One Step to You (The Rome Novels #1)(34)

“She has it all. She has a beautiful place to live, someone who is making her lunch right now. She has nothing at all to worry about. By now, she’s probably not even thinking about what she did. Right, why should she care?”

Signora Giacci reached into a cabinet full of glasses, each different from the others. She chose a glass at random and filled it with water. Even the sides of the glass seemed to be showing the signs of the passing years. She put a kettle full of water on the stove to boil and went into her small living room. The dog followed her obediently.

“And you should have seen all the other girls. They were overjoyed. They were laughing at me behind my back, so happy to see that I’d made a mistake…” Signora Giacci pulled open the door of a cupboard. She reached into a drawer and pulled out some homework and sat down at a table. She started correcting the papers. “She shouldn’t have done it.” She drew and redrew a bright red line under the mistake some girl had made. “She shouldn’t have made me look ridiculous in front of all the girls.”

The dog leaped up onto an old crimson velvet armchair and curled up on the soft cushion, by now well accustomed to his little body.

“You understand, how on earth am I going to be able to go back and face that class? Every time I give someone a grade, someone might very well ask, ‘Are you sure you gave that grade to me, teacher?’ And they’ll laugh, just know they’ll laugh…”

The dog shut his eyes. Signora Giacci put a red D on the paper she was correcting. The poor innocent girl might even have deserved a slightly higher grade. But Signora Giacci continued talking to herself.

Pepito fell asleep. Another paper was immolated on the altar of her indignation. On any more peaceful day, it might easily have cleared the bar and collected a passing grade.

Signora Giacci picked up another paper. The following day was going to be one of weeping and moaning for that class. But in this room, a woman sitting at a table covered by an old oilcloth had provided an answer to the question practically all on her own: It is people who make their possessions resemble them. Because for an instant, everything in that apartment seemed grayer and older. Even a beautiful Madonna hanging on the wall seemed to become a little cruel.





Chapter 12



A cheerful voice on the radio listed the American hits of the moment. Babi, sitting at the desk facing the window, was attempting to study, unsuccessfully. She leaned back in her chair and looked out, trying to concentrate.

On the terrace of the apartment across the way, a man was standing in bright sunlight, fixing something. Things didn’t seem to be going all that well for him either.

Babi tried to repeat the latest algebraic formula she’d just studied. After mentally opening and closing a pair of round parentheses, she was no longer all that certain of what she had put inside them. She looked down and checked in the book. As expected, she’d got it wrong.

The man on the terrace across the way was gone. Babi went back to her formulas. She continued repeating them aloud, checking them now and again in the textbook. She guessed a few of them right and then got tired of doing it.

She picked up a pen that was lying on the desk. It had an odd cap. She looked at a couple of photos that were underneath the desk’s glass top. She and Pallina hugging, sun kissed in a mountain meadow in Cortina. A beautiful postcard from the beach. She remembered it. Pallina had sent it to her the time she’d gone to the Maldives. Or had it been Seychelles? She leaned closer to the postcard but it didn’t help much. The sea on a postcard always looks the same. More or less. She wished she were there, wherever it turned out that beach might be.

She smiled. Up above it was one of those little pictures you get in a photo booth on the street. She and Pallina holding ice cream cones. There was even a caption on it: The Gluttons. The handwriting belonged to Pallina. The gelato, on the other hand, came from Giovanni’s shop. She could remember that day perfectly. The taste of the gelato. She was suddenly hungry.

She went into the other room. It was empty because Daniela was studying in her bedroom and her mother had gone out to play cards. She opened the fridge. A meager display. Skim milk, a few cheeses wrapped in wax paper. Fruit. Vegetables still bundled, not yet washed. A few bottles of Vitasnella diet water and some low-fat puddings. Terrible stuff.

She opted for a low-fat yogurt. She pulled off the paper top, and as usual, the last piece of paper remained stuck to the edge of the container. Without even licking it, she let the paper lid drop into the plastic shopping bag hanging from the handle of the window. If only it had been a fruit yogurt…

She dipped in a spoon and put it in her mouth. A bitter shiver ran all the way down to her feet. What torture.

She went back to her room. She’d dip in for a spoonful of yogurt now and then, and took just the bit from the end of the spoon. That day nothing seemed to suit her. What was wrong with her?

Then she saw it…and understood instantly. There was the poster, hung up on her armoire. Step seemed to smile at her in amusement with his motorcycle rearing up on just one wheel.

And there she was, behind him with both arms wrapped around his waist, holding on for dear life. With the wind in her hair. Her blue eyes seemed bigger. She didn’t recognize herself. For a moment, she forgot the fear she’d experienced and wished she could be behind him on that motorcycle again. Right then, so she could hold tight to him.

A cruel fate by the radio’s programming chose a new song, the latest by George Michael, and it spread through the room, magical and romantic. A shiver, this time of delight, traveled down her back, and her eyes, full of desire, wandered over the large photo until they halted on the phrase written in felt-tip pen at the top right. Legendary pair! And that exclamation point. Step had written it.