Backlight, page 20
"Most people had that fight years ago, Francie. I'm glad, though. This is a good thing."
"You knew we were meant to be together?"
In the background, she heard the low murmur of people in the market, the squeaky wheel on the shopping cart, the rustle of packaging. She held her breath as she waited for Valeria to speak.
"Anytime you saw him, you'd be different afterward. Something always happened, like the scooter accident, and you'd be thrown for a loop and wouldn't know why. And then at the funeral, you were both so hurt and scared, and I caught you looking at each other like you were the only people there. He was standing right next to that beautiful girlfriend and she might as well have been a piece of furniture."
Francesca took a deep breath. "I thought I was the only one who felt that."
"Sometimes, Francie, you're so caught up in your idea of who you are—the fashion photographer, the paparazzi victim, the other woman—that you don't realize who you really are."
"What does that have to do with the way I looked at Bruno?"
"You didn't even know you were doing it, and you couldn't see that he was doing it. That's all."
Francesca let her words sink in. "So you think it's real?"
"The realest. If you’re in town this weekend, come over for brunch on Sunday. Just us, no Scrabble swap. I promise."
"Bruno too? He's been coming up most weekends."
"Of course, Bruno, that’s the whole point. And you can meet Flavia, finally."
"Oh, yeah," Francesca said. "The baby."
"I'm at the cashier, Francie, I'll see you Sunday."
THIS WEDNESDAY, THEY received the worksheet as soon as they walked into the classroom. On the chalkboard, next to the illustrated alphabet, the word INTIMACY stood out in stark white against scholastic green. The worksheet was double-sided, with dense paragraphs and bold bullets and wide swaths of empty space meant for Francesca’s feelings, she inferred.
“The most common side effect of sexual assault, on an emotional level, is a withdrawal from intimacy,” the group leader began. “You may have experienced this in a number of different ways. And the best pathway to resuming healthy relationships, which, as Francesca noted before, is our goal, is renewing intimacy.”
She stood and wrote on the board. VULNERABILITY, underlined for emphasis.
“Our first intimate relationships are with our parents and carers, because as babies and children, we have no choice but to be vulnerable. We rely on others to fulfill our needs.”
“And when they betray us, it’s catastrophic,” Andrea said. The boy who was abused by his older brother.
The group murmured in recognition. “Go deeper, Andrea,” the leader said.
He shook his head.
“I’ll go,” an older woman volunteered. “I married young and didn’t have an education. I didn’t have a career like you girls do now. I relied on my husband for the home where we lived, for the food that we ate, for the clothes on our backs. I couldn’t take my children and leave, I had nowhere to go.”
“What would have changed that for you?” the leader asked.
“If I’d had a job, if I’d been able to get my own place, I could have gotten away. Or if someone had helped me with those things.”
“And in order for someone to have helped you, you would have had to—“
“Tell them the truth.” The woman was clear-eyed, plain-spoken, her provincial accent slight. Francesca knew she cleaned hotel rooms. She had gotten out.
“And that’s the first step of establishing intimacy,” the leader said, rising again to write on the board. “Trust. Your ability to trust has been destroyed, like Andrea said, but you must trust again to reenter the world.”
On the worksheet, Francesca read the conditions for intimacy: safety, trust, presence, courage, autonomy, mutuality.
“What’s mutuality?” she asked.
“Mutuality is a necessary condition for true intimacy. Instead of having a relationship with a structural imbalance—where one partner always shares and the other always listens, or one partner is a caretaker, or one partner is controlling, mutuality recognizes the relationship as an entity to which both must contribute. Mutuality depends on empathy, shared decision making, and interdependency.”
“But isn’t that at odds with autonomy?”
“You have to honor your separateness,” Regina said, chewing gum. “You can’t accept an equal role in a relationship unless you are comfortable with your autonomy. And the other person’s, too. Like my ex, he wouldn’t give me an inch of autonomy because he needed to be in control.”
