“Maybe you’ll win for me next year when we come back,” I said, placing my hand over his on the open door.
He smiled so brightly, and looked so young in that moment, it was like seeing the past. He looked every bit the twenty-two-year-old whose heart I broke.
“That is a promise.”
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON I TREATED MYSELF to a catnap in one of the chaise lounges by the pool and a walk around the gardens. Wanting to give Marcello some time alone with his family, I wandered this way and that, marveling at the colors. A path led through a winding garden with several “rooms.” Whoever had designed the space did so with an exacting sense of proportion, the lines graceful but clean, the palette varying but complementary. As was becoming customary, my hand twitched as I thought of the compositions I could create here, especially now in the late-afternoon sun, the golden hour.
As the pathways took me back closer to the house, I found myself at the edge of the kitchen garden, filled to bursting with summer vegetables and herbs. Walking under an archway blanketed by flowering vines, there stood Marcello with a small spade and his mother with a keen look in her eye.
“Avery, how was your walk, good?” she asked, waving me over.
“It was good; your gardens are lovely,” I answered, stepping into Marcello’s outstretched arm and letting him pull me into his side. “What are you two up to?”
“Weeds,” Marcello answered, rolling his eyes and earning a tug on his ear from Susanna.
“Bah, you think you are too old to help your mother? These weeds, they choke out the tomatoes! Come.”
We followed along behind his mother, who pointed out all the different herbs she’d planted and the ones she’d be using in tonight’s feast. Rosemary, parsley, several varieties of oregano, and the most enormous basil plants I’d ever seen. They were bushy and three feet high if they were an inch, and she attacked them with her snippers, cutting huge handfuls for her basket.
“Cello, the yellow tomatoes, see how they are surrounded? Save them, yes?”
“Yes, Mamma,” Marcello answered, and stepped to wage his war on the encroaching weeds.
“Can I help?” I offered, picking up what looked like a hoe that was lying in the eggplant beds.
Marcello nodded, gesturing toward the plants opposite him and digging in.
The three of us moved about the garden for half an hour or so, Marcello and me digging while his mother puttered about, snipping here, staking there, murmuring to her plants and her son all the while. They switched between Italian and broken English as we moved down the rows, and while I couldn’t understand everything, it was pleasant nonetheless to see and hear Marcello with his mother, whom he obviously adored.
At the end of my row, while digging around the last tomato plant, I struck something hard under the dirt. Loosening the soil slightly, I tugged and pulled a large piece of wood, scarred and blackened.
“What did you find?” Marcello called, peeking up over his row.
“Just an old piece of wood,” I replied, turning it this way and that, examining it more closely. It appeared to have writing on one side, but it was hard to tell. “It almost looks like it was, I don’t know, burned maybe?”
“Let me see,” Susanna said, setting down her basket and heading my way. Picking up the wood, she turned it over, running her fingers over the letters. “This is from the old barn; it burned many years ago.”
“Before I was born, there was a barn that stood right here; you can still see the foundations, yes?” Marcello pointed, and I realized that what I thought was just a low wall around the garden was in fact an old foundation.
“It burned the year after we were married,” she said, lost in thought. “Very awful, very scary. All the animals were saved, but the building? Distrutto.”
“That’s terrible.” I looked around, trying to imagine what it used to look like.
“It was terrible,” she agreed. “But by the next summer, things began to grow. First, just the weeds. But then Gabriella, Marcello’s grandmother, she go and plant tomatoes. And they were enorme! The fire, it burned the barn, but it made the earth . . . forte. How do you say?”
Marcello supplied the word. “Strong.”
“Ah yes, strong.” She nodded, and waved her hand over the entire garden. “Bad beginning. But now?” Her eyes twinkled. “Magnifico.”
I stared across the rows at Marcello, wondering if he was thinking the same thing I was.
“Very fertile, this family,” Susanna said. “Scusi, this family’s land.” She winked at me, then turned and headed back toward the house, calling over her shoulder, “Marcello, you finish that row, then you wash before dinner. You are disordinato!”
“Messy, Mamma, messy!”
“Yes, you are messy, too!” came the reply.
I pushed my way through the plants, surrounded by the smell of green growing things, in a place that was once covered in blackened ruin.
“Fertile, huh?” I asked, leaning up on my tiptoes to kiss his disordinato face.
“We have many tomatoes.”
“And you have many siblings.”
Now his eyes twinkled. “Big families are good, yes?”
I kissed him then, getting his messy all over me. “I think a big family could be very good.”
And with that, I went back to hoeing . . .
* * *
“MAMMA, CAN WE HELP YOU?” Marcello asked, setting the dinner plates on the marble countertop.
“No, take a walk before the sun sets,” she insisted, shooing him out of the door, me following behind.