Page 3 of Fall Into You
“Please.” She rolls her eyes at him. “I was up all night with Clara while she vomited, and where were you? Sleeping like a baby,” she says with her hands on her hips. Danielle looks back and forth between the two of us. “What are we talking about?” She pulls her naturally blonde hair up into a messy high bun at the top of her head and still manages to look perfectly polished. How do other womendothat? If I tried that with my thick curly hair, it would look like a giant cinnamon roll stuck on the top of my head.
Vinny gets up from his seat and settles Leo on his hip. “Just telling Liza here that she’s never really been in love,” he says casually with a shrug.
“Oh, yeah, totally. I thought this was common knowledge,” she says, and Vinny throws his head back in laughter as he walks out of the kitchen, presumably to change Leo’s diaper.
“What are you even talking about?” I screech. “I wasengagedto the guy. I was with him for three freaking years, you guys!”
Danielle looks bored and ignores me as she picks up Clara and sets her on my lap. “I need to pee. Please take her before I lose my mind.” I sigh deeply and wrap my arms around my niece, holding her to me.
I look down and catch Clara staring up at me with the same big brown eyes and huge smile on her face that Dad had. She looks so much like him it’s almost eerie. Of everyone in the family, she’s the one who looks the most like her grandfather. Despite being twins, Leo looks more like Danielle’s side of the family than ours. Where her brother is blond and blue-eyed, Clara has curly brown hair that is often pulled up to the side with a crooked clip. Poor Danielle grew up with Pantene-commercial hair and doesn’t know how to handle so much of it, so her daughter often looks like a mess.
I fix Clara’s hair and hold her close, giving her a kiss on the forehead.
“You definitely have the Castelli hair, kid.” I smile fondly at her. “You and your daddy look so much like yournonno.”
“No-no,” she says with a smile.
I sigh. The door swings open, and my mother walks into the kitchen in a huff as I say, “No, you have to say it right.Nonno,” I repeat, emphasizing the double-N.
“They’re never going to learn Italian, are they?” she asks me in her native tongue, and I shake my head with a smirk.
“I don’t think so. Vinny only ever speaks to them in English,” I reply back in Italian.
“Thenyoushould be the one to teach them. It’s your job to keep traditions alive when I’m gone.” I roll my eyes at her. My mother grunts in frustration as she stirs the sauce.
“I need you to add one more place setting, by the way. Your brother just invited someone over for lunch.”
I bounce Clara on my knee while she plays with the gold necklace my dad gave me a few weeks before he passed—a gold medallion with my initials engraved in it on the back.
“What do you mean he invited someone over? I was just talking to him, and he didn’t mention anything.” I switch back to English.
Mom looks over her shoulder at me, exasperated, and shakes her head. “It was last minute, apparently,” she sighs. “More like last second,” she adds, muttering under her breath.
I feel bad for my mom. She’s always giving, giving, giving, and we never notice how much we’re taking, taking, taking. I make a mental note to start showing my mother how much I appreciate all that she does for us.
But not right now because I have a baby on my lap, and she is so damn cute.
“Who did he invite?” I ask, smiling down at Clara. “I didn’t realize he was still in touch with people from high school.” I definitely am not. I hated high school. It was just four years of torture and mean girls and football players and bullies. You could easily say that I wasn’t very popular growing up, due in large part to my huge, frizzy hair and nerdy tendencies. I preferred to stay in and watchBuffy the Vampire Slayerreruns than go out partying, thank you very much (Team Spikeall the way).
Vinny, on the other hand, was the high school golden boy. A jock, a genius, class president—you name it! Thankfully, the fact that my brother is six years older than me meant that he never had to see how big of a loser I was. Though, I sometimes wonder whether he would have given me some sort of street cred, like being his sister would have somehow made things better for me.
We both grew up here in Long Island, but Vinny and I live in New York City now. My brother got a scholarship to Columbia for pre-medandmed school and is now a doctor at Cornell-Weill.
I went to NYU for undergrad and am currently in my last year of my psych graduate program at Columbia. We visit often to see my mom, but we haven’t really hung out with any of our high school friends since graduation, which is why I’m confused. Who could he have invited that lives in town?
“It’s not a high school friend. It’s one of his old college roommates who was apparently in the area,” she tells me.
Holy shit.
“Which one?” My heart starts beating out of my chest suddenly, and my stomach churns. Vinny had a lot of roommates throughout his eight years of college, but there were definitely some stand-out candidates—one in particular.
“Auntie Liza?” Clara slaps my face lightly so I pay attention to her. “My tummy hurts.”
“Hold on, kid,” I say on the verge of a panic attack. “Mom, who is it??”
TELL ME, WOMAN. I MUST KNOW NOW.
“I don’t know,” she sighs, stirring her sauce and lowering the heat. “I think it’s Mark? Max? I can’t remember.”
