Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (8 page)

I taste it, and my life changes.

I love it. It’s nutty and chewy and great, and I eat the whole bowl. I give Francesca a taste, but I refuse to share more. I hate to share in restaurants. I guard my plate like a wolf.

Or a corgi.

We leave the restaurant and I go on the Internet, where I learn that farro is actually an ancient grain, grown near Rome, in the province of Abruzzo, which happens to be where Mother Mary’s parents grew up. The motto of Abruzzo is strong and gentle.

Her motto is strong and violent.

I also learn online that farro isn’t emmer or spelt, but you could have fooled me, because I never heard any of these words.

But anyway, I go to the grocery store and buy three small bags of farro. Then I hurry home, soak half a bag for fifteen minutes, boil it for fifteen more, then add tomatoes, cheese, and olive oil. And devour.

I’m in food heaven.

I read the Nutrition Facts, and am happy to see that only 15 of the 170 calories are from fat, and farro is so filling that I’m not hungry all day or night, so I hardly snack at all. I try it with cheese and artichokes, then asparagus and all kinds of different veggies, and I love it so much I eat it for lunch and dinner.

Every day, for the next ten days.

I become Queen of Farro.

Or better yet, Pharaoh of Farro.

Ten pounds later, I’m starting to wonder. Francesca comes home for a visit, and I make her a bowl. “Delicious, right?” I ask her.

“Awesome.”

“I gained weight, but I never snack anymore. I don’t understand. Do you?”

“Maybe. Did you see this?” Francesca shows me the Nutrition Facts. “One serving is 36 grams of carbs.”

“I know, but it’s only 170 calories.”

“Okay, but did you read the serving size?”

“No,” I admit. “Most serving sizes are like two a bag, right?”

“Yes, but this one says ten. There are
ten
servings in one bag.” Francesca gestures to our bowls, which are full. “This meal is probably five servings a piece. At 36 grams of carbs a serving.”

I feel dizzy. I can’t multiply that fast.

“In other words, your meal is 180 grams of carbs.”

I blink.

“And if you eat it twice a day, that’s 360 grams of carbs a day.”

For a second, I can’t speak. I know this can’t be good. A low-carb diet like South Beach is 20 grams of carbs a day, but that’s crazy. We go online, where we learn that the average female, if she’s not dieting, should consume 180 to 230 grams of carbs a day.

Uh oh.

I can’t subtract that fast, either. But I’m getting the gist.

360 grams of carbs minus 230 grams of carbs equals my jeans don’t fit.

In Which We Lose Angie, and Nothing’s Funny

By Lisa

Today I have sad news to report.

No joke.

Our older golden retriever, Angie, passed away. I’ve been putting off telling you, because I’ve been putting off telling me.

The good news is that she was healthy all of her long life, then she got cancer. The bad news is, though she fought it, she didn’t win.

And we lost.

You might remember Angie as the Zen golden, the unsqueaky wheel who was soft and fluffy, with a coat the hue of creamery butter. If you remember the stories about her from the earlier books, she was the one who helped me figure out why my dishes were cloudy. Until we heard from plumbers that what she and I figured out was impossible, pipe-wise.

Still, what can you expect from a dog, much less a woman?

After the diagnosis, Francesca came home and we took Angie to chemo for weeks, trying to save her life. She cooperated, too, trying to hang in there, and in the end, we were all sleeping on the floor together, day and night, until one of us needed to rest, forever.

What’s interesting now, a few months later, is how this has affected the other dogs, especially Penny. You may remember that Penny is my other, and last, golden. They say that a dog is man’s best friend, and that’s true. But it turns out that dogs have best friends, too.

Penny’s best friend was Angie.

They played and hung out together, every minute. They usually rested side-by-side, their postures mirror images; in fact, they were half-sisters, having the same father. The only difference between them was that Angie liked to sleep with her ball in her mouth. Evidently, dogs need pacifiers, too.

Our Angie

And though Angie was quiet and Penny rambunctious, together they seemed to make halves of the same doggie whole.

Their favorite game was fetch, and Angie loved her red Kong ball, pockmarked with teeth. When we threw it for her, Penny would run to chase it down and always reached it first. We’d have to load the dice by throwing the ball closer to Angie, or even holding Penny back to give Angie a head start. Truth was, we did that more for us than for her. Angie wasn’t the competitive type. She just was happy to run around in the sun with her bestie, collecting a lot of love, if not beating anybody to a ball.

There might be a lesson in that, but I have yet to learn it.

And now that Angie is gone, Penny, the dog we thought was noisy and not at all sensitive, has changed. Specifically, Penny won’t come out of the coat closet.

Best friends

Penny, alone

Again, no joke.

Since Angie’s death, Penny has spent much of her day sleeping in the coat closet, which is something she has never done before. None of my dogs has. They’re all at my feet, on my lap, or standing in front of the television while I try to change the channel with the remote.

