Page 29 of My Fearless Fake Fling

Oh. “I knew that,” I lied.

When he finally let go of my hand, the woman immediately tugged me by my shirt to slam against her bosom, wrapping me in a tight, tight hug. “We don’t shake hands in this family,” she said.

My arms, constricted at the shoulders, stayed limp at my side. She seemed like a wonderful woman who obviously adored Len, but um… her letting me breathe would’ve been welcome too.

“Rita,” Len said as he tried to tug me back to him. “She’s turning blue.”

Rita looked down with horrified expression and shoved me away. “Sorry. Sorry. I get too excited.”

Turning bluewas a bit of an exaggeration, but it got me the result I wanted.

“We’re here for an extra-large Margherita,” Len explained to Mr. Napolitano.

“Bellissimo,bellissiomo… Rita, you stay here, I make pie.” Then in a move I didnotexpect, Mr. Napolitano moved from around the counter to pull me from Rita. “Come, bella Kami. We make pie.”

Um…oh-kay.

And he continued to tug me back into the kitchen. I went to the sink to wash my hands, a habit still ingrained in me from my years working food service as a teenager, while the old man scrounged me up an apron.

I tied on the bleached white covering, waiting for him to finish washing up his hands. Then he took me to the table with a bowl that had a damp towel draped over it. He flipped up the towel to show off a vat of prepared dough. A scale rested to the left of the bowl, but I had a feeling the man never used it.

He pinched off a large blob and started stretching it while moving it in a circle. He had an old-school brick oven burning, set in to the back wall behind us. And it felt like a bajillion degrees radiating off that sucker.

Then he set his circle down in a pile on the flour-dusted surface in front of him and reached back into the bowl to pinch off a smaller blob of dough. “You do,” he ordered me, plopping the blob down in front of me.

“Oh, I don’t think…”

“No, don’t think.Do.”

Don’t think, do. That was the whole point of these excursions, to do. To be the braver Kami I used to be and really, it was just pizza. What was the worst that could happen, right?

“Sure,” I answered, picking up the sticky blob. “Why not?”

Mr. Napolitano showed me his technique of dusting his hands in the flour from the table along with the dough, so it wouldn’t stick to my skin. And I started copying him move for move. He stretched dough. I stretched dough. Though his started to form the traditional circle of a seasoned professional while mine looked kind of like the state of Wisconsin.

“Good,” Mr. Napolitano praised me, even if my work didn’t warrant it. “Now throw.” To show me what he meant, he tossed his beautifully round circle into the air to widen the circumference or whatever.

So I tossed mine as directed. It looked more like I tried to reshape Wisconsin’s borders. I tossed it two more times, and on the third catch I heard whooping and clapping. I turned my head to see Len and Rita in the kitchen. She was doing the clapping, because Len had his phone out videoing me.

“I didn’t know this was a challenge,” I said.

“It’s not. But I thought you might want to relive this one.”

As usual, Len was right. When I turned back to the task, Mr. Napolitano had two extra large wooden peels dusted with cornmeal. The old man moved fast to pull them out and dust them in just the time I turned away. Wow.

He laid his on a peel, so I did the same with mine. Then he showed me how to sauce the pie and add the rounds of fresh mozzarella that he made there in the shop. He didn’t have to tell me; I saw the pot with the steaming water and cheese curds simmering on the stovetop. I’d seen enough Food TV in my life to know that was the step before forming the balls. Finally, we topped both of ours with fresh leaves of basil.

Carefully, we walked over to the oven with our pies and slid them in. “Eight minutes,” he told us.

How hot did that oven have to burn to turn out pies in eight minutes?

We folded pizza boxes while we waited. And I had to giggle at myself for getting so distracted from the delectable smell that I ruined two while the three of them talked around me. But at eight minutes, he used the peel to remove first my creation and then his, placing each directly into a box. Wisconsin never looked so good.

“Thank you so much for letting me do this,” I gushed, then bent in to kiss his cheek. His eyes got huge and I realized how what I’d done could be construed. “Oh, I’m sorry. I got caught up in the moment.”

That was far too familiar a gesture for only having met him a half hour ago, give or take.

“Leno, you find another girl. We keep her.” And he pretend-tugged me behind him as if keeping me out of range of Len.

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