What’s a heart for?
COOKING ALWAYS HELPEDto ?clear my mind, and after meeting Hallie, I sure needed the distraction. Just to keep my hands busy and my mind blank, I decided to make calzones.
Only my mind did not stay blank. Not when I was mixing the dough. Not when I was rolling it out and certainly not when I was folding it closed over the salami, ricotta and mozzarella filling. Those red cheeks stayed right there in my mind’s eye despite me trying to forget them.
I overstepped this time. It was clear by her reaction in the hallway.No sexual jokes from now on, gotcha.Just chill. Or better yet, forget about it. Yeah, just forget about it. Because that’s been going super well since the first time I saw her. Haha, no. The joke was on me.
Too many little pizza pockets ended up on my oven plate, and I hadn’t even calmed down after the tray went in the oven. Three hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit; the oven was showing one hundred and ninety, however. Getting used to the temperature being measured in Celsius wasn’t the biggest change moving to England had brought with it, but it was sure easy to stay focussed on it every time the weather forecast announced it would be fourteen degrees and raining. Always raining, just like the day I’d met Hallie.
There you go, my one-track mind took me back to her. And in circles it went no matter what else I attempted to think about. In the middle of the next lap around my scrambled thoughts, my phone rang. After wiping my hands in the towel that hung off my shoulder, I accepted the call.
“Ciao, Papá,” I said. “It’s not Sunday yet.”
“I know, I know,fagiolo,” my father said on the other side of the line. “I just wanted to call and see how you’re doing.Nonnahad this distinct feeling you might want to talk. A womanly intuition, she called it.”
Every Sunday, whether I was in the UK or back home, we would cook and have dinner together. Currently, that had resorted to video calls only. We would prepare the same meal, just on different sides of the world. And while it would be in fact an early dinner for me, it was around lunchtime for him andNonni.
“I’m fine,” I said. “In fact I just put calzones in the oven and was about to watch the news.”
“You only make calzones when—” Dad was interrupted by a muffled female voice on the other side. Of course,Nonnawould be listening, too, if her womanly intuition was involved. Sometimes that intuition was damn strange, but this time it was nothing to call about.
“I just had a lot on my mind, that’s all,” I said, to which the phone changed hands, and my grandmother’s voice was loud and clear in my ear.
“Don’t be brushing it off, Luca. You were making calzones,fagiolo. Calzones! Last time you baked calzones there was heartbreak involved. Listen to yournonna, no girl is worth your beautiful heart breaking. You pick those pieces right back together and tell me what she done so I can kick herculo.”
I laughed. “No asskicking necessary,Nonna. I swear. I am not heartbroken.”
“But there is a girl?” Dad’s muffled voice was just loud enough to make out.
“I did not say that—”
“Of course, there’s a girl,” my grandmother interrupted me. “There always is, and none of them know how to treat ourfagioloright.”
I closed my eyes, listening to the friendly bickering between my father and my grandmother, until they both quieted down on the other side of the line, and I could try to give an explanation that would ease their worries.
“It’s not like that,Nonna. She doesn’t even like me.” I imagined Hallie’s adorable red face that I took a bit of pride in, and the image jumped to my mind with surprising ease. Man, I was getting a wee bit invested. A smidge smitten.And a whole lot British. “I think I make her uncomfortable, but every time I see her I can’t help but tease her. It’s making it worse.”
“It’s not you,fagiolo. It’s the girls you choose,” my grandmother said matter of factly as if she’d been there in the elevator with us and witnessed the entire confrontation. “God only knows how it is possible that, when it comes to finding a good woman, all the Ombrello men are so useless.”
I sighed and my father groaned. It was a known topic, and Granny never failed to express her feelings about it. And every time, she would turn to her husband, pat him on the shoulder, and smile sweetly. “I’m not talking about you,” she would say. “You did good.”
I didn’t have to be in the same room to know how the scene played out. My father would grumble about her never approving of my mother, no matter how they started out, and then finally his dejected, “She was right at the time,” that ended the conversation, for him at least.
Me? I had nothing to say to that accusation. I’d pretty much given up on the idea of a ‘good woman’ before I was quite literally trapped by one. Was Hallie good? No idea. She was amusing, however. She was almost impossible to look away from.