“Exactly,” the group leader said. Regina grinned.
Francesca was scribbling in the margins of her worksheet. “But this doesn’t necessarily have to do with sex.”
“It doesn’t. It needn’t. But it may. The pathway to intimacy is through your feelings, which is why intimacy exists outside of sexual relationships. You have to feel like you can express your feelings about yourself and the other person within your relationship, whether it’s a friendship, a familial relationship, or a sexual one.”
“Can you give us an example?” Andrea asked.
“Can you?” the leader replied. “Think of a moment when you approached another person with your authentic self. When you were honest in the moment. When you had the courage to reveal something that could alienate that person, but you did it anyway. That’s a moment of true intimacy.”
SHE AND BRUNO HAD FALLEN into an easy routine. He would fly up on Friday after work, earlier if he could, try to schedule meetings in Milan. Friday night, they'd go to a casual dinner. Through Bruno she had learned not only about quinoa but also tempeh, chia seeds, and sprouted lentils. She wasn't convinced it was better than Domenica's cooking, but she was happy to try. Saturdays they spent together unless she had to work. Dinner, with Giulietta and Leo, and lately, Anna joining them, when the ladies’ league allowed. And Sunday lazy, mostly in bed, pleasure postponing her dread of his departure.
Sunday morning, Bruno woke her with a cappuccino in bed. When she blinked awake, he was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, sweaty at his hairline.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I went for a run. It's not that bad out"
"You went for a run. It's Sunday morning."
"You were sound asleep; I didn't think you'd miss me." He smiled. "I need a shower. Do you mind?"
"Go ahead. You didn't have to wake me up to ask."
"Grumpy, grumpy," he chided. "I was hoping you'd shower with me."
She pulled the duvet over her head. "Can you wait for another hour?"
"Francie, it's ten in the morning. We weren't even out late last night."
She peeked her head out from the covers. In the mid-morning light, the man she loved stood before her, sweaty and a little smelly, imploring her to shower with him. She took him in, the long, racehorse-like lines of his legs, the grey hooded sweatshirt with LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS spelled across the chest, his short hair slick with sweat. The only slick thing about him. She rolled out of bed to comply.
"What time is Valeria today?" he asked, under the running water.
"Noon. Brunch. Before the baby's nap."
"They have her on a strict schedule." He pushed her wet hair to one side and kissed her neck, and she leaned back into him.
"I guess. I wouldn't know."
"I can't believe you haven't met the baby. She's six months old and you've never gone to visit."
"I was traveling a lot when she was born," Francesca said.
"That was a long time ago."
"Why are you giving me such a hard time? I had good reasons."
"I'm sure you did."
He didn't ask her to tell him. She watched the water run down her legs to the tub, from the tub to the drain, and she remembered washing herself in Moscow. She could go see Valeria and apologize for being absent; she could dote on Flavia and admire how well she sat up or rolled over or whatever it was she could do on her own. But Francesca wouldn’t be able to hold her.
Bruno soaped her shoulders and slid his hands over her breasts, and she remembered looking at her body in the mirror, weighing them in her hands, trying to decide if she really was pregnant. She hadn't been able to tell. She had been so oblivious that she thought she had the flu. What a terrible mother she would have been.
"Francie."
"What?"
"Do you want to..." His voice trailed off, and she looked down between them, his cock erect, his body taut.
She felt a knot in her stomach. She didn't want to, not even with Bruno, who wasn't Selim, who hadn't done anything awful to her. She wanted to get out of the shower and tell him everything, to have her moment of honest mutuality. But she knew as soon as she did, everything would change. This could be the last time she made love to him, the last time she filled herself with that thick cock, the last time he fucked her and believed he could love her. The last time he loved her.
"I-I'm sorry—" she stammered. "I don't think we have time."
He took her hand and moved it to his cock. "We have time for this," he said, his voice husky, needy.
She yanked her hand away and stepped out of the tub. "We don't," she said, mummifying herself in a towel.
