Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 59647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 298(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 298(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
Once I was back in the kitchen, thankfully, Leo was back in the freezer or outside somewhere, leaving my father and me alone.
“Taste,” he said, pointing to the pot that was simmering on the stove.
I picked up a spoon and dipped it inside, taking a taste of it and tossing the spoon in the dirty dishes. It had a complex note of the guanciale and tomato with pecorino cheese and a dash of chili pepper and salt, but it felt like it was missing something. As usual, I knew what it was, and he wasn’t going to like it.
“I think…” I began.
“Let me guess,” he said, “it needs more heat.”
He said the last three words in an overly shrill imitation of my voice as a child, as it was often a phrase that came out of my mouth, even then.
“Yes,” I said. “It needs more heat, Papa. Lots more. Maybe some crushed pepper.”
“No,” he said. “No pepper. If they want it at the table, fine, but it will not go out of this kitchen like that. What about the cheese?”
“Cheese is fine, Papa. So is the pork. It just needs heat to marry it all.”
He shook his head as he emptied the pan of shrimp onto a plate and pushed it along the line for me to garnish and add pasta to.
“It’s always the heat with you. You like everything spicy. Your mama used to say to me, she say, ‘Sergio, that girl is a dragon. She breathes fire.’”
“Mama liked the heat too,” I pointed out.
“She got all the heat she needed marrying me, mio tesorina,” he said.
“Eeeeewwwwww.”
He laughed in that big way that his whole chest rose and fell like he was a broken washing machine on a spin cycle and shook his head again. I loved that laugh. For a long time after Mama died, it seemed to have gone away, and now I treasured it every time I got to hear it again.
“You need a fidanzato,” he said. “Someone to be your guinea pig for your spicy food.”
“Yes, Papa, I’ve heard this before,” I said, sighing. “I don’t like the men here. You know that.”
“So, what will you do?” he asked, nudging me aside so he could reluctantly grab the chili powder and add a pinch more in. “Stay with me forever? What’s wrong with the boys here? Your sisters don’t seem to have any problems with them?”
I bit my lip to refrain from speaking my opinion of my sisters’ choices of boys over the years. Suffice it to say that if one could label me as picky, whatever the opposite of that would be what Luna and Amara were. Camilla seemed disinterested so far in dating, but at seventeen, I had a feeling she just wasn’t being very vocal about it and had a whole life of her own with boys that we didn’t know about. Luna, being four years younger than me at twenty-two, had gone off to school for a bit and dated around, and Amara at nineteen seemed to be following in her footsteps.
Being young, pretty, and skinny seemed to go a long way for them, but they still chose the absolute worst boys to hook up with. It was a talent, in a way.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have men interested, though. Very specifically, I had an ex that I had thought was going to be my husband for years before I found out he was seeing other women on the side the entire time. It destroyed me, and because of it, I swore men off for a while.
A while turned into a year. Then two. Now I was twenty-six, staring headlong at the back half of my twenties and alone, living in an apartment behind the building where Sergio’s stood, and Papa’s apartment sat on top. He joked that I basically lived at home again, since I was so close, but I was glad to have a little bit of space to myself.
Papa tasted the sauce again after a few moments of stirring and grimaced.
“Well?” I asked.
“It’s better,” he said, sounding somewhat defeated. “Look, you might have been right here, and I agree you are a good cook, but your ideas on heat come from another planet.”
“Maybe I like things hotter than you, Papa, but there is a market for that. Why don’t you just let me do a few dishes and put them on the menu? We can label them for people, so they know they are spicy.”
He shook his head and went back to the pan, adding a few new pieces of shrimp before checking the lasagnas in the oven.
“You know how stupid people are,” he said. “They order things all the time and send them back for things that were on the menu when they ordered it. And the girls, they would have to remember to tell them…”