The Witless Protection Program, page 2
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mia reached for a third sample. “But if you don’t mind leaving some samples for potentially paying customers . . .”
Mia retracted her hand. “Right. Got it.”
She continued her wander back to the Belle View display, casting a disconsolate glance at the bridal gowns on parade as part of a runway show. An ear-splitting screech of joy distracted her. She craned her neck to see who released it. A tall blonde she pegged to be around twenty-five jumped up and down as she pointed to a particularly elaborate sequined, beaded, and rhinestoned bridal gown. She let out another screech. “Ahh! That’s it! That’s the gown I told you about, baby! The one I wanna get married in! It’s so bee-you-tee-ful! I’m dying!”
The baby in question, a man about the same height as the bride-to-be, turned to see the dress. He locked eyes with Mia. A wave of nausea coursed through her. For a moment, she thought she’d pass out.
The Miami police presumed her husband was lost at sea. Mia took great comfort from knowing her cheating spouse literally slept with the fishes. But in an instant, what she’d long feared had come true.
Adam Grosso didn’t sleep with the fishes. He wasn’t dead. He was there. At the bridal expo.
And Mia was looking right at him.
CHAPTER 2
Mia stood frozen in place, locked in a staring contest with the man who’d come close to destroying her life. She’d spent months after his disappearance in Miami PD’s crosshairs as their primary person of interest. Given her father’s position as a lieutenant who ran illegal gambling games for the Boldano Family and the occasional incarcerations of her dad and brother Posi Carina—who was currently finishing a stint at the Triborough Correctional Facility for indulging in his habit of stealing luxury sports cars—Mia found herself enduring the kind of notoriety usually trained on celebrities. Public interest in her eventually faded but left her battle-scarred, to say nothing of the emotional toll her relationship with Adam had taken on her. But finally, almost two years later, Mia’s life was on track. A great job. A nice home in Astoria she shared with her grandmother Elisabetta. And a boyfriend who would hopefully propose to her before senile dementia set in for one or both of them.
But now, this. This!
A cluster of attendees sauntered by, blocking her view of Adam. They passed, revealing an empty spot where he’d been standing. Mia shook off her temporary paralysis and ran through the crowd searching for him. Given her petite height of five foot four, she ran on her toes for the extra height that might help her catch a glimpse of his familiar head. It didn’t help.
She raced back to the table, where she found Belle View executive chef Guadalupe and sous-chef-slash-dessert chef Evans replenishing the samples table. “Oh, thank God, tall people!”
“Huh?” Evans, who leaned toward taciturn, only needed the one word to express his confusion.
“I saw Adam Grosso.”
Cammie gasped. “What?! No. Adam?! The Adam?”
“Yes. Adam Grosso. My husband. He’s here. With a fiancée.”
“Fiancée?” Evans sounded even more confused.
“No time to drill down on this. I need you to help me find him. You remember what he looks like? Average height and weight, bald spot shaped kind of like a starfish?”
Guadalupe nodded. “Your dad turned a picture of him from the newspaper into a dartboard. My image of him has a lot of holes in it, but it’s still pretty good.”
“Good. Go. Hurry!”
Guadalupe, who’d spent years as an army cook in Iraq, gave Mia a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
She, Evans, and Mia took off in separate directions, leaving Cammie to man the exhibit. Mia scoured her section. Her heart raced when she was sure she spotted him from the back, but when the man turned around, he proved to be a bride’s father and a good twenty years older than Adam.
After wasting an hour searching the expo for the phoenix that was Adam Grosso, Mia called it quits. The crew reconvened at the Belle View exhibit. “Any luck?” Cammie asked.
“Nope,” Evans said.
“’Fraid not.” A dark look crossed Guadalupe’s face. “Better for him I didn’t find the S.O.B. If he wasn’t dead then, he would be now.”
“Same here if I found him,” Evans said.
Cammie raised her hand. “Dibs on taking him out first.”
