Page 2 of Sister of the Bride

The lunch rush has ended, leaving just a few customers lingering in the dining room. At table six, there’s a couple who told Evie that they were on a first date. And it’s going pretty well if those moony looks and her foot stroking up his calf are any indication. There are two tables of tourists, identifiable by their sweaty T-shirts and backpacks, and in the back banquette, my tiny target.

“McKeevers!” I cry as I approach the table, arms wide. I push away a little tickle at the back of my brain that makes me feel as if I’m stepping directly into Dad’s shoes, but unlike the size-twelve clogs he wore in the kitchen, these fit me just fine.

The family that awaits me has been coming to Marino’s since before it was even a family of two. Ian and Lindy McKeever had their first date at Marino’s when they were undergrads at Emerson. Ian proposed over Mom’s tiramisu, and three years later, when Lindy McKeever was eight days overdue with little Jamie, she waddled into the dining room to see if our famous eggplant parmigiana could get the show started. (Her water broke on the T ride home, but I think that was probably more because of the eight-days-overdue thing than the eggplant parm.)

“Jamie, my man, how’s it going?” I kneel down to his eye level. He’s hard at work on the maze printed on the back of the paper kids’ menu. Focused, despite the fact that he’s completed the thing at least two dozen times before.

“Good,” he replies with the kind of shrug that will be rude when he’s fifteen but is adorable at five.

“Whatcha having for lunch today?”

“Spaghetti.”

“With sauce and meatballs? Yum, that’s my favorite meal.”

Jamie shakes his head, his flaming curls bouncing as he tightens his grip on the red crayon. “Just noodles.”

I glance up to see Lindy McKeever mouth the wordhelp, and I silently reply, “On it.” I turn my full attention back to Jamie, beaming down on him like a happy ray of sunshine. I nod as if to say,Yeah, that sounds good too, impressive palate, kid. “Hey, what’s your favorite food?”

“Chicken nuggets,” Jamie replies without missing a beat. I already know this, of course, because more than once the McKeevers have brought Jamie in with a greasy McDonald’s bag and guilty faces. I’ve told them time and time again that it’sfine, but it drives them out of their hipster foodie minds. So when they asked me a couple of months ago to help them attempt to steer Jamie toward a wider palate (one not made up entirely of ground-up chicken bits), I was more than happy to try.

“Oh, nuggets are pretty great too. I’ve been thinking maybe we should add them to the menu,” I lie, hoping my Italian ancestors aren’t rolling over in their graves. “What’s your favorite sauce to dip them in?”

“I like sweet-and-sour, but honey mustard is okay too. And ketchup if there’s no good sauce.”

“Oh, excellent. You know, I could bring out a little cup of red sauce, and maybe you could dip your noodles. You know, like you dip chicken nuggets.”

Jamie scrunches up his face, ready to protest, but then a realization seems to wash over him—he’s been given permission to pick up his noodleswith his fingersand dip them into sauce. Which is likely to be messy. And if I know anything about Jamie McKeever after several years of hands-and-knees level cleanup beneath his seat, it’s that he loves a good mess. He’s as serious as he is slovenly, and I love him for that.

Jamie’s parents glance over at him, their eyebrows up at their hairlines, the nervous expressions of anxious parents waiting to see if their little lordling is going to protest. His crayon hovers just short of the center of the maze as his wheels turn.

“Yeah, okay,” Jamie finally says. And then he returns to the maze, narrowly avoiding a dead end to bring the alligator to the swamp.

It takes everything in me to avoid fist-pumping, because Jamie will know immediately if we’re trying to put something over on him. (Ask me about the great eggplant fries fiasco of last spring, #neverforget.)

“Excellent. I’ll tell Fernando to add a side of sauce to your noodles. And if you run out, Evie’ll bring you another, okay?”

“Thanks, Miss Marino!” Jamie says, flipping the page over to tackle the word search.

I smile and ruffle his hair, even though I’ve told him a million times that he can call me Pippin. He seems to like that my last name is the same as the name of the restaurant he’s eating in, like maybe that makes me famous or something. And in some Boston restaurant circles, it kind of does. Marino’s has been open in this very Beacon Hill location since 1931, when my great grandfather won the entire building in a very questionable game of poker and decided to feed the hoity-toity denizens of Boston’s most venerable neighborhood the food of his homeland. Marino’s has been a mainstay ever since, an institution. Ben Affleck ate here once. And more than a few Kennedys, plus half the Whalbergs.

It’s our regulars who are like family, though. This restaurant has been my home (literally, since I live upstairs with Mom and Nonna) all my life, but I try not to forget that strangers see it as a kind of home too. The McKeevers are just a few of many.

As I head back to the kitchen, I run my fingers over the red paint splatter on the mahogany molding like a ritual. It’s an accident from when Polly and I were nine and Dad let us “help” him repaint the dining room in exchange for being allowed to get our ears pierced. A minor paint fight ensued, and Dad said he liked that the splatter always reminded him of his girls.

Another thing about Marino’s that I’ll never change.

“Plate of noodles, put the marinara in a little salad dressing cup on the side,” I call to Fernando as I hustle back to my lasagnas. “I’ve talked him into dipping noodles like chicken nuggets.”

“Whatever works.” Fernando shrugs, tossing a handful of pasta into a boiling pot of salty water. “I’m making it my life’s mission to get that kid eating osso buco before middle school, you hear me?”

“Dream big, Chef.”

I resume ladling Bolognese into a pan, working in satisfied silence as the plate goes out to Jamie. Minutes later, Evie pops her head back in with a double thumbs-up. My diabolical plan has worked. Success! At least for today.

Midway through my sixteenth lasagna, the door to the alley clangs open, and tall, rangy guy with floppy curls practically trips into the kitchen. “Excuse me, can someone please tell me where the Freedom Trail is?”

For a split second, I stare open-mouthed at the square jaw and easy grin of the man standing in front of me, his hands shoved into the pockets of his well-fitted jeans, a soft, faded Citgo logo stretched across his sculpted chest. But then that image dissolves, and all I can see is my best friend in the whole world since we were five.

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