She closed the bathroom door behind her.
SHE WAS READY TO LEAVE early, though there wouldn’t be traffic. She wanted to bring flowers but all the bouquets in the shop looked inappropriate, funereal, the flowers people had sent when Ricci died. She found a bunch in shades of pink, big, blousy flowers she would never ordinarily choose, and had them wrapped.
"Are those peonies?" Bruno asked when she got back into the car.
She shrugged. "Are they? I don't know flowers."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Just because I didn't want to have sex this morning, you think there's something wrong with me?"
"No. No, that's not why. You're just—not yourself, I guess."
"Maybe I'm exactly myself." She crossed her arms over her chest. "It's the next left."
Valeria was waiting for them in the doorway, the baby on her hip.
"Look, Francie, this is the dress you gave her! She finally fits in it." The dress that Timo had chosen. It was, she noted, exactly what she would have picked: a little pink wool flannel dress with long sleeves and grey piping at the collar and cuffs. Flavia had white tights and matching pink and grey shoes. Part of her gift, Francesca supposed.
"She's so beautiful." She felt the tears welling in her eyes. "Hi, Flavia," she said, holding out her index finger for the baby to grasp.
Flavia had her father Giovanni's ice-blue eyes; combined with Valeria's dark hair, though just fuzz on her head, she was strikingly pretty.
Bruno stood patiently behind her, waiting to go inside, making funny faces at the baby. Valeria handed off Flavia to Giovanni and pulled Francesca into the kitchen. She popped open a bottle of prosecco.
"It's been a long time coming," Valeria said. She raised her glass to Francesca. "Don't fuck it up."
They both drank. "That's the hard part," Francesca said.
"You'll be fine, I was just playing with you."
"I don't know, Val. Do you tell Giovanni everything?"
Valeria rolled her eyes. "That's the lamest relationship myth ever, the telling-your-partner-everything thing. Of course not. Do you think he knows our daughter has little baby Burberry shoes? And that she outgrew them in a week? Or that my hair isn't actually this lustrous shade of black?"
"Important things, though."
"Like what?" With her trademark directness, Valeria had caught her off guard.
"My trust," Francesca hedged.
"Francie, everyone knows about your trust. You're a Garancini. He was friends with your brother."
"But the amount. And how I got cut out of it."
Val peered into the living room, where Giovanni was bouncing the baby on his lap and Bruno was playing peekaboo with her.
"I don't think he'll care," she said. "You think the money would make any difference to him?"
Francesca watched him entertain the baby, his smile broad and true. She shook her head and refilled their prosecco.
"Are you happy, Val? With the baby? Do you feel like you've got it all, now?"
"Hell if I know. I drop her off at daycare three days a week, and when I pick her up, she cries. I haven't gotten more than four hours of sleep a night since she was born. Gio and I tried to have sex once, a couple weeks ago, and I fell asleep before he could finish. Most nights, we eat takeout in front of the TV. If that's having it all, well, I've got it. Do you know what happened this morning? Gio went out to pick up the stuff that I'd forgotten because I have baby brain and forget things all the time, still, and I was alone with Flavia and I had to dry my hair, so I set her in her baby swing and she started wailing, and I just left her there, crying her brains out, because I had to dry my hair, and with the hairdryer on I could barely hear her and if anyone else had told me that story I would have thought they were a terrible mother, but I just had to dry my hair."
Francesca didn't say anything for a minute.
"You think I'm a terrible mother," Valeria said.
"No, I was thinking that your hair looks good, and she seems fine, so it all worked out." She picked up the plate of cheese. "Let's go out there. Bruno's probably teaching Flavia the history of the Holy Roman Empire or something."
Valeria groaned. "He hasn't changed?"
"I think it's adorable. He knows everything. But he does enjoy sharing it."
"Do you worry about keeping up?"
