The Italian I Was Never Supposed to Understand novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Man From La Morra

Ponte's chief executive arrives at midnight with a fake bottle of his own family's Barolo traced to Raffaele's office, Livia volunteers to go in as an English-only temp, and Raffaele texts a photo of roses at her door.

"Works for me?" I said.

"For the family. Which is you, whether you like it or not."

Nonna slid the lasagna closer.

I pushed it back.

"Why would you buy a wine importer in Queens?"

"The building was cheap and the company was honest." She sniffed. "One of those is no longer true."

"Which one?"

"Eat, and you'll find out. He's on his way."

"Who is?"

The doorbell rang at midnight exactly.

Nonna didn't get up.

She never got up for anyone after eleven.

I opened the kitchen door to the garden steps.

A tall man in a wet white shirt stood there, holding a wine bottle by the neck.

Dark beard. Gray at the temples.

A face that looked like it hadn't smiled since spring.

He looked at me.

Then he looked at me again, longer.

"You're shorter than your photo," he said in Italian.

"You're ruder than your shirt," I said, in Italian too.

Behind me, Nonna laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down.

"Livia, this is Tommaso Ferri. He runs Ponte. Tommaso, this is my granddaughter, who apparently speaks to people again."

He came in and set the bottle on the table beside my folder.

The label was a hill of vines in brown ink and one word in old script.

FERRI.

"My family's Barolo," he said. "From La Morra. My great-grandfather made the first one in 1922."

"It's a pretty label."

"It's a fake label."

He turned the bottle.

On the back, under the vintage, there was a small blank box.

"Every bottle my mother sells has a number written in that box by hand. Her hand, or my brother's. This one doesn't."

"So someone forgot."

"Nobody in my family has forgotten in a hundred years."

His jaw worked.

"I bought this tonight at a steakhouse on West 52nd. A hundred and forty dollars a bottle."

He tapped the cork.

"I tasted it in the men's room. It's cheap Piedmont red from a tank."

I knew that steakhouse.

I'd sat at its bar a dozen times, waiting for my best friend's shift to end.

I didn't say so.

Not yet.

"How does it get to a steakhouse?"

"Through a distributor nobody has heard of."

He took a folded paper from his shirt pocket.

"The distributor's phone number rings at a desk in my sales office."

"Raffaele's desk?"

"I don't know whose. Eight people share those phones."

Nonna tapped the table.

"Which is why I want Ponte sold. Quietly. Before this is in a newspaper with our name on it."

Tommaso's face went still.

"Forty people work in that warehouse, signora."

"And forty people can work for someone else."

He opened her refrigerator without asking.

He took out a pot of leftover pasta e fagioli, a block of parmesan and half an onion.

Then he lit the stove.

"What's he doing?" I whispered to Nonna in Italian.

"He cooks when he's angry. It's the only reason I hired him."

"I can hear you," he said.

"Good," said Nonna.

He chopped the onion in a blur.

I watched his hands.

There was a pale scar across one knuckle.

I wanted to draw it, which was a stupid thing to want at midnight on the worst night of my life.

"Don't sell it," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"Raffaele needs a wife in nine days. He thinks I'm a poor girl who draws bunnies and can't live without him."

I pulled the folder toward me.

"If anything's going on in that office, he won't hide it from me. He doesn't hide anything from me. He just says it in Italian."

Tommaso stirred the pot.

"What are you suggesting?"

"Put me in the sales office. A temp. Front desk. English only."

"No," said Nonna.

"No," said Tommaso, at the same time.

"You don't get a vote," I told him. "Technically I'm your boss."

He looked at Nonna.

Nonna looked at the ceiling.

"She's right," Nonna said. "Technically."

He set a bowl of steaming pasta in front of me, then one in front of Nonna, then one for himself.

He sat down across from me.

"You'll have to listen to them talk about you," he said quietly. "All day. They are not kind about the women they work with."

"I just listened to my fiancé tell my best friend they used four condoms last night."

The spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Four?"

"That's what he said."

"He lies about everything," Tommaso said. "Two, at most."

I laughed.

It came out of me like a hiccup, ugly and surprised, and then I couldn't stop.

Nonna watched us both over her glasses.

She looked pleased, which should have worried me.

"Pina runs the front office,"

Tommaso said, when I'd stopped.

"She hires the temps. I'll tell her I want an American who doesn't understand a word."

"Will she buy it?"

"Pina buys nothing. But she'll do it."

He wrote a number on the back of his paper and slid it across.

"If you hear anything, you call me. Not the police. Not your grandmother's lawyers. Me."

"Why you?"

"Because it's my mother's name on that bottle."

My phone buzzed against the table.

Raffaele.

A photo, no words at first.

A huge bunch of red roses propped against the door of my fourth-floor walk-up in Carroll Gardens.

Then the words came.

"Open up, babe. Please. I'm on your stairs and I'm not leaving."

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