“Never going to happen,” I laugh, my eyes still lingering on that unusual door. Bobby is the person I like most in the world these days, but we’re still not serving my mother’s gelato in the Very Tasty Noodle House. Not in Katz’s Deli either, for that matter. Nor in the super-swish dining room at the Plaza, not even if the head chef got down on his knees and begged me. My mum was a bohemian free spirit with an ever-playful glint in her eye, but she had one stone-cold serious rule when it came to her vanilla gelato recipe: it was a secret that I could never share with another living soul. It is the best vanilla on the planet and remains my desert island food. She made it for me as a small child and as a grown woman, served from her favorite vintage cotton-candy pink melamine bowls. And then when she became ill I made it for her, until it was the only food her body could stomach. Until it became more about the memories than the taste. She’d close her eyes as I held the spoon to her dry lips, the smallest amount enough to raise the ghost of a smile.
I click the camera open on my phone and snap a shot of the distinctive door, even though I almost don’t need to because it’s so memorable. Its slender old mahogany frame houses a bevel-edged sheet of plate glass, which has been hand-painted with a green-striped cup of swirled gelato topped with cherries and a neon spoon at a jaunty angle. The jewel colors pop from the glass as if freshly painted just yesterday, even though it exudes unmistakably stylish old-time ambience.
“I think I’m done,” I say, taking one long, last glance at the door. “If I eat anything else I’ll collapse.”
“Home, then?” Bobby offers me his arm, and we step out into the crowds and duck our heads against the rain.
2.
IT COMES BACK TO ME in an adrenaline-fueled rush as we make our way home, the door jumping out from my memories of a photograph I’ve looked at hundreds of times over the course of my life. As soon as we let ourselves through the peeling red side door beside the noodle house I make a garbled excuse to Bobby about grabbing a quick nap before evening service starts. I’m more wired than tired, though, as I slam the door of my apartment, my mind racing as I head straight for my bedroom, shrugging my coat off as I go. I drag my mother’s scrapbook down from the top of the wardrobe and drop back onto the bed with it in my arms. I’ve looked at this stuffed-to-the-brim book countless times over the years, both with and without my mother by my side to fill in the blanks. It’s a potted history of her youthful hopes and dreams, proof that she followed her performer’s heart, even if things didn’t work out quite the way she’d hoped in the end. Official publicity shots of her eighties band sit alongside more candid photos that pulse with gig-energy, cuttings from trade magazines, reviews from papers, the occasional ticket stub, the front of a cigarette box signed by all of the members of the band. I can’t read their illegible scrawl and I don’t recall their names, except for the confident red signature at the bottom belonging to Charlie Raven, the band’s drummer. My father. He was my mother’s on–off lover for several years, a physical relationship she always knew was destined to go nowhere. It ended the day she declined his offer to give her enough money to terminate her pregnancy. I have no memory of him at all; he died in a helicopter accident when I was six. My mother said she wasn’t all that surprised when news reached her of his death, because he was the kind of full-throttle person who rarely lives to see old age. She didn’t speak badly of him, exactly, just painted a picture of someone wild who blazed bright and burned out. She probably felt it was reassuring for me to hear I shared little in common with him except my surname, which she chose for me over her own anonymous Smith. My father’s death has always just been a footnote in my story, someone who bears very little impact on who I am today. Charlie Raven, forever thirty-two.
Every page of my mother’s album is full to overlapping, a tightly packed chronicle of the band’s brush with the big time. But that isn’t what I’m looking for right now. I flip quickly to the very last page. Just two precious things are pinned in place: a photograph and a torn, scrawled-on napkin. I peel back the protective layer and lift the photo carefully away, feeling the tug of age try to grip it in place. I stare at it now with fresh eyes, even though there’s no question in my mind. Same mahogany frame, same brass handle, same striking paintwork. It’s the same door. I’ve never known where the photograph I’ve looked at so many times was taken, with its faded summer look of a holiday romance, and my mother always declined to elaborate.
Turning the photograph over, I read her familiar script: Santo, 1985, a love heart doodled beside his name. Just seeing the loops and dips of her handwriting, so similar to my own, is enough to bring a lump to my throat. I flip it back to study the photo again. The young man gazes back at me. He’s laughing, thick dark hair flopping over the hand he’s raised to shield his eyes from the sun. The distinctive shop door is ajar behind him, sunlight refracting the colors in an arc across the image. Everything about the photograph is retro-stylish, from the hand-painted door to the guy himself, channeling Breakfast Club cool with his eighties leather bomber jacket, white T, and bleached jeans. I wrack my brain, trying to pin down any scraps of information I can pull out. There isn’t much. She was a storyteller, my mother, but she always steered the conversation away when it came to this photo and the napkin alongside it, only ever going so far as to say that the guy was quite possibly the love of her young life. The mint-green napkin is torn in half, leaving just the second part of a gold printed logo visible: otti’s. My mind connects the dots. Belotti’s? I’ve never known before what the whole logo said, but I know by heart what’s written on it in confident blue ink. Our beloved gelato recipe.