"I'm smart enough. I don't know as much as he does, but I can follow." She paused for a moment. "I'm sorry, Val. I should have come to visit a long time ago. I should have spent more time with you and Flavia. I'm sorry it's taken this long."
Valeria patted her shoulder. "You had a lot going on."
You have no idea, Francesca thought. "That's no excuse," she said aloud.
"You're here now, though." Valeria topped off their wineglasses.
In the living room, they found Giovanni holding Flavia and Bruno playing with her, letting her grab his glasses off his face and tickling the soles of her feet. They were talking about new cars; Gio wanted to test drive an Audi.
"It's fine," Bruno said. "I don't need a performance vehicle. I'm not looking to go 170kmh on the autostrada. It's just not efficient."
Francesca and Valeria giggled. "You're so serious," Francesca said.
"Engine efficiency is a serious thing," Bruno protested. "Cars these days give you so many options; it's important to choose the right one."
"Take the baby, Francie," Valeria interrupted, snatching Flavia from her father and passing her to Francesca. Francesca gripped her, worried she could drop her, that the baby could wriggle out of her grasp and fall and hurt herself. But Flavia just pursed her lips into a baby coo and batted her black-lashed eyes. Francesca relaxed her grip and pulled the baby close, inhaling her sweet, fresh fragrance.
“Look at you,” she said softly, her lips close to Flavia’s ear. “You perfect little human.”
"It's not practical to have a sports car," Valeria said. "Just because you're having some midlife crisis, it's no excuse. We need something that will fit a baby seat."
"You could get the supercharged one. But it really affects the gas mileage." Bruno ate a bocconcino.
Valeria shot Francesca a sympathetic look. "You see what I mean?" Francesca asked.
"I agree with him," Valeria said. "We have to send this little muffin to university; we can't go around buying fancy cars."
AS VAL SHUFFLED DISHES into the kitchen and Gio took the baby into her nursery, drawing the shades for her nap, Francesca dug her nails into her palms and repeated her lines in her head. She thought of all she'd want to remember about this magical time with Bruno, the idea that, for a month or two, she was beloved by someone wonderful. That someone believed she was worthy of that kind of love.
"What a cute baby," he said as they drove back. She looked out the window so he wouldn't see her biting her lip.
"Of course she is. Look at her parents."
"They seem to be handling it well."
"I like that Giovanni takes so much responsibility. Val had a hard time at first. He stepped up."
"Do you want kids?" Bruno asked. The earnestness in his voice was what she’d been dreading; there was only one correct answer, but in the world of incorrect answers, she was going to give him the worst.
She took a deep breath. She owed him the truth; she had learned that much. And she owed it to herself. Even if it meant she would lose him.
"Maybe. I think so." She paused, tracing the fabric on the side panel of the car door. "It's always easy to think you want kids until you have to go through with it."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a pretty thought until you're actually pregnant."
"You say that like you know how it feels."
"What would you think if I did?"
She counted the seconds of his silence. After five, she looked up to see his hands fidgeting on the steering wheel. After ten, she turned to face him, trying desperately to catch his eye. At a stop sign, he looked at her.
"I'd think you were in a position I know nothing about."
"You've never been worried, when your girlfriend was late and you thought maybe something hadn't worked the way it should and you didn't know what to do next?"
"Never that much. Not that I knew about. But it sounds horrible."
"It's terrifying. And not everyone wants kids, you know?" She felt a stony lump in her throat, one she couldn't swallow past.
"What are you trying to say?"
"Last year, I was tired, run-down, I'd been working and traveling a lot. I guess I lost track of time. I hadn't realized it. I was pregnant, and I didn't know it. Which sounds horribly irresponsible, and if I had heard this story about someone else, I would have thought it was irresponsible, too." She paused to breathe. "I've been on the pill for years. This sort of thing isn't supposed to happen. I thought I had the flu."
This part of the story was hard enough. The next part, the part he'd probably guessed, was worse. She was confident she'd done the right thing; she wasn't concerned with herself. She had made her choice, but she couldn’t account for his beliefs.
