Love & Gelato(36)

“No thanks,” Ren said.

I nudged him. “I don’t know, Ren. That sounds like a pretty good deal. Ten bucks for true love?”

He smiled, stopping in the center of the bridge. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

“See wha—oh.”

I ran over to the railing. Stretched across the river, about a quarter mile ahead of us, was a bridge that looked like it had been built by fairies. Three stone arches rose gracefully out of the water, and the whole length of it was lined with a floating row of colorful buildings, their edges hanging over the water. Three mini-arches were cut out of the center, and the whole thing was lit golden in the darkness, its reflection sparkling back up at itself.

Gum officially swallowed.

Ren was grinning at me.

“Wow. I don’t even know what to say.”

“I know, right? Come on.” He looked to his right, then his left, then launched himself over the side like a pole vaulter.

“Ren!”

I leaned over, fully expecting to see him dog-paddling toward Ponte Vecchio, but instead came face-to-face with him. He was crouching on a table-size ledge that jutted out about five feet below the side of the bridge and he looked ridiculously pleased with himself.

“I was waiting for a splash.”

“I know. Now come on. Just make sure no one sees you.”

I looked over my shoulder, but everyone was too involved in the whole fake-Prada-bag thing to pay me any attention. I climbed over, dropped down next to him. “Is this allowed?”

“Definitely not. But it’s the best view.”

“It’s amazing.” Being just a few feet lower somehow cut out the noise of the people above us, and I swear Ponte Vecchio was glowing even brighter and more regal. It gave me a solemn, awestruck kind of feeling. Like going to church. Only I wanted to stay here for the whole rest of my life.

“So what do you think?” Ren asked.

“It makes me think of this time my mom and I drove to a poppy reserve in California. The flowers all bloom at once and we timed our visit just right. It was pretty magical.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah.”

He shimmied back next to me and we both rested our heads against the wall, just looking. I have finally found the place that feels right to me. It was like she was waving at me from just across the water. If I squinted I could almost see her. My eyes fogged up a little, turning Ponte Vecchio’s lights into big gold halos, and I had to spend like thirty seconds pretending to have some mysterious Arno dust in my eye.

For once, Ren was being totally quiet and once the crying jag had passed I looked over at him. “So why is it called ‘Old Bridge’? Isn’t everything old here?”

“It’s the only bridge that survived World War II, and it’s really, really old, even by Italian standards. Like medieval old. Those house-looking things used to be butcher shops. They’d just open the windows and dump all the blood and guts into the river.”

“No way.” I glanced at the windows again. Most of them had green shutters and they were all closed for the night. “They’re way too pretty for that. What are they now?”

“High-end jewelry shops. And you see those windows spaced out across the very top of the bridge?”

I nodded. “Yeah?”

“Those go to a hallway. It’s called the Vasari Corridor and it was used by the Medici as a way to get around Florence without having to actually walk through the city.”

“Elena’s people.”

“Esattamente. That way they didn’t have to mix with us commoners. Cosimo Medici was the one who kicked out all the butchers. He wanted the bridge to be more prestigious.” He looked at me. “So what was that book you were reading? The one you had under your bed.”

You trust him. The words elbowed their way into my head before I even had a chance to wonder. So what if I’d known Ren for only two days? I did trust him.

I took the journal out of my purse. “This is my mom’s journal. She was living in Florence when she got pregnant with me and it’s all about her time in Italy. She sent it to the cemetery before she died.”

He glanced at the book, then back up at me. “No way. That’s pretty heavy.”

Heavy. That was exactly it. I opened to the front cover, looking again at those ominous words. “I started reading it the day after I got here. I’m trying to figure out what happened between Howard and my mom.”

“What do you mean?”

I hesitated. Was it possible to condense the whole messy story into a couple of sentences? “My mom met Howard when she was here going to school, and then when she got pregnant, she left Italy and never told him about me.”

“Seriously?”

“Once she got sick she started talking about him a lot, and then she made me promise I’d come live here with him for a while. She just never actually told me what went wrong between them, and I think she left me the journal so I could figure it out.”

I turned and met Ren’s stare. “So last night when you said you don’t know Howard very well, it was like a huge understatement.”

“Yeah. I’ve officially known him for . . .” I counted on my fingers. “Four days.”

“No way.” He shook his head incredulously, sending his hair flying. “So let me get this straight. You’re an American, living in Florence—no, living in a cemetery—with a father you just found out about? You’re even stranger than I am.”