“You guys, stop.” A darker look than Guadalupe’s colored Mia’s face. “Taking him out is my job.” She swiped one of the napkins from the table-setting display and used it to mop perspiration from her brow. A dollop of strawberry frosting sat glued to where it landed on her dress when she collided with Marjan, who had stepped out from behind her exhibit to hand out cake samples. “But he’s gone. I swear, that moron does a better job of disappearing than a magician.”
“Or . . .” Cammie paused. She exchanged a look with Guadalupe and Evans.
Mia crossed her arms in front of her chest. She pursed her lips. “I saw that look, you guys. Or what?”
“Maybe you thought you saw Adam,” Cammie said.
Mia bristled. “Uh, hello. I think I know the man I shared a bed with for five long, miserable years.”
“Still doesn’t mean it was him,” Guadalupe, always matter-of-fact bordering on blunt, declared.
“I’m telling you, it was Adam,” Mia insisted.
“If you say so,” Evans said in a tone indicating he, too, didn’t believe it.
“You know what, just forget it.”
Mia stomped behind the table. She bent down to retrieve a sparkling water from a cooler stashed under it and wet the napkin. Fueled by annoyance with her doubting friends, she scrubbed at the strawberry stain, which sat front and center on the lacy white cocktail dress she wore to emulate a wedding gown.
“I’ve got a Tide stick.” Cammie removed one from her purse and set to work on the stain. “All I’m saying—”
“All we’re saying,” Guadalupe corrected.
“Is that you and I were just talking about Adam before you took a break. You’re all tense about this whole proposal thing with Shane, which has to make you think about your first marriage, and I know there’s part of you that’s worried about making sure you get it right the second time. With all that going on, there is a chance you might have seen someone who looked a lot like Adam and thought it was him.”
“Argh, we’re never gonna get this stain out. I might as well dye the dress pink.” Frustrated, Mia tossed the napkin into the trash. She collapsed onto one of the folding chairs the crew had brought from Belle View. “I hate when you might be right.” She sighed. “Why would he be in New York anyway? I always thought he disappeared because he got involved in some sketchy business. Besides dying, the only thing I thought might have happened to him was ratting out whoever he was grifting with and going into the witness protection program. And they wouldn’t send him here to New York.”
“Wrong,” Guadalupe declared. “Hide in plain sight. Big city’s the best place for that. Standard operating procedure for the WPP.”
Evans stopped snacking on the cake sample he’d scored from Marjan. He eyed Guadalupe. “Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling us?”
The chef barked a laugh. “Ha. If I outed a criminal, you’d best believe I’d be in his face and not hiding out in some program. Or her. Don’t wanna be sexist here.”
A few rings of a bell sounded over the intercom system, followed by the announcement that the expo was a half hour from closing. “Walk the crowd with sample trays and give out a business card with each sample,” Mia instructed Evans and Guadalupe. “Cammie and I will start packing up.”
The chefs hefted trays and disappeared into the crowd. Cammie checked the swag bag. “We only have a few headbands left.” She took one and placed it atop her frosted hair, whose poufiness duked it out with the pouf of her dress sleeves. She then took another headband and positioned it on Mia’s dark brown/almost black long, thick head of hair. “You’re gonna get to wear a real one of these. Promise.”
She hugged Mia, who eked out a smile. But her thoughts were on the heart-stopping sighting of the man who might be Adam. She said a prayer her friends were right and she was caught in a case of mistaken identity. But the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that she’d locked eyes with her living, breathing, still-married-to husband.
CHAPTER 3
Mia parked in the garage behind the two-family house in Astoria she shared with her grandmother. She grabbed a container of leftover cake samples from the passenger seat of her pre-owned Honda Civic, then strode through the postage-stamp backyard. She climbed the few steps that led to the cement deck behind her grandmother Elisabetta’s first-floor home and entered into the kitchen through the back door.
Elisabetta’s terrier mutt, Hero, lifted his head from his food bowl to bark a peremptory greeting, then resumed eating his dog food flavored with bits of his human’s homemade lasagna. Elisabetta stood by the stove, warily eyeing whatever was in a large pot Lin Yeung, her elegant future daughter-in-law and Mia’s future stepmother, was stirring. Unlike Shane, Mia’s father, Ravello, had proposed to his girlfriend, a federal prosecutor turned Lower East Side florist. She and Elisabetta were taking turns teaching each other their respective cuisines—Vietnamese on Lin’s part, Italian—of course—on Elisabetta’s. The look of distaste on Elisabetta’s face confirmed Mia’s instinct that poor Lin had her work cut out for her.