"You knew we were meant to be together?"
In the background, she heard the low murmur of people in the market, the squeaky wheel on the shopping cart, the rustle of packaging. She held her breath as she waited for Valeria to speak.
"Anytime you saw him, you'd be different afterward. Something always happened, like the scooter accident, and you'd be thrown for a loop and wouldn't know why. And then at the funeral, you were both so hurt and scared, and I caught you looking at each other like you were the only people there. He was standing right next to that beautiful girlfriend and she might as well have been a piece of furniture."
Francesca took a deep breath. "I thought I was the only one who felt that."
"Sometimes, Francie, you're so caught up in your idea of who you are—the fashion photographer, the paparazzi victim, the other woman—that you don't realize who you really are."
"What does that have to do with the way I looked at Bruno?"
"You didn't even know you were doing it, and you couldn't see that he was doing it. That's all."
Francesca let her words sink in. "So you think it's real?"
"The realest. If you’re in town this weekend, come over for brunch on Sunday. Just us, no Scrabble swap. I promise."
"Bruno too? He's been coming up most weekends."
"Of course, Bruno, that’s the whole point. And you can meet Flavia, finally."
"Oh, yeah," Francesca said. "The baby."
"I'm at the cashier, Francie, I'll see you Sunday."
THIS WEDNESDAY, THEY received the worksheet as soon as they walked into the classroom. On the chalkboard, next to the illustrated alphabet, the word INTIMACY stood out in stark white against scholastic green. The worksheet was double-sided, with dense paragraphs and bold bullets and wide swaths of empty space meant for Francesca’s feelings, she inferred.
“The most common side effect of sexual assault, on an emotional level, is a withdrawal from intimacy,” the group leader began. “You may have experienced this in a number of different ways. And the best pathway to resuming healthy relationships, which, as Francesca noted before, is our goal, is renewing intimacy.”
She stood and wrote on the board. VULNERABILITY, underlined for emphasis.
“Our first intimate relationships are with our parents and carers, because as babies and children, we have no choice but to be vulnerable. We rely on others to fulfill our needs.”
“And when they betray us, it’s catastrophic,” Andrea said. The boy who was abused by his older brother.
The group murmured in recognition. “Go deeper, Andrea,” the leader said.
He shook his head.
“I’ll go,” an older woman volunteered. “I married young and didn’t have an education. I didn’t have a career like you girls do now. I relied on my husband for the home where we lived, for the food that we ate, for the clothes on our backs. I couldn’t take my children and leave, I had nowhere to go.”
“What would have changed that for you?” the leader asked.
“If I’d had a job, if I’d been able to get my own place, I could have gotten away. Or if someone had helped me with those things.”
“And in order for someone to have helped you, you would have had to—“
“Tell them the truth.” The woman was clear-eyed, plain-spoken, her provincial accent slight. Francesca knew she cleaned hotel rooms. She had gotten out.
“And that’s the first step of establishing intimacy,” the leader said, rising again to write on the board. “Trust. Your ability to trust has been destroyed, like Andrea said, but you must trust again to reenter the world.”
On the worksheet, Francesca read the conditions for intimacy: safety, trust, presence, courage, autonomy, mutuality.
“What’s mutuality?” she asked.
“Mutuality is a necessary condition for true intimacy. Instead of having a relationship with a structural imbalance—where one partner always shares and the other always listens, or one partner is a caretaker, or one partner is controlling, mutuality recognizes the relationship as an entity to which both must contribute. Mutuality depends on empathy, shared decision making, and interdependency.”
“But isn’t that at odds with autonomy?”
“You have to honor your separateness,” Regina said, chewing gum. “You can’t accept an equal role in a relationship unless you are comfortable with your autonomy. And the other person’s, too. Like my ex, he wouldn’t give me an inch of autonomy because he needed to be in control.”
“Exactly,” the group leader said. Regina grinned.
