Page 14 of Blood Orange Christmas
Outside the bathroom door, a nurse calls my name. I close my hand around the test and for the first time since I left the villa, I don’t look at the door like someone might walk through it and change my mind.
6
SERENA
Afew years later
I teach myself not to flinch when the door buzzer rings after dark. Rome is louder than the places I used to hide, and the city has a way of folding you into its noise until your fears sound like traffic. I live two floors up from a bakery that starts kneading at four in the morning and atabaccaiothat never seems to close. The woman downstairs calls me Signorina even though I’m twenty-four and have a four-year-old who can eat his weight in clementines. My building smells like espresso and hot stone and sometimes rain inside the stairwell. I like it because the smells are honest.
Marco lies on the rug in the living room with his cars. He lines them up in a perfect row, then whispers to each one before he sends it under the couch. He decides which car is brave and which one is tired. He decides who gets a turn. The brave ones always go last.
“Dinner in ten,” I call, rolling lemon zest into sugar with my knuckles until the grains glow pale yellow and the whole kitchensmells like memory. I fold the sugar into ricotta and whisk until the mixture loosens and shines. I don’t have a stand mixer because I don’t have the counter space, so I do everything by hand. It keeps me honest too.
Marco pops his head around the counter and looks at the bowl like it might answer a question for him. “Is that the cloud one?”
“It’s the cloud one,” I say. “But only after you eat your pasta.”
He considers the moral cost of patience, then climbs onto his chair at the small table I found on Via Merulana for forty euros and refinished during a heat wave. He swings his feet while I plate pasta al limone with ribbons of zucchini and a little pecorino. I drizzle good oil over both plates. He whistles low like an old man because he knows it makes me laugh.
We eat facing the window. I leave it cracked because the street sounds make me feel less alone. A Vespa coughs by. A couple on the sidewalk argues softly about where they parked. Marco chews thoughtfully and then asks the question he has started asking more and more.
“Mamma, why don’t I have a papa?”
The fork pauses in my hand. I keep my voice gentle because he is four and because I promised myself I would never teach him to be afraid of his own questions. “You have me,” I say, and I push a few extra zucchini ribbons into the sauce like that changes anything. “And you have Nonna on Sundays.”
He takes this in like a scientist. “But where is he?”
“I don’t know,” I say, which is true and not. “Sometimes, people who would be bad at being close choose to stay far away.”
“Bad like when I run in the street?”
“Bad like… not careful with hearts,” I say, and he nods like he understands traffic laws.
He twirls pasta around his fork. “If I had a papa, would he like cloud cream?”
“Of course he would like cloud cream,” I say, and my chest aches for a second in a place I keep quiet. “And if he didn’t, we would teach him.”
He brightens at the idea of training a hypothetical adult. He eats faster. After dinner, he asks if he can set the “snows” in the freezer—the lemon-sugar ricotta in small cups, because he likes it half-frozen, the edges turning to soft ice. I let him, because this is our house and our rules and because it matters to let him do small things he can finish.
When I put him to bed, he asks me to tell the story about the fishermen again. I make it up as I go, like I always do—a boat at dawn, seven nets, a feast promised if the sea is kind. I don’t say the words I learned four years ago and try to forget every day.Omertà.Consigliere.Capodecina. I say anchovies and calamari and baccalà, and I say how the boat comes back full, and I tell him the city glows when the feast is ready. He asks if the fishermen eat with their hands. I tell him yes, obviously, because some things taste better when you touch them.
He falls asleep with his hand on the stuffed whale I stitched for him the week I decided to stop pretending I was waiting for a knock that would never be kind. I watch him breathe for a minute longer than I need to. Then I clean the kitchen, answer two client emails about Christmas menus, and price out Sicilian pistachios with my mouth set in a line because everything costs more this year and I’ve promised myself I’ll move us to a place with one more room by spring.
I’m portioning dough for crostate when my phone rings with a number I don’t know. I let it buzz twice, three times, and then I answer because unknowns used to be dangerous and now they are sometimes rent.
“Pronto?”
“Signorina Serena?” A woman’s voice with a Perugia lilt, brisk and careful. “My name is Gabriella. I’m the house manager for a private villa in Umbria. We need emergency catering. Three nights. Feast of the Seven Fishes on the first. Christmas-adjacent—tonight’s four days off the date, but the Signore is particular. We heard you handle seafood cleanly and that your lemon pastry melts like memory.”
I close my eyes. The streetlight flickers. “Who gave you my name?”
“Your client from Trastevere. The pop-up under the sycamores—she said your fritto misto didn’t taste heavy after an hour.”
I exhale slowly. “Menu, guest count, and site kitchen?”
“Guest count twenty-four for the first night, eighteen for the remaining two. There’s a full kitchen. We can send photos. Remote location. You would sleep on site. Triple rate.”
Triple rate is the kind of number that makes my hands shake, which is how I know I shouldn’t say yes right away. My eyes go to the doorway of Marco’s room, to the half-lit whale on the quilt. “I don’t travel alone,” I say. “I have a child.”
