An Inheritance of Shame(41)
He’d been telling the truth when he said the place was nothing fancy, just wooden tables and chairs and plain, whitewashed walls, but a single glance at the menu told Lucia that this was still a high-class restaurant, with high-class prices.
‘Not too many forks,’ Angelo murmured as they were seated to a private table in the back, and she smiled.
‘I can just about manage these.’
‘I have no doubt about that.’
A waiter appeared and Angelo ordered a bottle of wine while Lucia fidgeted with her napkin, her glass of water. Few forks there might have been, but she still felt outclassed.
‘So,’ she said when the waiter left, ‘fill me in on the past fifteen years.’
Angelo smiled faintly. ‘It could be summed up in a few sentences. I worked. I worked some more. I made money.’
‘Give me the long version, then. What did you do after you first left Sicily?’
He shrugged, his long, lean fingers toying with his own cutlery, clearly on edge albeit for a different reason. ‘I went to Rome. I didn’t have any better ideas, to be honest.’
She imagined him in that huge city—a city she’d never seen—with nothing but a rucksack of clothes and his own burning ambition. ‘Did you know anybody there?’
He shook his head. ‘I got a job running messages for a finance firm. I learned the city and English, saved up for a moped, and then after about a year I started my own business offering the same service, only faster and cheaper.’
‘That was quick.’ He would have only been nineteen.
‘I spent the next couple of years building that business, and I sold it when I was twenty-three. I wanted to move into real estate, and so with the proceeds from that sale I bought a derelict building in an up-and-coming neighbourhood and turned it into a hotel.’ He stopped then, and glanced away.
‘And then?’ Lucia asked after a moment.
Angelo shrugged. ‘More of the same. A bigger building, a shopping centre, and so on. Five years ago I moved to New York and started doing the same thing there.’
‘And now you’re doing it in Sicily.’
He hesitated for a second’s pause and then nodded. ‘Yes.’
The waiter came with the wine, and Lucia watched as Angelo swirled it in his glass and tasted it. He nodded once, and the waiter began to pour. When had he learned about such luxuries? she wondered. When had he become accustomed to three-thousand-euro suits, fast cars and fancy restaurants? It was all so removed from her own small world, her shabby apartment and her working-class job. How on earth could a relationship between them ever work?
‘Taste,’ Angelo said, and she picked up her glass. The wine was rich and velvety-smooth, warming her insides.
‘Delicious,’ she said, although in all honesty she couldn’t really tell one wine from another.
‘So tell me what you’ve been doing these past fifteen years, Lucia, besides working.’
She smiled wryly. ‘Not much.’
‘You must have other pursuits. Hobbies.’
‘I like to read.’
‘What kind of books?’
‘Anything, really. I like…’ She felt herself blushing, which was ridiculous, but there it was. ‘I like travel books. Memoirs about people going places, seeing things.’
‘And would you like to travel yourself, one day?’
‘One day, perhaps.’ She hadn’t yet had the chance.
‘Those postcards,’ Angelo said slowly, his considering gaze sweeping over her. ‘You used to collect postcards from places all over the world.’
‘Just the ones nobody wanted any more,’ she said quickly, and he chuckled.
‘I wasn’t accusing you of stealing, Lucia. I’d just forgotten, that’s all. You had a scrapbook.’
‘Yes.’
‘You wanted to go to Paris,’ he spoke slowly, as if the memories were surfacing in his mind, popping like bubbles. ‘You had a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘We looked at them together.’
‘I bored you with them, more like.’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘You don’t need to rewrite the past, Angelo,’ she said quietly. ‘I know well enough how it was.’
He leaned forward, his eyes glittering. ‘Then tell me how you think it was, Lucia.’