Francesca was scribbling in the margins of her worksheet. “But this doesn’t necessarily have to do with sex.”
“It doesn’t. It needn’t. But it may. The pathway to intimacy is through your feelings, which is why intimacy exists outside of sexual relationships. You have to feel like you can express your feelings about yourself and the other person within your relationship, whether it’s a friendship, a familial relationship, or a sexual one.”
“Can you give us an example?” Andrea asked.
“Can you?” the leader replied. “Think of a moment when you approached another person with your authentic self. When you were honest in the moment. When you had the courage to reveal something that could alienate that person, but you did it anyway. That’s a moment of true intimacy.”
SHE AND BRUNO HAD FALLEN into an easy routine. He would fly up on Friday after work, earlier if he could, try to schedule meetings in Milan. Friday night, they'd go to a casual dinner. Through Bruno she had learned not only about quinoa but also tempeh, chia seeds, and sprouted lentils. She wasn't convinced it was better than Domenica's cooking, but she was happy to try. Saturdays they spent together unless she had to work. Dinner, with Giulietta and Leo, and lately, Anna joining them, when the ladies’ league allowed. And Sunday lazy, mostly in bed, pleasure postponing her dread of his departure.
Sunday morning, Bruno woke her with a cappuccino in bed. When she blinked awake, he was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, sweaty at his hairline.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I went for a run. It's not that bad out"
"You went for a run. It's Sunday morning."
"You were sound asleep; I didn't think you'd miss me." He smiled. "I need a shower. Do you mind?"
"Go ahead. You didn't have to wake me up to ask."
"Grumpy, grumpy," he chided. "I was hoping you'd shower with me."
She pulled the duvet over her head. "Can you wait for another hour?"
"Francie, it's ten in the morning. We weren't even out late last night."
She peeked her head out from the covers. In the mid-morning light, the man she loved stood before her, sweaty and a little smelly, imploring her to shower with him. She took him in, the long, racehorse-like lines of his legs, the grey hooded sweatshirt with LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS spelled across the chest, his short hair slick with sweat. The only slick thing about him. She rolled out of bed to comply.
"What time is Valeria today?" he asked, under the running water.
"Noon. Brunch. Before the baby's nap."
"They have her on a strict schedule." He pushed her wet hair to one side and kissed her neck, and she leaned back into him.
"I guess. I wouldn't know."
"I can't believe you haven't met the baby. She's six months old and you've never gone to visit."
"I was traveling a lot when she was born," Francesca said.
"That was a long time ago."
"Why are you giving me such a hard time? I had good reasons."
"I'm sure you did."
He didn't ask her to tell him. She watched the water run down her legs to the tub, from the tub to the drain, and she remembered washing herself in Moscow. She could go see Valeria and apologize for being absent; she could dote on Flavia and admire how well she sat up or rolled over or whatever it was she could do on her own. But Francesca wouldn’t be able to hold her.
Bruno soaped her shoulders and slid his hands over her breasts, and she remembered looking at her body in the mirror, weighing them in her hands, trying to decide if she really was pregnant. She hadn't been able to tell. She had been so oblivious that she thought she had the flu. What a terrible mother she would have been.
"Francie."
"What?"
"Do you want to..." His voice trailed off, and she looked down between them, his cock erect, his body taut.
She felt a knot in her stomach. She didn't want to, not even with Bruno, who wasn't Selim, who hadn't done anything awful to her. She wanted to get out of the shower and tell him everything, to have her moment of honest mutuality. But she knew as soon as she did, everything would change. This could be the last time she made love to him, the last time she filled herself with that thick cock, the last time he fucked her and believed he could love her. The last time he loved her.
"I-I'm sorry—" she stammered. "I don't think we have time."
He took her hand and moved it to his cock. "We have time for this," he said, his voice husky, needy.
She yanked her hand away and stepped out of the tub. "We don't," she said, mummifying herself in a towel.
She closed the bathroom door behind her.
