He rests his arm on the open driver’s door and looks up at me. “Not that I remember.”
“Richard Gere pulls up in a fancy car and climbs the fire escape,” I call down.
My mother always liked to say she was named after Vivian from Pretty Woman, even though she was born more than twenty years before its release. Gio eyes the rickety ladder zigzagging the front of our building and shakes his head, and I laugh and slam the window shut.
Down on the sidewalk, I stand and gaze at the imposing muscle car. It’s gleaming black and chrome, long, low, Saturday Night Fever kind of cool.
“Did you borrow it from John Travolta?”
He grins and bangs the roof. “It’s a 1972 Cadillac Sedan Deville, and it’s Papa’s pride and joy. He asked me to drive it sometimes and keep it oiled for when he can use it again.”
“It’s big enough to have its own zip code,” I say as Gio gets in and leans across to open my door.
“Oh my God,” I groan, because I’m enveloped by cherry-red leather. The car smells just as you’d hope it would, of nourished leather and wood polish, of age and distinction, definite gentleman’s club vibes.
“Can I live in here? This is way more comfortable than my couch.”
I stroke my hand over the teak dashboard. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a button marked “bourbon over ice”—and I’d press it too. It’s a drive-in movies kind of ride, a deep, button-back bench seat in the front with an armrest pulled down between us.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Gio says, gunning the engine.
“Where are we going?”
“Not far,” he says. “It’s a surprise.”
I settle in, surreptitiously watching Gio out of the corner of my eye. “You look sexy driving this.”
He shoots me a look. “Don’t ask me to talk dirty again,” he says. “You got me in enough trouble this morning.”
“You liked it,” I say, laughing into my scarf.
He doesn’t deny it. “You didn’t really take your bra off, did you?”
I contemplate a lie. “No, I was making an omelet.”
He laughs, shaking his head as he turns the radio on. “You’re a real bad influence on me, Iris.”
I look out of my window, trying to stay in the moment rather than let his off-the-cuff words spiral me into thinking exactly how bad I am for Gio, jumping forward to the New Year when his opinion of me will hit the floor. The idea of him thinking badly of me is lead in my heart, so I tune my ear into the Christmas songs on the radio and hum along instead.
* * *
—
TRUE TO HIS WORD, our journey isn’t a long one, but it’s one I hope to remember forever. The combination of the car, the man driving it, and the glittering city lights as we drove across Brooklyn Bridge was the kind of perfect snapshot you can’t hope to capture on your cellphone camera. I’ve captured it in my head instead and filed it away to look back at in the days and years to come, in much the same way my mother spun a million love stories around that single photograph of Santo.
“Here should do it,” Gio says, pulling the car up curbside in a quiet residential street.
“Is it a restaurant?” I say, hoping not because Bobby and Robin called me upstairs to share pizza earlier.
Gio shakes his head as he gets out and locks the car.
“A bar?”
He shakes his head again and links his arm through mine.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“You’ll see,” he says.
The farther we walk, the more people there are on the streets too, obviously headed the same place as us. Couples, families with little kids, everyone bundled up in winter coats and hats.
We round a corner and I gasp, coming to a surprised standstill.
“Worth the suspense?”
The road ahead is a blaze of color, every house almost obscured by Christmas lights and ornaments. Huge golden snowflakes, life-size snowmen, illuminated Santas climbing down chimneys. This is the America of my childhood movie-spun fantasies, Disney-bold and brashly beautiful.
“What is this place?” I breathe.
“Dyker Heights,” he says. “They’ve done this every year since the eighties, it goes on for another twenty blocks or so.”
We join the throngs of sightseers walking slowly through the illuminated streets, and honestly, I feel as if someone scooped me up and dropped me on a holiday movie set. Every house seems to be more ornately decorated than the last. Candy canes and dancing elves fill the front lawns, shimmering presents line the porch steps, starlight nets cover trees and shrubs.
“You can probably see this from space,” I say, blown away by the sheer scale and spectacle.
We pause outside a huge old house guarded by a battalion of ten-foot-tall nutcrackers, their brass uniform buttons flashing gold as Christmas music pumps from hidden speakers. Angels dance between the trees, and a life-size nativity scene takes up most of the lawn.
“Wow,” is all I can say. “How do they even do this every year? They must need another house just to store all the decorations.”
“It’s companies mostly these days,” Gio says. “Big business.”
“Oh, I quite fancy that job,” I say, taken with the idea. “Professional elf.”
We buy hot chocolate from a vending van, because this scene isn’t quite festive enough already, and Gio produces a hip flask of brandy and hands it to me.
“You think of everything,” I say, sloshing some into my cup.
He slides the bottle back inside his jacket and I realize he’s brought it just for me, just for this hot chocolate, and I link my arm through his as we wander from house to house, bedazzled.
I stop to admire a vintage metal sleigh that rivals Santo’s Cadillac in length, metallic scarlet and big enough for us to climb aboard. We don’t, though—the front seat is already taken by a Coca-Cola-worthy Santa Claus holding on to the reins of eight reindeer in flight across the lawn, all of them aglow with hundreds of golden pinprick lights. I check, and of course the one up front has a red nose.
“For a guy who doesn’t like the Christmas store, this is a big step,” I say.
He drops his arm across my shoulders. “This is different. We came here every year as kids.”
I see the Belottis in my mind’s eye, a gaggle of overexcited little girls and Gio, dark-haired and serious-eyed, tagging along behind them.
“We come from very different lives,” I say with a soft sigh. “My mother was a huge Christmas fan, but we never amassed a collection of family decorations or yearly traditions, we moved around too much. If it didn’t fit in the backseat of the Vauxhall it didn’t come with us, and it was nothing like the size of Santo’s Cadillac, let me tell you.”