Begin Again: Short stories from the heart (9 page)

They spent the next half hour walking up and down the rows of trees, considering, deciding, and looking for just the right tree. After the eighteenth one, Danielle smiled and said, “This is it. What do you think, Mom?”

What she thought was that this one looked the same as the fifth tree they’d seen.
And the sixth, seventh, and the next eleven.
“It looks fine to me,” Maggie said, shaking a little snow off the branches.

“Great!” Danielle yelled, suddenly very excited. She glanced at her watch for the tenth time in the last half hour. “I’ll run and tell Mr. McKinley we found a tree and he can send someone to cut it down. Don’t move from that spot. And can I get my hot chocolate and peppermint?” Her words fell out in a rush, as though she was suddenly in a great hurry to leave.

“Sure. Danielle?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Why have you been looking at your watch every five minutes since we got here?”
What was she up to?

“Just wondering what time it was,” she said. “Bye.” Then she turned and jogged toward the little log cabin and her annual goodies.

“Kids,” Maggie muttered under her breath.

She spent the next ten minutes waiting for Mr. McKinley. Snow fell like a curtain, turning everything white.
A real Winter Wonderland.

“Excuse me, Miss,” a deep voice called from behind.
Definitely not Mr. McKinley.
“Is this tree taken?”

Maggie turned and looked up into deep blue eyes, the color of a summer sky. She stood captivated, taking in the man’s rugged good looks—dark hair, strong jaw, cleft chin, tall muscular build. No, this was not Mr. McKinley.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No.”

The man laughed. “Is that no to
both questions or
one?”

It was Maggie’s turn to laugh. “No, nothing’s wrong. My daughter examined eighteen trees and insisted we take this one. I’m standing guard until she gets back with Mr. McKinley.”

The handsome stranger shook his head. “That’s odd. My daughter looked at twelve while I was helping Mr. McKinley load a tree and then she escaped for hot chocolate, telling me she wanted the Douglas fir in the fourth row, three back.”

Maggie and the stranger looked at one another. “Wait a minute,” Maggie said, remembering how her daughter kept glancing at her watch, hurrying through the trees, scampering away. She should have guessed something was amiss—Danielle never rushed anything and rarely even wore a watch. “Would you happen to be a photographer?”

The man nodded. “How did you know?”

“And I’ll just bet your name is Matthew Webster, isn’t it?”

His blue eyes narrowed, moving over her face, her hair, studying her in detail. “Maggie?”

She
nodded,
a faint smile on her lips.

The man threw back his head and laughed. “This is the first time I’m actually going to thank Nicole for butting into my love life.”

“You have a little matchmaker in your family too, huh?” Maggie asked, grinning.

He laughed again. “I sure do, but she’s never joined forces before. That could prove deadly.”

“Do you think we can fend them off?” Maggie teased.

“I don’t think I want to,” Matthew said, his blue gaze meeting hers.

Despite the cold and snow, a wave of warmth washed over her. “Nor do I,” she said softly.

Bursts of yelling and cheers startled them both. They turned and spotted two figures running toward them.

“Finally,” Danielle said, out of breath when she reached them.

“Hi, I’m Nicole.” A pretty girl with brown hair and blue eyes held out a red-
mittened
hand.

“I feel like I already know you, Nicole,” Maggie said, shaking her hand.

“Sorry we kind of tricked both of you,” Danielle said. “But we knew you’d like each other once you met.” She looked from one adult to the other. “You do like each other, don’t you?”

“Of course they do, silly,” Nicole said. “Didn’t you see how they were looking at each other? It was
so
obvious.”

“Yeah, they did kind of have weird looks on their faces,” Danielle agreed, her eyes darting from one to the other.

“All right you two. You’ve done your jobs. I think Maggie and I can take it from here.”

He smiled down at her and Maggie almost forgot to breathe. Danielle was right. Matthew Webster
was
totally awesome.
And then some.

The End

Some say it was the Catholic Church that killed Mary Alice Olivetti. Others say it was her mother,
Nicolena’s
obsession with holy water and olive oil. And there were others still who blamed the rest of us, throwing out words like indifference and ridicule.

Me, I think it was a mix of all three, a trinity if you will; Church, mother, and us. I was Mary Alice Olivetti’s friend, her best friend, according to her. It wasn’t true, not for me, at least not in the beginning. I
let
her be my friend because she copied psychology notes for me while I did more important things like wrote my name along the margins of a black and white steno book, block style. And she saved me a place in the cafeteria line on pizza day, like it was an honor for her to be doing it. Of course, there were the
pizzelles
—vanilla because I didn’t like anise—thirty of them that she brought once a week to our lunch table to guarantee
herself
a seat.

Mary Alice believed us when we said Alex
Delensen
had a crush on her. Didn’t she know the captain of the football team would
never
look twice at a girl with a big fat braid who wore rosary beads around her neck and black elastic pants with white cotton shirts?

I don’t like to think too much about the early days when I thought she was just the new girl in the robin’s-egg-blue house with yellow trim whose parents spoke broken English and drove a beat-up Plymouth Fury.

I like to dwell on the after; after I went to her house that day to deliver a dozen freshly made cannoli because my mother said we were just as Italian
and
just as Catholic as the Olivetti’s even though we didn’t wind our hair in tight buns or hang a crucifix in every room.

“Do they really have a crucifix in every room?” I’d asked my mother as she arranged the cannoli on a Styrofoam tray layered with wax paper.

