Page 3 of Love You, Mean It

“Ellie, Bella, is that you?” Ma’s voice rang out from the kitchen, and I quickly shed my shoes and retreated through the entryway, Bella lingering to say her hellos. Ma was still in scrubs, pulling together a salad at the center island, the Formica top slightly discolored with age but otherwise spotless. Mimi hadn’t updated the house since the eighties, but she sure as shit cleaned it twice a week, top to bottom. I perched on a stool at the counter, stretching tosnag the bottle of red wine at Ma’s elbow. She raised an eyebrow as she sliced a mushroom against the pad of her thumb, even strips dropping onto the fluffy pile of arugula in the bowl.

“Don’t start, Ma. I spent the last half hour at the shop choking down Ruth Pinsky’s thoughts on the quality of the mortadella.”

“Where does she think she’ll find a better mortadella?” Ma’s wide blue eyes narrowed to slits. I couldn’t help but notice the crow’s feet the expression pulled out. She always claimed she was going to start slowing down at work, but I had yet to see any sign of it.

“Exactly.” I poured a generous glass of wine, then tilted my head at another glass, eyebrow raised. Ma turned her face heavenward and sighed, her unspoken yes. I poured a glass for her, then one for Bella. I was already a good third of the way through my own when Bella joined me at the counter.

“There’s my favorite niece!” Ma reached across to cup Bella’s cheek with one hand before returning to the salad. Bella’s mom was Ma’s sister. Laurie and Dave had moved to Nashville about five years back so he could take a teaching post at Vanderbilt, but Bella was established in Boston by then, and she’d kept coming to family dinner every week, even during my brief stint in New York. Taking over the deli when Dad died won me a brief wave of goodwill from the family elders, but Bella was still the favorite Greco of our generation byfar,and she wasn’t even a Greco.Frankly, I couldn’t blame them.

“How’s the big city treating you, Annabella?” Ma said, pausing between vegetables to take a small sip of wine.

“About the same.” Bella wrapped both hands around the bowl of her glass.

“I don’t know why you don’t just come back here. Rents in Boston are out of control, I was reading about it in theGlobejust last week.”

Bella gave a gentle smile. We played this out pretty much every week, and somehow it never seemed to bother her.

“When Milborough’s got a good marketing job for me, it’ll be top of my list.”

“You girls have both always been so ambitious,” Ma said, her tone suggesting it wasn’t entirely a compliment.

“Pretty sure that only applies to Bella.” I reached across the counter to pluck a cherry tomato off the salad. Ma slapped my hand playfully. “In case you forgot, I hung all that up to run the family deli.”

“But look at all the changes you’ve made! I just saw something about how ‘on trend’ tinned fish was, how restaurants are charging fifteen, even twenty dollars for some sardines and a few crackers. I never would have believed it.”

“Youdidn’tbelieve it. You and Mimi basically tried to have me committed for bringing in brands that cost more than a dollar.”

“Well, I’m a big enough woman to admit when I’m wrong. The point is, you’ve really put your stamp on the place. Classed it up!”

It’s not that I wasn’t glad she appreciated the changes I’d made—itwasnice to take more ownership over the deli, even nicer to see the people I cared about most genuinely proud of me. At some point that I couldn’t put my finger on, I’d even stopped thinking of it as Dad’s or Mimi’s—my responsibility but the family’sthing—and started thinking of it asmydeli. And it was; the shop it was today wasn’t the one Dad had run, or Grandpa and Mimi before him.

Still, I’d always hoped to achieve more in my life than “caught the trend in tinned fish at the right time.” I tried to smile—Ma meant it as a compliment; there was no point in making her feel bad. Besides, I was the one who’d practically insisted on giving everything up to run the place.

“What can I say? I’m basically the Martha Stewart of meat slicers.”

“That’swhat you think classy is?” Bella giggled.

“Okay, the…Grace Kelly of…giardiniera?” I tried.

“Her royal highness of ham?” Bella retorted.

“You girls are sostrangesometimes.”

“Yeah, but you love us,” I said, relieved that the moment had passed without her noticing. I bent to haul out the food I’d brought from the deli, the slight heat from the wine melting the surface layer of permatension in my neck and shoulders. “Do we have another cutting board? I brought beet salad, but we also had a leftover focaccia.” I waggled the square of bread in the air before plopping it on the breakfast bar.

“Did you think to bring—”

“Red pepper ricotta spread to go with it? What do you take me for, Linda?”

“Have I ever told you how much I love you, daughter of mine?” Ma fluttered her eyelashes exaggeratedly. “Look in the cupboard,” she added, pointing with her knife to the narrow cabinet where Mimi kept cutting boards and cooking trays, separated with cheap tension rods so they “wouldn’t get all jumbled.” Margaret Greco, the O.G. of Pinterestable home organization hacks. Which begged the question…

“Where’s Mimi?” I said as I pulled a scarred wooden board from the cupboard.

“At the town council meeting. Don’t worry, I made sure your grandpa got the lasagna in the oven.”

“Still? They must have had a hell of a lot of crosswalks to fight over.”

“Don’t. I think it’s lovely your grandmother stays active in the community.”

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