SHE WAS READY TO LEAVE early, though there wouldn’t be traffic. She wanted to bring flowers but all the bouquets in the shop looked inappropriate, funereal, the flowers people had sent when Ricci died. She found a bunch in shades of pink, big, blousy flowers she would never ordinarily choose, and had them wrapped.
"Are those peonies?" Bruno asked when she got back into the car.
She shrugged. "Are they? I don't know flowers."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Just because I didn't want to have sex this morning, you think there's something wrong with me?"
"No. No, that's not why. You're just—not yourself, I guess."
"Maybe I'm exactly myself." She crossed her arms over her chest. "It's the next left."
Valeria was waiting for them in the doorway, the baby on her hip.
"Look, Francie, this is the dress you gave her! She finally fits in it." The dress that Timo had chosen. It was, she noted, exactly what she would have picked: a little pink wool flannel dress with long sleeves and grey piping at the collar and cuffs. Flavia had white tights and matching pink and grey shoes. Part of her gift, Francesca supposed.
"She's so beautiful." She felt the tears welling in her eyes. "Hi, Flavia," she said, holding out her index finger for the baby to grasp.
Flavia had her father Giovanni's ice-blue eyes; combined with Valeria's dark hair, though just fuzz on her head, she was strikingly pretty.
Bruno stood patiently behind her, waiting to go inside, making funny faces at the baby. Valeria handed off Flavia to Giovanni and pulled Francesca into the kitchen. She popped open a bottle of prosecco.
"It's been a long time coming," Valeria said. She raised her glass to Francesca. "Don't fuck it up."
They both drank. "That's the hard part," Francesca said.
"You'll be fine, I was just playing with you."
"I don't know, Val. Do you tell Giovanni everything?"
Valeria rolled her eyes. "That's the lamest relationship myth ever, the telling-your-partner-everything thing. Of course not. Do you think he knows our daughter has little baby Burberry shoes? And that she outgrew them in a week? Or that my hair isn't actually this lustrous shade of black?"
"Important things, though."
"Like what?" With her trademark directness, Valeria had caught her off guard.
"My trust," Francesca hedged.
"Francie, everyone knows about your trust. You're a Garancini. He was friends with your brother."
"But the amount. And how I got cut out of it."
Val peered into the living room, where Giovanni was bouncing the baby on his lap and Bruno was playing peekaboo with her.
"I don't think he'll care," she said. "You think the money would make any difference to him?"
Francesca watched him entertain the baby, his smile broad and true. She shook her head and refilled their prosecco.
"Are you happy, Val? With the baby? Do you feel like you've got it all, now?"
"Hell if I know. I drop her off at daycare three days a week, and when I pick her up, she cries. I haven't gotten more than four hours of sleep a night since she was born. Gio and I tried to have sex once, a couple weeks ago, and I fell asleep before he could finish. Most nights, we eat takeout in front of the TV. If that's having it all, well, I've got it. Do you know what happened this morning? Gio went out to pick up the stuff that I'd forgotten because I have baby brain and forget things all the time, still, and I was alone with Flavia and I had to dry my hair, so I set her in her baby swing and she started wailing, and I just left her there, crying her brains out, because I had to dry my hair, and with the hairdryer on I could barely hear her and if anyone else had told me that story I would have thought they were a terrible mother, but I just had to dry my hair."
Francesca didn't say anything for a minute.
"You think I'm a terrible mother," Valeria said.
"No, I was thinking that your hair looks good, and she seems fine, so it all worked out." She picked up the plate of cheese. "Let's go out there. Bruno's probably teaching Flavia the history of the Holy Roman Empire or something."
Valeria groaned. "He hasn't changed?"
"I think it's adorable. He knows everything. But he does enjoy sharing it."
"Do you worry about keeping up?"
"I'm smart enough. I don't know as much as he does, but I can follow." She paused for a moment. "I'm sorry, Val. I should have come to visit a long time ago. I should have spent more time with you and Flavia. I'm sorry it's taken this long."
