“It’s not that I don’t have ambition for the business,” he says, exasperated. “The mobile city carts were my idea, I’m not risk averse. Belotti’s has changed with the times in every way but the flavor.”
He takes a step back as he speaks and accidentally stands on the start button of a life-size singing snowman, and in his haste to move away manages to stumble and press two more. All three wheeze into loud, tinny life, swinging their arms as they sing “Last Christmas,” an out-of-time chorus that is so ridiculous I start to really laugh. Gio looks at them in horror, and then at me, and then shakes his head and laughs too.
So that’s what he looks like when he laughs, I think.
“That’s definitely my cue to get out of here,” he says.
Back on the street, he rolls his shoulders as if to shake off any traces of Christmas glitter. He glances in the direction of the gelateria, and then the other way.
“Let’s try something out,” he says, placing a hand on my elbow to guide me across the street between the stalls and generators. People know him here: they raise their hand as he passes, waylay him to ask how Santo is doing. It reminds me how embedded Belotti’s is in this community, and I wonder if Gio appreciates what it means to hold a place within it. He’s a crucial cog in his family machine, and they in turn are a founding cog in Little Italy. I’m not part of something like this. We moved too frequently when I was a child to be crucial anywhere.
Gio stops. “In here,” he says.
I lean back and see we’re at a gelateria, but any similarity to Belotti’s ends there. This place is large and ultra-modern, and inside the glass display counter there are at least twenty different flavors of gelato, a parakeet display of color and drama.
“Wow,” I murmur. “How do you ever choose?”
An immaculately made-up woman leans across the counter and kisses Gio’s cheek, lingering for a second longer than a socially acceptable peck.
“Gio! It’s been a while since we last saw you in here,” she says. “What’ll it be?” She glides her hands gracefully across the top of the glass and smiles. She somehow reminds me of a snake charmer.
“Vanilla,” he says. “As it comes, no toppings, thanks.”
She looks disappointed. “The blackberry is the best today.”
He doesn’t say anything, and she sighs as she reaches for a cup. “One of these days,” she says, heaping it full of vanilla. I can’t imagine she puts that much in everyone’s serving, she’d be out of business in a week.
“Iris?” He turns to me. “For you?”
I look at the array of flavors and colors laid out before me, impressed. For the chef in me, this is better than a jeweler’s shop window. And then I look at Gio watching me and I know what I’m going to choose.
“Same again, please. Vanilla.” I look at the mountain of gelato in the cup on the counter for Gio. “Or, actually, can I just have a second spoon?”
He looks pleased, which is more than I can say for the woman behind the counter as she jabs another spoon into the cup, wobbling the precarious gelato tower. I’m not sure, but I think she might have imagined poking it in my eye.
“On the house,” she says, when Gio reaches for his wallet. “I’ll come by yours soon and you can return the favor.”
We take a seat at one of the booths, the gelato on the table between us.
“Research?” I say.
He pushes it toward me. “Ladies first.”
I pull out a neon green plastic spoon and swirl it in the gelato. “It’s more yellow than Belotti’s,” I say, raising the spoon up to eye level to study it.
He doesn’t touch his spoon, just watches me as I taste it. I find myself looking away from him as the cold gelato slides down my throat.
“It’s heavier, I think?”
He reaches for the other spoon and tests it, one spoonful and then another.
“More cream, less milk,” I say.
He nods. “This has a stronger vanilla flavor too.”
He’s right. There’s a delicacy to Belotti’s gelato compared to the intensity of this one.
“It’s kind of custardy,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, pointing his spoon at me.
“There’s no way I could eat this much of it,” I say, waving my spoon over the piled-high cup.
Gio’s gaze flickers toward the counter. “I think Priscilla was trying to make a point.”
“I think she was blatantly coming on to you,” I say, sliding my spoon back into gelato-mountain.
His eyebrows shoot up and he flushes as he looks away. “She thinks we would be a good partnership,” he says after a pause. “In business.”
I laugh under my breath. “Among other things. Maybe your sisters should be glancing across the street if they’re trying to fix you up.”
He sighs and lays his spoon down. “I don’t need fixing up.”
“From what I saw of them today, they probably just want to see you happy.”
“I’m happy enough,” he says, but his frown says something different.
“The fact you had to say enough at the end of that sentence tells me you’re probably not, really,” I say, and then I catch myself and wonder where that even came from. Did Priscilla sprinkle a little truth extract in with the vanilla?
He picks up his spoon again and slides it through the gelato, more for distraction than to eat it.
“I know you’ll understand this better than most, Iris. Losing Penny…the world stopped turning. All of my plans, my hopes and dreams, gone, just like that.” He pushes his spoon all the way into the gelato for emphasis and leaves it there. “Bella was the only reason I got out of bed in the morning. I’d lost my wife, but she’d lost her mamma, and I had to step up. God knows we were lucky to have family around us, but when I closed the door at night, it was still just the two of us walking around the edges of this gaping hole in our home. And you can’t live like that forever, can you?” He shakes his head, his expression bleak. “Me and Bells…we found our way through the mess together, and by some miracle we managed to rebuild a solid floor beneath our feet.” He looks up at me. “She’s pretty terrific,” he says.
“I’ll bet,” I say, thinking he is too.
“I’m not lonely,” he says. I don’t know if he’s trying to convince me or himself. “I have Bells, my family, the gelateria. So when I say I’m happy ‘enough,’ what I probably mean is my world is turning again now, and having experienced what it feels like when it stops, that’s something worth protecting. For Bella more than for me. My sisters think romance is the be-all and end-all because they’re lucky and they’re naive. I see it for what it is—fragile and unreliable, likely to blow a hole in your life when you least expect it.”
It’s clear from listening to him that his daughter is the center of his world.
“It sounds like you’re a great dad,” I say. “I grew up with just one parent too, so I know how that ‘you and me against the world’ feeling goes.”
Gio huffs softly. “You and me against the world. Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it.”