The Italian I Was Never Supposed to Understand novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Roses

Livia lets Raffaele beg on her stairs and agrees to City Hall in a week, then gets hired at Ponte's front desk, where Raffaele walks in and sees her.

Tommaso drove me to Brooklyn in a dented Ponte van that smelled like corks.

He didn't speak on the bridge.

On Court Street he finally said, "I'll wait down here."

"You don't have to."

"I'm not asking."

He parked across from my building with the engine off and the lights dark.

I climbed four flights.

Raffaele was sitting on the top step with his tie loose and the roses in his lap.

He'd been crying.

Real tears, red eyes, the whole thing.

He stood up so fast the roses fell.

"Livia. Babe. Thank God."

He reached for me.

I let him hold me for a moment, because I needed to know what it felt like now.

It felt like being held by a coat rack.

"I was so scared," he said into my hair. "You just left. You took off your ring. Do you know how that looked?"

"How did it look?"

"Like you don't trust me."

I stepped back and got my keys out.

"Chiara says you went home sick," he said. "Are you sick?"

"I'm tired. You said so yourself."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

He wiped his face with his palm.

"My English goes stupid when I'm nervous. Everybody was drinking. I love you. You know I love you."

I unlocked the door.

I didn't open it.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I let it.

"Can I come in?" he asked.

"No."

His face did something fast and then smoothed over.

Under his breath, in Italian, so soft he probably thought it was just air, he said, "Fucking princess, after everything I've done for you."

Then in English, gently, "Okay. Okay, I understand."

I stared at the doorframe so my face wouldn't move.

Everything he'd done for me.

He'd once forgotten my birthday and given me a bottle of wine from the office the next day.

I wondered now which office.

"I'll marry you," I said.

He went completely still.

"Not tomorrow. I meant what I said at dinner." I looked at him. "I want to meet your mother first. You said she's flying in."

"She lands next Thursday."

"Then next Friday. City Hall, May fifteenth. After I've met her."

He did the math.

I watched him do it.

The fifteenth was one day before his visa ran out.

He picked up the roses and pushed them into my arms.

"May fifteenth," he said, and kissed my forehead. "You scared me, Liv. Don't do that again."

"I won't," I said, which was true.

I went inside and locked the door.

I listened to him go down the stairs.

On the third-floor landing, he was already on the phone.

"It's fine," he said in Italian. "She's back. The fifteenth. No, she cried, it was pathetic."

I hadn't cried.

I put his roses in the bathtub because I didn't own a vase big enough and didn't want one.

Then I went to the window.

The van was still there across the street.

When Raffaele came out the front door and walked toward the subway, its lights stayed dark.

When he turned the corner, they flashed once.

I texted Tommaso.

"I'm in. City Hall is on the fifteenth."

He wrote back.

"Bene."

Then, a minute later.

"Pina says wear something ugly."

The next morning I wore my worst blouse, a navy thing with a bow at the neck that my editor once called "brave".

Ponte Imports was a red brick warehouse three blocks from the Long Island City water.

It had a loading dock, a fading painted sign and a smell of diesel and old oak.

The front office was up a steel staircase.

A short round woman in a flowered blouse sat behind a desk covered in invoices and a tray of homemade biscotti.

Teased black hair. Reading glasses on a beaded chain. Long red nails.

She looked me up and down.

"You're the temp?"

"Yes, ma'am. Livia."

"Pina Caputo. I run this place. The men think they run it, God bless." She narrowed her eyes. "Tommaso says you don't speak Italian."

"Not a word, I'm afraid."

"Not even 'ciao'?"

"Is that the hello one?"

She studied me for a long moment.

Then she pushed the biscotti tray at me.

"Eat. You're too pale. Phones, filing, coffee for the sales boys."

She wagged a red nail at me.

"If they're rude to you, you tell me, and I make their lives a living hell."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Sit there. Smile. That's the whole job."

The front desk faced a glass wall.

Behind it, eight desks. Eight Italian men and women in good shoes, talking on phones, laughing, arguing about football.

One of the desks by the window was empty.

The nameplate said R. BELLANDI, SALES MANAGER.

At eleven-fifteen I heard him on the stairs, humming.

He came through the door with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, still in last night's blue suit.

He saw Pina first.

"Buongiorno, bellissima."

Then he saw me.

The coffee stopped halfway to his mouth.

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