Adriana Trigiani - Very Valentine

“Who is Clickety Click?” Pamela asks. She looks at me and then up at her husband.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” he says.

“Valentine?” Pamela looks at me.

“It’s a-”

“It’s a term of endearment really,” Tess says, jumping in. “A nickname.”

“It’s not a nickname if I’ve never heard it.” For the first time in seventeen years, Pamela’s voice hits its upper register. “Wouldn’t I know my own nickname?”

“I’m begging you, girls, get off this subject. It’s getting us all nowhere.” Mom pulls the collar on her faux mink up around her ears. “Come on. It’s getting too cold up here. Let’s go in and make some Irish coffee. Anyone for Irish coffee?”

“Nobody is going anywhere.” Pamela sets her steely gaze on Mom. “What the hell does Clickety Click mean?”

“Valentine?” Mom looks at me.

“It’s a nickname that-” I begin.

“It’s the sound you make when you walk in your high heels,” Jaclyn blurts out. “You’re small and you take short steps and when the heels hit the ground, they go…clickety click, clickety click.”

Pamela’s eyes fill with tears. “You’ve been making fun of me all this time?”

“We didn’t mean it.” Tess looks desperately at Jaclyn and me.

“I can’t help my…my…size. I never make fun of you, and there’s plenty to laugh at in this crazy family!” Pamela turns on her heel and stomps off. Clickety click. Clickety click. Clickety click. When she realizes the sound she’s making, she rises up onto her toes and moves silently en pointe until she reaches the door. She grabs the door frame for balance. “Alfred!” she barks at him. Then Pamela goes clickety click down the stairs. We hear her calling for the boys.

“You know, I don’t care if you’re mean to me. But she never did anything to you. She’s been a good sister-in-law.” Alfred follows her down the stairs.

“I’m going to wrap up some leftovers for them,” Mom says, following Alfred out.

“You had to blurt it out,” Tess says, throwing up her hands.

I point to Jaclyn. “You had to tell her?”

“I felt trapped.”

My face is hot from the wine and the fight. “Couldn’t you have made something up? Something glamorous, like the clickety click of an expensive watch or something?”

“That would be Tickety Tock,” Charlie says from his guard position in the outpost by the fountain.

“You’ll have to apologize to her,” Gram says quietly.

“You know I’m not supposed to get upset in my condition,” Dad says, adjusting the collar on his car coat. “These implanted seeds are radioactive. If my blood pressure goes berserk, they’re likely to blow like Mount Tripoli.”

“Sorry, Dad,” I whisper.

Dad looks at his three contrite daughters. “You know, we got one family here. One small island of people. We’re not Iran and Iraq and Tibet, for crying out loud, we’re one country. And all of youse, except you, Tom, with the Irish blood, all of youse have some Italian, or in the case of Charlie’s people, the Fazzanis, a hundred percent Italian including that quarter Sicilian, so we got no excuses.” Dad remembers his manners and looks at Roman. “Roman, I’m assuming you’re a hundred percent.”

Roman, caught off guard, nods quickly in agreement.

Dad continues, “We should be united, for one another, and we should be unbeatable. But instead what do we got? We got rancor. We got rancor coming out our ears and out our asses. And for what? Let it go. Let it all go . None of this matters. Take it from your father. I’ve seen the Grim Reaper eyeball to eyeball and he is one tough bastard. You got one life, kids. One.” Dad holds up his pointer finger and presses it skyward for emphasis. “And trust your old man, you gotta enjoy. That’s all I know. Now if Pamela has short legs and has to wear high heels to read her watch, well, we need to accept that as normal. And if Alfred loves her, then we love her. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Dad,” Jaclyn, Tess, and I promise. Roman, Charlie, and Tom nod in agreement.

Gram’s eyes are closed as she leans back on the chaise.

“So that’s gonna be how it’s gonna be. I’m going in.” Dad goes down the stairs.

Charlie and Tom have stepped away from the fray as far as they can go without falling off the roof. They stand with their hands in their pockets, half-expecting more bullets to fly on Christmas. When they don’t, Tom looks around and says, “Is there any more beer?”

Roman helps me into the passenger seat of his car, then climbs in the other side. I shiver as he starts the engine. His seat is pushed back as far as it can go; I push my seat back to his. “What do you want to do?” he says.

“Take me to the Brooklyn Bridge so I can jump.”

“Funny. I have a better idea.”

Roman drives over to Sixth Avenue and heads uptown. The streets of Manhattan are bright and empty.

“I’m sorry you had to hear all that.” I reach over and hold his hand.

“One time at a Falconi Christmas, we served dinner in the garage; my brothers got into a fight and were so angry they started pelting each other with spare tires. Don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t now.” We laugh. “What did you think of Alfred?”

“I don’t know yet,” Roman says diplomatically.

“Alfred has very high standards. No one is allowed to fail. After my father’s affair, Alfred got very righteous and even thought about going into the seminary to become a priest. But then Alfred was called by a different god. He became a banker. Of course, that’s just another way to get back at Dad. My father never made a lot of money, and that’s another way for Alfred to be superior. Alfred is morally and financially superior.”

“How about his wife?”

“She’s under his thumb. She’s so nervous, she eats baby food because she has chronic ulcers.”

“Why is he so hard on you?” Roman asks gently.

“He thinks I’m flip. I changed careers, I live with my grandmother, and I didn’t close the deal with the perfect man.”

“Who was he?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not interested in perfect.”

“What do you want?”

“You.” Roman lifts my hand and kisses it. I’m besotted, and I don’t think it’s a passing holiday mood. As terrible as the fight on the roof was, I was soothed by Roman’s presence. He made it all better without saying a word or doing a thing. I felt protected.

Roman slows down in front of Saks Fifth Avenue and then makes the turn onto Fifty-first Street. He parks the car at the side entrance. “Come on,” he says. He comes around to my side and helps me out of the car. “It’s Christmas. We gotta do the windows.”

He takes my hand and we walk behind the red velvet ropes. There’s a Latino family down the way taking pictures in front of a window with a circus act of snowmen. The father holds up his three-year-old son, near the glass.

Fifth Avenue is hushed as we look at the windows, dioramas of holiday happiness through the ages, a fussy Victorian scene where the family opens a present and the puppy pulls the ribbon from a package over and over again, another of the Roaring Twenties, with girls in bobbed haircuts and short sequin sheaths doing the Charleston in synchronized repetition.

A man with a saxophone appears on the corner of Fiftieth Street, breaking the silence with a jazz riff. Roman holds me close and moves me down the line to the tumbling-snowman window. The man with the horn stops playing, his brass sax dangling around his neck like an oversize gold charm. As we move to the next window, I look at the old man and smile. He wears a beat-up English tweed cap and an old coat. He sings,