She looked up at me and raised a black brow, an
Italian
black brow. “Go deliver the cannoli,” she’d said. “Then you tell me.”

The Olivetti house was two blocks from ours, up a hill and around a bend on a patch of land surrounded by clumps of crabgrass and holy statues. There was one of the Virgin Mary tucked in the flower bed by the front door, hands extended,
a
stone visage of white purity, blessing, and welcome. Another was of Baby Jesus decked out in a scarlet robe and matching crown, two tiny fingers forming a peace sign. He was propped against the opening to a fence that led to the
backyard and what looked like grape vines. The house was newly painted to robin’s-egg-blue, the trim a daffodil yellow, except for the screen door that hung at an odd angle, its off-white paint peeling around the edges.

I’d stood there, half holding my breath against the smell of garlic and burned grease filtering through the screen in a cloud of stale disgust. My eyes were glued to a scrap of chipped paint on the door, the tray of cannoli in my hands, wondering what Mary Alice would say if she knew we took bets on the size and color of her underwear. White, Hanes, number nine had been my guess.
Full-cut.
When I looked up, she was standing on the other side of the screen.

“
Vivi
, hi.”
Her voice was softer than usual, almost a whisper. “What are you doing here?” She didn’t open the door, didn’t step outside either, just stood there, a dull red splashing her olive skin.

I held out the cannoli, my eyes darting to the door handle,
then
back to her face. Well? Wasn’t she going to invite me in? I wanted to check out the crucifixes.

Before I could say anything, Mary Alice’s mother swooped down on us in a rush of oily flesh and rapid Italian.

Nicolina
Olivetti was a big woman with a chest that tucked itself into her waist and disappeared under a grease-splattered white apron. Her hands were long and square, her gray-black hair stretched into a bun so tight her eyes looked half Asian. She wore a housedress that fell just below her knees and was the same blue as the house. The slippers on her swollen feet were soiled to a brown-gray though they might have been white when she bought them.

My gaze darted back to her face. There were creases on Mrs. Olivetti’s high forehead and around her thin lips but the rest of her skin was pulled tight, stretched over a long nose and broad cheekbones as though there hadn’t been enough flesh to cover the bones.

But it was those eyes that pulled me in, made me clear my throat twice. They were deep black; onyx, midnight, opaque, the kind that grabbed you tight, held on, x-rayed, scanning layers of brain and memory and secrets. I thought Mrs. Olivetti saw right through me down to the bet I’d made on Mary Alice’s underwear.

I looked away.

She turned to Mary
Alice,
spoke in the same high-pitched, staccato Italian she’d used earlier. Mary Alice
answered,
her voice soft at first then rising to within a decibel of her mother’s. I heard my name, once, twice, three times. Mrs. Olivetti pointed at me with her left hand, shook her head. The thin gold band on her third finger made me think of Mary Alice’s father, Umberto; small, thin, stoop-shouldered with a shock of white hair and round wire-framed glasses. I never heard him speak, even the one time when Father Charles introduced him after Mass. He’d just stood there and nodded, his thin lips pulling open enough to reveal two crooked front teeth. I figured he’d given up on talking after he married Mary Alice’s mother. Who wouldn’t?

Mrs. Olivetti gave me one last look, muttered in Italian, then turned and headed back into the house, to her garlic and grease and rooms with crucifixes dangling from the walls.

“I… I have to go,” Mary Alice said, her dark eyes staring at her slippers. They were the same style as her mother’s, two shades cleaner.

“Here,” I said, wedging open the door enough to shove the cannoli into her hands. “These are for you.” I turned and ran down the street toward my house wishing my mother hadn’t decided to be hospitable. Then I wouldn’t have been standing on the other side of the Olivetti’s screen door, wouldn’t have smelled the garlic and burned grease.
Wouldn’t have heard Mrs. Olivetti’s shrill voice saying my name as though it were evil.
I wouldn’t have noticed anything.

But I did.

The next day I saw Mary Alice leaving school.
“Hey, Mary Alice.
Wait up,” I said, hurrying to catch up with her.

She slowed but didn’t look at me.
“
Vivi
. Hi.”

I knew what I wanted to say, I just didn’t quite know how to say it—a first for me. We headed down the hill, past the smokers puffing on their afternoon fixes, past the line of evergreens, stiff and secretive, toward the railroad tracks and the shortcut home. “About yesterday,” I started, stopped.

“Thanks for the cannoli.” She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead.

“You’re welcome.” I didn’t look at her either.

“They’re my favorite.”

“Oh. Good.” I paused. “Good.”

“We used to make them but it’s been a long time.”

I kicked the gravel on my side of the tracks. A spray of tiny stones flew in the air, scattered on the ground. “They’re a lot of work.”

“I know.” She let out a small sigh, “Thank you.”

“Mary Alice, what was your mother saying about me yesterday?”

She stumbled, regained her step and shifted the stack of books she carried to her other arm.
“Nothing.”

“She said my name three times.” I didn’t add ‘like I was the devil’ but I thought it. “What was she saying?”

“Nothing.
Really.”

I stopped and waited until she looked at me. “
You planning
on going to confession Saturday?” I asked. “Because I know you just lied.”

She shook her head, stared at me with those dark eyes. “
Vivi
, my mother’s from the old school. She expects things to be a certain way.”

“So? What’s that have to do with me?”

“Well, she expects
people
to be a certain way, too, the way they act, the way they talk, the way they dress—”

“Mary Alice,” I cut her off, “What did she say about
me
?”