The women exchanged greetings. Mia planted a kiss on each cheek of her grandmother and gave Lin a quick hug. She glanced into the pot. “Pho? Yum. You’ll love this, Nonna. It’s loaded with noodles.”
“Made with rice,” Elisabetta said, sounding unconvinced. “Who makes pasta from rice?”
“Many Asian cultures, Nonna,” Mia said with a warning note in her voice. She loved Lin and didn’t want to offend her.
“Whatevs.” Elisabetta’s TV diet mainly consisted of youthful, dystopian dramas, so she’d picked up some of the lingo.
Lin put a spoon to her broth and gave it a taste. She added a dash of fish sauce and stirred it in. “How was the expo?”
“Good. I think we connected with some potential new clients. I brought home cake samples for dessert.” Mia placed the container on Elisabetta’s vintage dinette table. She debated sharing the news about the possible Adam sighting and decided to go for it. “I thought I saw Adam.”
Nonna gave the fish sauce bottle a suspicious sniff. “Huh. Interessante.”
“Yes,” Mia said, a little insulted by the casual reaction. “Very interesting. Considering he’s supposed to be dead.”
“We have some interesting news here, too,” Lin said, unfazed by Mia’s acerbic tone. She called into the living room. “Ravello, love, bring in our surprise guest.”
Mia’s large oak tree of a father appeared in the doorway. Remarkably, Ravello’s coal-black hair had maintained its natural color until his recent bout with heart trouble. Whether from stress or some mysterious physical quirk, it was now snow-white, which stood in stark but handsome contrast to his olive skin. “Ciao, bambina.” He blew a kiss to his daughter. “What a joy it is to have both my children home at last.”
“Both?” Mia responded, mystified.
Ravello stepped aside to reveal Posi Carina, Mia’s scofflaw of a brother.
Mia let out a surprised scream, then threw herself into Posi’s arms. “OMG! This is incredible.” She embraced him in a tight hug. “Are you out? You got early release?”
“Not quite.” Posi broke from the hug. “I got transferred to a halfway house for the last six months of my sentence. I have to get permission to leave the house and be back by curfew, seven o’clock. And I have to wear this when I’m out.” He lifted a pant leg to show an ankle encased in a monitor.
“Still, we can see you without a guard yelling, ‘Visiting hour’s over!’” Mia hugged him again.
“We thought you’d like this surprise.” Ravello shared a smile with the others.
“Time to celebrate.” Lin turned off the heat under her pot of pho. “Mangiamo.”
“Let’s eat,” Elisabetta translated with approval.
“It’s Chúng ta hãy n in Vietnamese.”
Elisabetta shook her head. “I got no idea how to say it like you did.”
The five took seats around the folding table Ravello had set up in Elisabetta’s living room, their faces reflected in the giant mirror attached to the wall behind a couch covered with an afghan crocheted by Elisabetta in bilious colors she got for cheap at the local yarn shop. Lin ladled soup into pasta bowls. Posi picked up a goblet of red wine for a toast. “To me!” he declared with the dimpled smile that had made way more than one woman weak-kneed and led him to try and go viral as a #hotconvict.
“To you!” his family chorused.
They drank to Posi and began chattering excitedly about his future post-halfway house. The unexpected and wonderful development pushed all thoughts of Adam Grosso from Mia’s mind.
“Seconds?” Lin asked Mia, noticing she’d cleaned her pho bowl.
“Absolutely. It’s fantastic.”
Mia held out her empty bowl for a refill. As Lin ladled, her engagement ring reflected light from the ceiling fixture above. “You got your ring sized.”
“Yes.” Lin placed the pho pot on a trivet in the center of the table.
“Dad did good by you.” Mia tried and failed to keep a hint of wistfulness from her tone.
