Dolci di Love Read online

  For my mother, Margaret Lynch,

  and helpful widows everywhere

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Daniel’s other woman and two bright-eyed beautiful children were sitting…

  Chapter 2

  Violetta awoke feeling her sister’s big toe prodding her armpit.

  Chapter 3

  In the days when Lily and her sister Rose still…

  Chapter 4

  Violetta and Luciana shuffled sideways out of their cramped living…

  Chapter 5

  Fear fluttering in her chest, Lily flew to the home…

  Chapter 6

  ‘This is Fiorella Fiorucci,’ the widow Del Grasso announced to…

  Chapter 7

  The last-minute complications of deserting her life on such short…

  Chapter 8

  Daniel sat outside a pleasantly crowded café just off the…

  Chapter 9

  The widow Benedicti was usually so particular about her cleaning…

  Chapter 10

  ‘This hotel you ask for is closed down for renovations,’…

  Chapter 11

  The widow Ercolani waited until Lily had left the tourist…

  Chapter 12

  Lily heard muffled grumblings, the scraping of chairs, and the…

  Chapter 13

  The widows were not a happy bunch when Violetta hobbled…

  Chapter 14

  The early morning light threw a friendly shaft across Lily’s…

  Chapter 15

  ‘What was she saying?’ Luciana asked, waving smoke away from…

  Chapter 16

  After her escape from the kitchen, Lily took a moment…

  Chapter 17

  Daniel woke up on the tiny couch in his cramped…

  Chapter 18

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ Luciana asked as she stood…

  Chapter 19

  Lily was hurrying past the Hotel Adesso when the little…

  Chapter 20

  All the widows dressed in head-to-toe black, as was expected…

  Chapter 21

  Pienza was one of the villages Alberto had recommended: an…

  Chapter 22

  Violetta sat back in her chair and wondered if she…

  Chapter 23

  Ingrid and Daniel sat across the table from each other…

  Chapter 24

  Lily woke up at dawn with the Fiat emblem from…

  Chapter 25

  ‘Oh, well done, Violetta! Well done!’ The widow Ciacci’s head…

  Chapter 26

  Lily woke early the next morning, the sweet smell of…

  Chapter 27

  ‘Are you going to tell me what is going on?’…

  Chapter 28

  Whatever Lily had thought she might achieve by coming to…

  Chapter 29

  With every step Violetta took across the pasticceria in the…

  Chapter 30

  Despite the recent embarrassment in Pienza and the bowlful of…

  Chapter 31

  Ingrid and Daniel meandered away from the river up the…

  Chapter 32

  Thankfully there was no one in Montevedova’s only phone booth,…

  Chapter 33

  It was a small subdued collection of widows waiting in…

  Chapter 34

  Oatmeal, it seemed, or more specifically, rolled oats, had never…

  Chapter 35

  Luciana woke up after a night in hospital to find…

  Chapter 36

  Lily was walking across the magnificent piazza grande holding Francesca’s…

  Chapter 37

  The widows were crowded around the table in their underground…

  Chapter 38

  Lily stood in the alleyway not knowing what to do…

  Chapter 39

  The League’s headquarters had never been so silent.

  Chapter 40

  Lily had forgotten the all-consuming drama of that first deep…

  Chapter 41

  ‘All praise to Santa Ana di Chisa,’ the widow Benedicti…

  Chapter 42

  As she climbed the hill from the parking lot to…

  Chapter 43

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning.

  Chapter 44

  Lily had expected a sleepless night after the roller-coaster events…

  Chapter 45

  ‘That gave us what? An extra ten minutes?’ Violetta calculated…

  Chapter 46

  ‘Lily,’ Daniel said again, the golden light in the middle…

  Chapter 47

  Once the church was empty again, the curtains on either…

  Chapter 48

  When Lily walked back into the kitchen a couple of…

  Chapter 49

  The widows were in their underground HQ a week later,…

  Chapter 50

  She should have put two and two together the moment…

  Chapter 51

  Upstairs in the trattoria, Violetta, Luciana, and Fiorella fell away…

  Chapter 52

  The first Sunday of the following July, Lily woke up…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Daniel’s other woman and two bright-eyed beautiful children were sitting under the insole of his left golf shoe when Lily first found them. They were laminated.

  Despite the shock of finding the photo and the immediate awful certainty deep in her bones that these children were indeed her husband’s, this most practical of details struck her. They were laminated, which made a point all by itself.

  The layers of Lily’s life-as-she-knew-it might be flying off into the ether, helplessly transparent, never to be seen together again, but the layers of this other life she knew nothing about were fixed sturdily right there in her hand, preserved for eternity.

  Lamination was forever, after all. That was what it was for. You didn’t laminate things that didn’t matter or that you weren’t sure about; things like your Fairway shopping list or the Italian heels clipped out of the latest Vogue.

