Adriana Trigiani - Brava, Valentine

“My heart was breaking because I turned away from the people who loved me, for someone who was looking for the love I already had. Now, this seems like a…like a…contradiction…”

I exhale softly as my father at long last finds the exact right word.

“…but it wasn’t. The best thing about me was that I had a good wife and four children. That was my calling card in the world. That’s what made me a cut above. But I had to throw it all away to find that out. I had built, with your mother, a bee-you-tee-full family. But at that time, I thought I needed more, attention, appreciation. Whatever the hell you want to call it.”

“I don’t want to lose her,” Alfred says.

“You won’t, Alfred. You won’t. But you gotta persist. And when she’s ready to forgive you, you’ll get a chance to start over. You’ll have to build your life with her again.”

“I don’t know if I can do that. If she’ll let me.”

“It’s not easy. The hardest thing I ever had to do was win your mother over a second time. And every man is different. But you’re made of far better stuff than me. You’re smarter, you’re more loyal, and you’re stubborn. You can turn it around. And I’m here to help you however I can. If you’ll let me.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“You owe me nothing, son. Not an apology. Nothing.”

“I hurt you, too.”

“Because I hurt you. That only makes us even.”

Dad holds Alfred close.

I watch them for a long time. I never thought this day would come.

“I suffer, too,” I say aloud. I didn’t intend to speak, but the words just come out of me. I place my hand over my mouth.

My father looks up at me.

“Dad, I know you love us, but there’s a reason I’m not married. There’s a reason I can’t…” I feel tears coming, but I stop them. “I can’t trust any man. It’s really hard for me. I forgave you, but I never beat my own fear. I’m still afraid of loving someone and being disappointed.”

“I’m sorry, Valentina,” my father says.

Only two men in my life ever call me Valentina, my father and Gianluca. Instead of making me sad, it makes me smile for a moment.

Gianluca did everything he could to help get through my fear, and I turned him away because I couldn’t face myself. I wouldn’t show him who I really was, so at the end, he had to go because he didn’t recognize me anymore. I didn’t even fight for him. I didn’t chase him when he left our room at the Four Seasons, I just stood there, frozen, inside and out, unable to move. I guess I thought if I went after him, I wouldn’t know what to say when he stopped, I wouldn’t have known what to do . So instead, I let him go. I let a good man, rare as an emerald, go because I couldn’t think of one reason to make him stay.

“Alfred?”

My brother and father look at me.

“At least you know what happens when you break a promise. I can’t even make one.”

I leave Alfred and Dad in the shop. I pick up my shoes and climb the stairs. I think about the pithy letter I wrote to Gianluca to woo him back. I was being funny after I broke the man’s heart. Now, that’s inappropriate. No wonder he didn’t write back. He sat there in Italy and thought, “She still doesn’t get it.” Maybe someday he’ll forgive me for my ignorance. I wish, on this Thanksgiving night, that there was some way to reach out to him. But this isn’t one of Gabriel’s soufflés that fell on the way to the table from the oven. This is Gianluca’s happiness I destroyed. What I couldn’t know then was that I destroyed my own as well.

“Feen is on her way out of Manhattan,” I announce to my sisters and mother who sit around the farm table after an endless meal that was long on courses and family drama.

“Where’s your father?”

“He and Alfred are talking in the shop.”

“Oh, good,” my mother says, ever the optimist.

I pull up a seat at the table. I place the wooden nut bowl in front of me, and commence cracking walnuts. My sisters and mother have small piles of shells where their plates once rested.

“June and Gabe are on the roof. They said they were roasting chestnuts, but I think they’re smoking pot,” Tess says. “That, or they’ve charred the chestnuts.”

“Good for them,” I say. “Either way.”

“I agree,” Tess says. Then she looks around the table. “What are we going to do?”

“Well, clearly, I’m going to go on a serious diet after the holidays,” Mom says.

“Oh, God, Ma, Pam was just taking potshots,” Jaclyn says.

“I only did Jenny Craig twice. I never saw myself as a yo-yo dieter.” Mom hacks the meat out of a walnut with a small, silver pick. She chews. “Do you?”

“No, Ma,” we say in unison.

“You know what? I like her,” Jaclyn says.

“Who? Pam?”

“Yeah. She’s got moxie. I had no idea she was that tough. I thought she was weak, and look at her, she stood up for herself.”

“If you look hard enough, you can find something to like about anybody,” Mom says diplomatically.

“She’s got good taste,” I add. “She has very dramatic sense of color when it comes to her clothing.”

“Always well dressed,” Tess says, cracking a pecan in half. “You can’t say she let herself go. She was right about that.”

“She was,” I agree. “So why didn’t we like her?”

“I don’t think we ever liked her because we’re all scared of Alfred.” Tess smooths her nutshells into a pile like she’s racking the balls for a game of pool.

“You’re right. We’ve danced around him all our lives. Trying to please him, or stay out of his way-it’s him. It’s not her,” I realize. “It was never her.”

“I disagree. I’m not afraid of my own son.”

“Mom, when we were kids, you’d have a pot of sauce on the stove for rigatoni for dinner. When Alfred came in from the library and he didn’t want marinara, you’d turn off the sauce, put the pot back in the fridge, and start pounding cutlets. You were afraid of him too.”

My mother picks up a nutcracker and decimates a pecan with one squeeze. “Do you kids analyze everything your father and I ever did or didn’t do?”

“Yes,” we answer in unison.

“I don’t think that’s healthy.” Mom frowns.

The last of the relatives have left with the last of the leftovers. June grabbed a cab after a parting whiskey shot. She has another party tonight in the East Village.

I finish the last of the dishes. I go to the table and blow out the candles, which have burned down to flat orange puddles in the holders.

I grab the last two cannoli and climb the steps to the roof. The scent of roasted chestnuts fills the air.

Gabriel has his feet up on the chaise, looking at the moon. I sit on the empty one beside him.

“Nobody ate the chestnuts,” Gabriel says.

“A lot of drama today. They forgot.” I hand him a cannoli.

“I can’t. I got no room.”

I put the cannoli aside and lean back on my chaise. The full moon is lit like a diner sign on the off-ramp of the Jersey Turnpike, so close I could reach up and write Open 24 Hours on the face of it.

“You prepared a beautiful meal,” I say.

“It didn’t matter. It went down like gruel.”

“How about that Kathleen sending an e-mail?”

“I never liked that redheaded hussy,” Gabriel says. “Not for a second.”

“I was surprised she’d send an e-mail like that.”

“Then you need a wake-up call. She wanted Pamela to find it. Holidays suck for mistresses. They’re sitting home scheming! There they are: all alone in the dark with their black thoughts and a Morton’s pot pie. And instead of going out and finding an available man, they want to wreck the holidays for the married ones. In the old days, they did drive-bys. My mother called the police one Christmas when my father’s mistress cruised by for the fiftieth time before the manicotti. Now, all these home wreckers have to do is e-mail. Saves on gas, I guess.”