“Still nothing from Shane?” Lin shook her head. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, she knew about Mia’s frustration. “It’s obvious to anyone who spends a minute in your presence that the two of you are deeply in love. Why does the fact he’s taking his time to propose upset you so much?”
No one had asked this of her. The event planner found herself briefly stymied. Then she said, “Because it’s the logical next step in our relationship.” She winced at the answer, which managed to be simultaneously cold and lame.
“So?” Lin took a delicate sip of her soup. “You have a strong relationship already, don’t you? Think of cake.”
“I often do,” Mia, who had a sweet tooth, joked. She wondered where Lin was going with this.
“A solid relationship is the cake. Engagement and marriage is the icing. You’re much better off having cake without icing than icing without cake.”
Mia pondered the statement. “Is this some kind of Vietnamese parable?”
“Good lord no,” Lin said, chortling. “I thought it up when I was eating a slice of cake one day.”
“It makes sense,” Mia said. “Kind of. I’m generally team icing. But thank you.”
Lin rejoined the conversation. Mia took a peek at her grandmother’s bowl of pho and noticed it was full. She took a closer look at Elisabetta and saw her grandmother sneak a bite out of a container in her lap. “You’re sneaking gnocchi?” she whispered. “You’re terrible.”
“Sono fame,” Elisabetta whispered back. She gestured to the soup bowl with her head. “And this ain’t doin’ it for me.” She stood up. “I’m done. You need me, I’ll be in my office.”
Elisabetta marched off. “She has an office now?” Posi asked, amused.
“Ever since we got her a laptop for her birthday,” Mia said. “It’s the second bedroom, formerly known as the junk room. We brought over my old school desk from Dad’s basement and bought her an office chair. She’s in there for hours now.”
Posi let out an amused chortle. “Any idea what she’s doing when she’s on the computer? I’m guessing she’s not a gamer. Although with Nonna, you never know.”
“I can tell you what she’s not doing.” Mia held up a decorative pillow crocheted in a riot of clashing colors. “Making more of these.”
* * *
Much as she loved icing, Mia found it hard to argue with Lin’s relationship analogy when she gave it more thought the next night as she dressed for a Mets game. Cake was the sturdy underpinning of any frosted dessert. In all her years as an event attendee and planner, she’d never seen icing served without cake. But she had seen—and served—cake without icing. From that perspective, a strong relationship was far more important than the symbolic gesture of marriage. And now I want cake, Mia thought.
She dispelled the craving and stepped over her Abyssinian ginger cat Doorstop, who was splayed out across the bedroom carpet, to pull a jersey from her closet. A lifelong Mets fan, she built her fall schedule around the team’s games against their mortal enemies, the Atlanta Braves. After a brief moment of indecision, she went with heavy hitting first baseman Pete Alonso’s jersey rather than the one paying homage to shortstop Francisco Lindor.
Pet parakeet Pizzazz, on a break from her cage, amused herself dive-bombing Doorstop, who responded with annoyed paw swats. “Behave, you two,” Mia scolded. “Mommy’s got a man waiting for her downstairs. A good man. A man who gave up his allegiance to the Cardinals for me. A total piece of cake.”
She added a baseball cap featuring Mr. Met to top off her outfit. After giving Doorstop a kiss good night on his furry head and guiding Pizzazz back to her homey cage, she hurried downstairs and outside to where Shane waited for her in the purple Tesla she’d received as a gift and passed on to him because driving the all-electric car with its weird computer instead of a dashboard freaked her out.
“Hello you.” Mia hopped in the car, and the couple locked lips. After a steamy moment, they reluctantly parted. Mia took in his jersey. “You went with Pete, too. You da best.”
Shane lifted the corner of his mouth in a half grin. “Like they say, great minds.”
Mia returned the grin. “Indeed.”
Traffic was light midafternoon and they made it to Citi Field in record time. But the time they made up on the road they lost waiting in line at the Shake Shack behind center field. Armed with flat-top hot dogs, crinkle cut fries, and two chocolate shakes, they climbed the steps to their seats in the upper deck behind home plate, pausing to sing the National Anthem with the crowd.