  You only laminated absolute necessities, sureties; things that you needed to last longer than they were meant to when they were printed on paper that could be spattered with ketchup or yellowed by the sun.

  The surprise woman and two children were accordingly announced to Lily as a trio in need of top-level maintenance. So important were they to Daniel, her husband, that he wanted to protect them forever against all the foot rot, shoe sweat, and whatever other peril the Manhattan Woods Golf Club held for them. So important were they that he wanted to keep them close to him for time immemorial, or however long plastic lasted, which Lily happened to know was about five hundred years. Long after Daniel was dead and buried, after she was, after everyone in the photo was, after the golf shoe—save, perhaps, the two brown aiglets from the tips of the laces—had decomposed, this snapshot of a happy ‘family’ would remain.

  Daniel’s foot fungus from the year before, Lily thought, as she put the shoe back in its place. Was this picture-perfect threesome responsible for that? Could they have created extra moisture under his sole? Produced a perfect breeding ground for rogue spores after eighteen holes in the Hudson Valley? He’d spent a fortune at the podiatrist; she knew, because she paid the bills.

  She straightened both the golf shoes on their shelf, although she didn’t know why. Surely there was something else she should be doing. Her life had just been turned upside down. She should have thought to laminate it, to preserve life, forever, just the way she liked it.

  The annoying thing was, if she’d known she had to, she would have. Lily was by natu
re a laminator. She was famous for dotting i’s and crossing t’s, but a person had to know that an i needed dotting or a t crossing in the first place. If they were sitting there looking to all intents and purposes already dotted and crossed then there were usually a million other things to be getting on with in the meantime.

  She wondered why Daniel had chosen his golf shoe.

  Was it so he could take the little family out of his sports bag when he rode to the club with Jordie and Dave, and gaze at those beautiful childish faces in the back of Jordie’s SUV while up front they talked about real estate and the Knicks?

  That didn’t seem private enough, somehow. Unless Jordie and Dave knew about it, which she doubted because Jordie actually only talked about real estate and the Knicks and Dave didn’t talk at all. She couldn’t see the three of them analysing the perils of a bent tee, let alone infidelity.

  No, she was pretty certain that the laminated photo was not related to the golf itself.

  She looked around her husband’s closet. The rest of his shoes were neatly laid side by side across three shelves: all black and nearly identical. Why, he had the most boring taste in shoes of any man alive. How could she never have noticed that before?

  Obviously, he couldn’t hide anything in any of these lookalike shoes because he would waste too much time trying to find it. He had a pair of grey running shoes, but she supposed they would be too sweaty to house the little plastic family (the resulting foot fungus would likely kill him), and his one pair of loafers—she picked them up and had a close look—had a glued-on insole.

  The brown-and-white golf shoes with their flirty leather fringe were really the obvious choice, she reasoned. He could slip into his closet and easily snatch a few private moments to gaze at his secret photo. Also, Lily did not play golf. She’d tried it years before but considered it a waste of time. She could burn calories more efficiently a dozen other ways so had left Daniel to his golfing years before. He knew she would never have anything to do with those shoes.

  In fact, normally she wouldn’t have anything to do with his closet. She had one of her own on the other side of the wall from where his suits hung three inches apart from each other. Her closet was the same size, but there was no space between her clothes, and her shoes were all completely different. Plus, as far as she knew, her closet held no secrets, apart from the cost of one particular pair of shoes, which she lied about for no reason other than it seemed ridiculous to pay that much.

  It was Pearl, her assistant at Heigelmann’s, who was to blame for her being in there. It was Daniel’s birthday the following Saturday and Lily had been planning to get him a polo shirt, a good one, but had been surprised at the response from Pearl earlier in the week when asked to organise this.

  ‘Whatever you say,’ Pearl had said, with attitude. ‘Just not blue and not green, right?’

  They’d worked together for seven years; Lily knew to pay attention to attitude.

  ‘Oh, really? And why is that?’ she asked, curious because both those colours suited Daniel. Green brought out his eyes, and blue the shots of silver that were further claiming his thick blond hair. He was a handsome man and only improving with age, but seemed not to notice this himself. She loved that about him. That and his kindness. His smile. His no-fuss way of handling things. No fuss? She had that right.

  ‘Because you gave him a blue shirt last birthday and a green one at Christmas,’ Pearl informed her, with one of her special disapproving head waggles. She was really a very good assistant but at times like this Lily wanted to pull hard on one of her shiny black ringlets. Lily could remember how many product units were transported in any given week from Virginia to Vermont and how much it cost, down to the penny, so why couldn’t she remember what gifts she’d given her husband?

  ‘You could always get him a tie,’ Pearl suggested.

  ‘Oh well, Daniel doesn’t really wear ties,’ Lily said, although of course he did and what’s more Pearl had probably seen him in one at least a dozen times. ‘Not that much,’ she added limply. ‘Anymore, that is.’ Pearl pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows so high it was a miracle they didn’t shoot right off of her head.

