Love & Gelato(40)

While I tried to figure out what we were doing there, Adrienne pulled out her camera and started taking photos of the room and the woman, who didn’t seem to notice. Finally Adrienne turned to me and said in her deliberate English, “This is Anna. She is a psychic. Her sons own the shop out front, and during the day she reads cards. No one else will be photographing a Florentine psychic. It is a unique subject.”

I had to hand it to her. It was unique. And the setting couldn’t have been more interesting: dingy back room, the beaded curtain, smoke from Anna’s cigarette curling at the ceiling. So I pulled out my camera and started taking picture as well. Finally the show ended and Anna got up to turn off the TV, then shuffled over to a table pushed up against the wall, gesturing for us to take a seat. After we’d crowded around the table, she picked up a stack of cards and began laying them out one by one in front of her, muttering to herself in Italian. Adrienne set her camera down and was absolutely silent. After a few minutes Anna looked up at us and said with a thick accent, “One of you will find love. Both of you will find heartache.”

I was a little bit stunned. I hadn’t realized we were getting an actual reading. But my reaction was nothing compared to Adrienne’s. She looked devastated. Once she regained her composure she started firing off questions in Italian until Anna got annoyed and cut her off. Finally Adrienne gave her some money and we left. She didn’t say a word to me the entire way back.

MARCH 23

All of us went to a lecture at the Uffizi. Howard offered to walk me home, and I found myself telling him about Adrienne and the psychic. For several minutes he didn’t say anything. Then he started walking faster and asked if he could show me something. We headed to Piazza del Duomo, and when we got there he led me to the left side of the cathedral and told me to look up. The sun had just started to set and the Duomo’s shadow was covering half the piazza. I had no idea what I was looking for—all I could see were the beautifully detailed walls—but he just kept trying to get me to see something. Finally he took my finger and guided it so I was pointing at something jutting out of the cathedral’s wall. “There,” he said. And then I saw it—right in the middle of all that beautiful stonework and statues of saints is a sculpture of a bull’s head. Its mouth is open and it stares down at the ground like it’s looking at something.

He told me that there are two stories about the bull’s head. The first is that animals were critical to the building of the Duomo, and the bull was added as a way to honor them. The other story has a bit more Italian flair.

When the Duomo was being constructed a baker set up shop near the building site, and he and his wife sold bread to the stonemasons and workers. The baker’s wife and one of the master stonemasons ended up meeting and falling in love, and when the baker found out about their affair he took them to court, where they were humiliated and sentenced to life away from each other. To get revenge, the stonemason carved the bull and placed it on the Duomo in a spot where it would stare down at the baker in his stall as a constant reminder that his wife loved another man.

I love how much he knows about Florence, and it definitely took my mind off the whole Adrienne thing, but now I keep wondering about the timing of the story. Was he trying to tell me something?



Howard. The place where she’d written his name was practically glowing. Why had she not called him X? Was it a slipup, or were they on their way to making their relationship public? And was there some kind of connection between Adrienne and the timing of Howard’s story?

I stood up and walked over to the window. It was still warm out, almost hot, and the moon was flooding the cemetery like a spotlight. I scooted my violets over, then leaned out, resting my elbows on the windowsill. It was funny, but less than a week in and already the headstones weren’t bothering me all that much. They were kind of like people you pass on the street—there, but not really. Like background noise.

A set of headlights appeared over the edge of the trees and I watched as the car snaked its way down the windy road. Why had Adrienne taken my mom to a psychic reading about their love lives? Was it possible she’d been interested in Howard too? Was it maybe him she’d been talking to in the stairwell?

I sighed. So far the journal wasn’t clearing anything up. It was just making things more confusing.





Chapter 13




“THERE ARE SO MANY PLACES I want to show you in Florence, it’s hard to know where to start.”

I glanced at him. Howard and I were headed for the city again, and I was having a really hard time deciding how to feel about him. Maybe because he was blasting Aerosmith’s “Sweeeeeeeet Emooooootion” with all the windows rolled down, and his occasional drum-playing on the steering wheel made it really hard to think of him as the mysterious heartbreaker X. Also, he couldn’t sing worth anything.

I leaned against the door, letting my eyes close for just a second. I’d stayed up really late thinking about Howard and my mom, and then an incredibly exuberant group of what appeared to be Italian Boy Scouts had come galumphing through the cemetery at the crack of dawn. I’d gotten approximately four minutes of sleep.

“Would you mind if we started at the Duomo again? We could climb to the top and you’d see the whole city at once.”

“Sure.” I opened my eyes. What if I brought up the baker and the bull? Would he remember?