Chapter 4: English Only

"Liv?"

"Surprise," I said.

Raffaele looked at Pina.

Pina looked at her nails.

"What are you doing here?"

"Working."

I held up a stack of invoices.

"My editor pushed my book to next spring, so no advance until then. The temp agency called this morning."

I shrugged.

"I didn't even know it was your company until I saw your name on the desk."

That last part he wanted to believe so badly I watched him decide to.

He laughed and turned to the glass wall, where eight faces were now pressed toward us.

"My fiancée needed a job," he announced in English. "So cute, right? She's going to make us coffee."

Then, in Italian, to the room, "Don't worry. She can't understand a thing. Talk normally."

The sales office laughed.

He kissed my cheek and went to his desk.

Talking normally, it turned out, meant talking about me.

By ten past twelve I knew the following.

The man with the gold chain thought I had a "farm girl" face.

The woman with the bob thought I dressed like a Sunday school teacher.

Two of them had a bet on whether Raffaele would last a year married to me.

One said six months.

The other said he'd never even move in.

"He doesn't need her apartment," said the gold chain. "He needs her passport."

"And her signature," someone else said, and everyone laughed again.

I smiled at them through the glass.

I took their coffee orders in English and wrote each one down slowly.

Gold chain: double espresso, two sugars.

I gave him three.

At one o'clock Tommaso came up the steel stairs.

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