Page 12 of The Lucky One
“We kept that package cold for you.”
“Thank you. I’ll take it off your hands.”
Chiara knocks me in the hip with hers. “Good use of idiom.”
I laugh, because I cannot believe she’s standing here next to me in the lobby of my building.Keep cool, Ivo.Don’t mess this up.
Miguel hands metwoboxes. My mother has gone crazy this year. One of them is ice cold from the refrigerator, one is not. “Thank you!” I say from underneath them.
“Can I carry something?” Chiara asks.
“No, you may not wait on me tonight. Just ring for the elevator?”
She hurries ahead. “Nice lobby. Very swanky.”
“Do not be too impressed. My place is a studio.”
A few minutes later, when I unlock the door and let her in, she lets out a hoot of surprise. “Ivo, this istechnicallya studio. But it’s bigger than some two bedroom apartments.”
“It is nice,” I agree, stepping inside. To the right—but beyond a translucent partition—you can see the outline of my king-sized bed against the far wall.
The space is vast, though. To the left is a generous living area, where the big sofa faces a TV that’s suspended from the ceiling. And straight ahead is a glorious kitchen that I rarely use, because cooking for one man is not very much fun.
I carry both boxes over to the counter. I shrug off my suit jacket. “May I hang your coat?” I ask.
“Let me do it,” Chiara says, taking my suit jacket and carrying it over to the coat rack on the wall. “You’d better open those boxes.”
I find a knife and cut through the packing tape. Then I start pulling things out of the cold box. Mist rises into the air from the piece of dry ice in the bottom. “Mama wanted me to have a Finnish Christmas. She knows I miss my family over the holidays.”
Chiara makes a soft noise. “Three brothers, two sisters.”
“That is right.” She was wrong when she said we didn’t know each other very well.
From the cold box, I pull out a small ham and a container of cooked beets. Two cheeses. And a container of my mother’s mashed potatoes. “I do not even want to guess how much it costs to send mashed potatoes overnight across the sea.”
“Speaking as someone who knows, people enjoy feeding you.” She touches my arm. “You do like your food.”
“The food was only part of why I always went to Romano and Bianchi,” I point out. “Not to put you on the spot, but it’s true.”
Her dark eyes dip toward her hands. “Ididknow that. We used to fight about you.”
My hands go still on the next box. “You did? You and Stefano?”
“Oh yeah.” She shrugs. “He would always accuse me of flirting with you.”
“You didn’t,” I say. “You were just friendly.”
“True,” she says, lifting her chin. “But I cared for you in a way that I didn’t for any other customers. He knew that. It must have been very obvious.”
“It is not a crime to care for someone,” I say. Then I open the other box and find what I am looking for. “Ah! The cookies. There are two kinds. We had better sample them both.” I am already pulling down a couple of small plates, and putting the kettle on. “Tea?”
“I would love some tea,” she says. “But what is this?” She pulls a bag of rice out of the box.
“In Finland, Christmas Eve is the day we celebrate, and this rice is for the morning, when we make our rice porridge. We make it with milk, and topped with cinnamon and sugar, or berry compote. You are supposed to put a single almond into the pot.”
“Here it is!” she cries, extracting a single blanched almond, wrapped in plastic, from the box. “Is this for luck? Whomever gets the almond in their bowl has a lucky year?”
“Exactly. Last year I made the porridge and put the almond in and felt very unlucky. I was sitting here by myself for hours before it was time to go upstairs for the team party. It is easy to feel sorry for yourself when you are away from your family. I have gotten very good at it.”