  ‘Actually, you know what?’ Lily pressed a finger to her lips, feigning a sudden inspiration. ‘I’ve just had another idea. Thanks, Pearl, but I think I’ll take care of this myself.’

  She had racked her brains for the rest of the day trying to come up with an alternative gift, finally remembering that Daniel had complained in recent weeks—in as much as he ever really complained—that the sprigs on his golf shoes were loose, or old, or tired, or something.

  She hadn’t paid much attention when he mentioned it but in light of the shirt situation, she decided she would break the tradition she’d unwittingly embraced and would replace his golf shoes instead. She just couldn’t remember what size he took.

  Should she have known? she wondered, again looking around his closet. Would a wife who remembered previous gifts and knew her husband’s shoe size be less likely to find a laminated photo of a beautiful woman and two children hidden under his insole?

  It was searching for his size that had brought her into his closet. She’d picked up the shoe, turned it upside down and dislodged his hidden spotless-forever family. If she’d known his shoe size, or even reached for the other shoe, the spotless-forever family would have remained a secret.

  Looking down at the picture she was still clutching, Lily felt the need to sit. Were she prone to explosive displays of emotion she would be indulging in one right now, she knew that, but she was not. Her emotions—a neat, controlled collection as a rule—seemed bewildered, with her body not far behind. Her legs were trembling, she realised. That was why she needed to sit. This was a normal reflex. This was good.

  She sat, light as a feather, on the edge of her bed. The little girl in the photo was about five, she thought, and the boy was not much more than a baby.

  A baby.

  A crumpled gargle-like whimper, an almost cute puppyish noise, escaped without her permission.

  She stared at the woman in the picture, running her thumb along the sharp edge of the hard plastic. She wasn’t exactly pretty, not in the all-American way that Lily was, but she had that wild, defiant sort of beauty that ‘other’ women often seemed to possess; not dangerous exactly, but close. Her lips were thin, her cheekbones sharp, her dark unruly hair was being blown across her face in the wind, and she was smiling, sort of, at the photographer, who was no doubt Daniel—Lily’s husband—to whom Lily had been married for sixteen years and who formed one half of the perfect couple everyone said they were.

  Another choked gargle escaped her as she ran her fingers over the image of the little girl. She had her mother’s hair, long and dark, and that same defiant wildness, but she had Daniel’s eyes, his dimpled chin. She stood slightly in front of her mother, not touching her, and looked boldly at the camera as if challenging Daniel to even take the photo.

  The baby was the happiest of them all, his face turned toward his mamma as he laughed at what the wind was doing to her hair. He was wearing a T-shirt and something stripy on his bottom half, which didn’t really match. Lily had drawers full of clothes that this baby would look better in. One sausage arm was raised in the air as his fat round hand with its tiny plump fingers snatched at a glossy black tendril the wind was whisking just out of his reach. He looked exactly like Daniel did in all his baby photos. Exactly.

  She should be crying, she knew that. Howling even. But crying seemed too insignificant a response, howling an insult. Tears and moans were for everyday heartbreak. This was something else. Again, she felt it, in the quiver in her arm, the light bead of sweat on her forehead: bewilderment.

  Lily had built a career on not being bewildered. Indeed, she was famous for her certainty. It had got her as far as being VP of a Fortune 500 company—one of the country’s biggest—this unwavering natural instinct. It had brought her wealth and success. It had become her most prized possession and s
he trusted it.

  Yet right now as she confronted what was undoubtedly the biggest crisis of her personal life, her ability to know what to do lay huddled in a distant cave, licking its wounds, shunning the light, leaving her all on her own.

  The thing was that Lily considered her marriage to Daniel, indeed Daniel himself now she came to think about it, as the pin in the grenade of her life: not the most exciting feature, perhaps, but pull it out and everything would explode. The bits would fly as far as the sun and she would never reclaim them.

  So what if she focussed more on her job these days than on her husband—what woman in her situation wouldn’t? She could hardly take a few years off to stare at an empty crib. Married women without children had no choice but to concentrate on their careers and it happened almost naturally that they climbed the ladder more quickly. It was no problem for Lily to stay later in the office, after all, because she had no blond-haired boy to pick up from nursery school, no green-eyed girl’s ballet performance to dash off to.

  And at forty-four there was never going to be a blond-haired boy or a green-eyed girl for Lily. She knew that, she had been through all that; she had accepted it years ago.

  Absentmindedly, she turned the picture over and to her further shock there was half a photo of Daniel and the woman and baby on the other side. Well, there was a whole photo but only half of Daniel was in it. The little girl must have taken the picture and it was on a crazy angle, with just the bottom parts of the two adults and one fat, striped leg of the baby.