Valeria patted her shoulder. "You had a lot going on."
You have no idea, Francesca thought. "That's no excuse," she said aloud.
"You're here now, though." Valeria topped off their wineglasses.
In the living room, they found Giovanni holding Flavia and Bruno playing with her, letting her grab his glasses off his face and tickling the soles of her feet. They were talking about new cars; Gio wanted to test drive an Audi.
"It's fine," Bruno said. "I don't need a performance vehicle. I'm not looking to go 170kmh on the autostrada. It's just not efficient."
Francesca and Valeria giggled. "You're so serious," Francesca said.
"Engine efficiency is a serious thing," Bruno protested. "Cars these days give you so many options; it's important to choose the right one."
"Take the baby, Francie," Valeria interrupted, snatching Flavia from her father and passing her to Francesca. Francesca gripped her, worried she could drop her, that the baby could wriggle out of her grasp and fall and hurt herself. But Flavia just pursed her lips into a baby coo and batted her black-lashed eyes. Francesca relaxed her grip and pulled the baby close, inhaling her sweet, fresh fragrance.
“Look at you,” she said softly, her lips close to Flavia’s ear. “You perfect little human.”
"It's not practical to have a sports car," Valeria said. "Just because you're having some midlife crisis, it's no excuse. We need something that will fit a baby seat."
"You could get the supercharged one. But it really affects the gas mileage." Bruno ate a bocconcino.
Valeria shot Francesca a sympathetic look. "You see what I mean?" Francesca asked.
"I agree with him," Valeria said. "We have to send this little muffin to university; we can't go around buying fancy cars."
AS VAL SHUFFLED DISHES into the kitchen and Gio took the baby into her nursery, drawing the shades for her nap, Francesca dug her nails into her palms and repeated her lines in her head. She thought of all she'd want to remember about this magical time with Bruno, the idea that, for a month or two, she was beloved by someone wonderful. That someone believed she was worthy of that kind of love.
"What a cute baby," he said as they drove back. She looked out the window so he wouldn't see her biting her lip.
"Of course she is. Look at her parents."
"They seem to be handling it well."
"I like that Giovanni takes so much responsibility. Val had a hard time at first. He stepped up."
"Do you want kids?" Bruno asked. The earnestness in his voice was what she’d been dreading; there was only one correct answer, but in the world of incorrect answers, she was going to give him the worst.
She took a deep breath. She owed him the truth; she had learned that much. And she owed it to herself. Even if it meant she would lose him.
"Maybe. I think so." She paused, tracing the fabric on the side panel of the car door. "It's always easy to think you want kids until you have to go through with it."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a pretty thought until you're actually pregnant."
"You say that like you know how it feels."
"What would you think if I did?"
She counted the seconds of his silence. After five, she looked up to see his hands fidgeting on the steering wheel. After ten, she turned to face him, trying desperately to catch his eye. At a stop sign, he looked at her.
"I'd think you were in a position I know nothing about."
"You've never been worried, when your girlfriend was late and you thought maybe something hadn't worked the way it should and you didn't know what to do next?"
"Never that much. Not that I knew about. But it sounds horrible."
"It's terrifying. And not everyone wants kids, you know?" She felt a stony lump in her throat, one she couldn't swallow past.
"What are you trying to say?"
"Last year, I was tired, run-down, I'd been working and traveling a lot. I guess I lost track of time. I hadn't realized it. I was pregnant, and I didn't know it. Which sounds horribly irresponsible, and if I had heard this story about someone else, I would have thought it was irresponsible, too." She paused to breathe. "I've been on the pill for years. This sort of thing isn't supposed to happen. I thought I had the flu."
This part of the story was hard enough. The next part, the part he'd probably guessed, was worse. She was confident she'd done the right thing; she wasn't concerned with herself. She had made her choice, but she couldn’t account for his beliefs.