I encourage Penny to come out and play fetch, and she rises to the occasion, cantering toward me with the ball, but it isn’t the same. You would think she’d revel in always getting the ball and never having to share, but that isn’t the case. Instead, she lies down after a time, tired sooner than she used to be, and today I realized that Penny was never trying to beat Angie to the ball.

She was showing off for her.

And now, her audience is gone.

The truth is, I’m getting more and more used to losing things I love. As are we all, as we get older.

That is, if we’re lucky.

If we’re not the ones getting lost.

And I don’t think we get past any of these losses, whether they’re dogs or people. We just tuck a little ache into a heart that gets softer and warmer with time, like dough kneaded by skilled and loving hands.

Penny won’t get over Angie, and neither will Francesca or I.

We’re not meant to.

We’ll just carry her around inside us, and she’ll be a dog that reminds us of just how human we really are.

Thank you, Angie.

We love you.

Banana Fanna Fo

By Lisa

I just found out that Mother Mary has been living under an alias.

You would think that I’d know my mother’s real name. After all, she’s 86, I’m 55, and it’s the kind of thing that’s generally well-established by now. But Mother Mary is full of mysteries.

Let me explain.

You may recall that I took her back to the airport after her last visit, and she almost wasn’t allowed to board the plane to Miami, because her ID card had expired. The airline let her fly only because she was carrying her social security card. Of course, you could have guessed that Mother Mary carries her social security card. She also carries her voter registration card and a photo of Tom Selleck that she claims came with her wallet, but I don’t believe her.

I suspect she just likes Tom Selleck.

Wallets haven’t come with photos since the days of Troy Donahue. Photos don’t even come with photos anymore. All the photos are in the cell phones, guaranteeing that the moments of our lives will last as long as a SIM card.

To continue the story, Brother Frank took her to the DMV for a new ID card, but they wouldn’t renew her card because her last name, which is Scottoline, was different than the one on her birth certificate, which is Lopo. She had to go home and obtain her marriage and divorce certificates from when she married and divorced my father, and she also had to get the marriage and divorce certificates of the guy she married and divorced before my father, since she’s divorced twice, in the manner of all Scottoline women, who need a couple of tries to get something right and often never do.

So she obtained the necessary documents and they went back to the DMV, where they waited in line for three hours, during which Brother Frank tells me that Mother Mary morphed into Line Police. He didn’t need to elaborate; I’ve waited in plenty of lines with Mother Mary, and I know the drill. She watches everything and everybody in the line.

She makes the average hawk look asleep at the switch.

Mother Mary makes sure that nobody is butting in, holding a place for someone else, or taking too long at the counter. All such infractions are met with eye-rolling, theatrical sighing, or a well-timed “oh, come on!” And if the line shifts forward but the person in front of her doesn’t move instantly, she’ll lean over, wave him ahead, and say, “
Go.
”

Her finest moment arises when she spots the person who Just Has A Question.

You’ve seen this person.

He acts agitated when he bypasses the line and goes straight to the counter, as if his question was roiling his very soul. Most people ignore the person who Just Has A Question. Not Mother Mary. I’ve seen her stop the person who Just Has A Question and tell him he can take his question to the back of the line where it belongs.

And once, she said to him, “I just have a question, too. Why are you butting in line?”

To return to the story, she finally gets to the DMV counter, and the clerk is about to issue her a new ID card when he notices something. Mother Mary’s birth certificate doesn’t read Mary Lopo, but Maria Lopo.

“So what?” Mother Mary asked him, and me, later, when she tells me the story.

“Your name isn’t Mary?” I’m dumbfounded. “All my life, you told me your name was Mary.”

“It is. Maria is Mary in Italian.”

“But this isn’t Italy, Mom. Mary and Maria are two different names. I thought your name was Mary, but it’s Maria. How did I not know this?”

“They’re not different names.”

“Yes, they are. That’s why the man couldn’t give you an ID card that says Mary.”

“So now I got an ID card that says Maria Scottoline, but it doesn’t match my bills, my credit cards, my social security card, or my deed.”

“Your name really isn’t Mary?” I ask, still flabbergasted. Twenty years ago, I named my first fictional character, Mary DiNunzio, after her. And for years, I’ve been calling her Mother Mary. But she isn’t Mother Mary. She’s Mother Maria.

She keeps talking away.

But I don’t listen. I don’t understand at all.

I’m the person who Just Has A Question.

Mousetrap

By Francesca

I try not to be squeamish. I was raised by a strong woman, and I’m working on becoming one myself. So the first time I saw a mouse in my kitchen, I kept an eye on it as it ran into a crevice beside my radiator pipe, quickly retrieved some steel wool, and calmly plugged the hole.

Problem solved.

For the night.

The next day, I was sitting writing at the table, when I saw something dash across the floor. I tip-toed over and peered underneath the dishwasher, but just as I caught sight of the twitching, whiskered nose, a second mouse emerged from beneath the oven and joined his friend under the washer.