The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany(23)

Poppy pats her cheek. “That silly old curse has made fools of us all. Just look at you, my dear girl. So desperate for love. And this one”—she points at me—“shows up looking like a scuffed shoe.”

I gasp. “Me?”

Lucy cracks up. “I know, right? But you’re going to break it now? The curse?”

Poppy lifts her chin. “On my eightieth birthday, I will meet the love of my life on the steps of the Ravello Cathedral.”

Lucy’s jaw drops. “That’s your plan to break the curse?”

Poppy’s face erupts in childlike joy, and she nods. Lucy grabs her by the shoulders.

“No. No! No! No! You can’t be serious. What makes you think you’re going to meet the love of your life at age eighty, when I can’t find mine at twenty-one?”

“What Lucy means,” I say, my heart in my stomach, “is that the odds of meeting someone at your . . . um . . . stage in life . . . is . . . well . . .”

Lucy interjects. “I hate to break it to you, Pops, but very few men are into windsock boobs and wrinkled asses.”

I wince, and pray our aunt has a hearing problem.

“Tell me,” Poppy says, looking from Lucy to me. “When was it that you stopped believing in magic?”

Her question catches me off guard. I’m tempted to tell her the truth, that I stopped believing sometime around the fourth grade, when, after years of wishing and praying, I still hadn’t gotten a mother.

“The only reason I’m here,” Lucy says, “is because you promised to break the curse. My mom’s already blowing up my phone, wondering when I’ll be freed. Please tell me you have a plan B.”

Poppy turns away and lifts the handles of her wheelie bags. “Forget about the curse, Luciana. We’re off to Italy!”

I avoid Lucy’s eyes, but I can feel them, shooting daggers at me. I want to assure her that, if there really is a curse (which of course there’s not), Poppy will break it. She will keep her promise. But I can’t. My great-aunt just may be the biggest manipulator since Downton Abbey’s old Lady Grantham.

I follow Poppy through security. Unlike my pristine passport, stamps from foreign countries fill every page of Poppy’s book.

“How many countries have you visited?” I ask as she slips her passport back into her oversized orange purse.

“Thirty-four and counting. But Italy’s special. I return every year.”

“You travel to Italy each year, hoping to meet your true love?”

“Oh, goodness, no! Only this year. I haven’t set foot in Ravello since 1961. I’ve been saving that town for next week.”

We three sit at the gate, side by side on pleather sling chairs. Lucy turns her back to us, typing furiously into her phone. Poppy seems oblivious. She sits erect as a queen, smiling and nodding to the travelers as they scurry past.

“Airports are such fun, don’t you think, Luciana?”

“Second only to Brazilian waxing,” Lucy says, her eyes never leaving her phone.

Poppy tips her head back and laughs. “How clever you are, Luciana, for someone who chooses to wear stilettos for international travel.”

Lucy looks over her shoulder. “Hey, they’re better than Em’s church lady shoes.”

“What’s wrong with my shoes? These Clarks are super comfy.”

Poppy plants a hand on mine. “Once you start dressing for comfort, dear, it’s all downhill. Ever visit a nursing home? Nothing but elastic and Velcro.”

Ouch. She’s managed to ding both Lucy and me in one conversation.

As Lucy taps her phone, Poppy tells me of her love for horses. “Bought Higgins on my sixtieth birthday.” Her favorite music. “I just got wind of a terrific new indie band called Chastity Belt. Have you heard them yet?” And the yoga classes that keep her limber. “Do you know that seventy percent of adults cannot get up from the floor without using their hands? Imagine!”

As she talks, I study her, the way she emphasizes with hand gestures, furrows her brows, leans back and howls. She’s wrinkled, no doubt about it. But her face isn’t pinched, like Nonna’s. And those eyes. They’re the same oval shape as Nonna’s, the same deep chocolate brown. But I’d bet my life savings the creases that sprout from Poppy’s are etched from amusement, not animosity.

I startle, and realize Poppy has stopped talking. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

She leans in. “You’re looking at me as if you’re seeing me for the first time, dear.”

I smile, feeling heat rise to my cheeks. “I guess I never realized you were so beautiful.”

“I was a plain child. But you see, planted in the right spot, we blossom. You’ll find it happens to you, too, once you find your home.”

“Bensonhurst is my home.”

“Is it?” She holds my gaze. “What if, after nearly thirty years of life, you discover you’ve been planted in the wrong place?”

An inexplicable chill comes over me. At once I remember the medal in my purse. “Excuse me,” I say. “I need to make a call.”

I punch in my sister’s number as I walk over to the window. She answers after three rings. “Thank you for the Saint Christopher medallion, Dar. I just found it.”

“It’s only on loan,” she says. “Don’t lose it.”