it from a completely different angle.
Loretta reaches into a six-foot-high tomato plant tied to a wire cage, and retrieves a green plum tomato with a little red at the base. I hold out the bowl and she drops it in.
“Do you know who those men were?” I ask. “The ones who tried to take me?”
“That’s a question for Santino.”
“You don’t know?”
“Santino doesn’t answer to a woman…or anyone for that matter.” She drops more into the bowl. “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you if he asked me not to.”
