“Not until you talked.”
“That’s what counts, though, right?”
“I guess so.”
He led me to the front door and we walked inside. “Welcome to Villa Caramella. ‘Caramella’ means ‘candy.’?”
“Holy . . . books.”
It was like a librarian’s worst nightmare. The entire room was lined with floor to ceiling bookcases, and hundreds—maybe thousands—of books were mashed haphazardly into the shelves.
“My parents are big readers,” Ren said. “Also, we want to be prepared if there’s ever a robot uprising and we need to hide out. Lots of books equals lots of kindling.”
“Smart.”
“Come on, she’s probably in her studio.” We made our way through the piles of books to a set of double doors that opened to a sunroom. The floor was shrouded in drop cloths and there was an ancient-looking table holding tubes of paint and a bunch of different ceramic tiles.
“Mom?”
A female version of Ren lay curled up on a daybed, yellow paint streaked through her hair. She looked about twenty years old. Maybe thirty.
“Mom.” Ren reached down and shook her shoulder. “Mamma. She’s kind of a deep sleeper, but watch this.” Bending close to her face, he whispered, “I just saw Bono in Tavarnuzze.”
Her eyes snapped open and in about half a second she’d scrambled to a standing position. Ren cracked up.
“Lorenzo Ferrara! Don’t do that.”
“Carolina, this is my mom, Odette. She was a U2 groupie. Followed them around for a while in the early nineties while they were on tour in Europe. Clearly she still has strong feelings for them.”
“I’ll show you strong feelings.” She reached for a pair of glasses and slipped them onto her nose, giving me a once-over. “Oh, Lorenzo, where did you find her?”
“We just met on the hill behind the cemetery. She’s living here with her dad for the summer.”
“You’re one of us!”
“American?” I asked.
“Expatriate.”
“Hostage” was more like it. But that wasn’t the sort of thing you told someone you’d just met.
“Wait a minute.” She leaned forward. “I heard you were coming. Are you Howard Mercer’s daughter?”
“Yes. I’m Lina.”
“Her full name is ‘Carolina,’?” Ren added.
“Just call me Lina.”
“Well, thank the heavens, Lina—we need more Americans here. Preferably live ones,” she said, waving her hand dismissively in the direction of the cemetery. “I’m so glad to meet you. Have you learned any Italian?”
“I memorized like five phrases on the flight over.”
“What are they?” Ren asked.
“I’m not saying them in front of you. I’ll probably sound like an idiot.”
He shrugged. “Che peccato.”
Odette grimaced. “Promise me you’ll never use even one of those phrases in this house. I’m spending the summer pretending to be somewhere other than Italy.”
Ren grinned. “How’s that working out for you? You know, with your Italian husband and children?”
She ignored him. “I’m going to get us some drinks. You two make yourselves comfortable.” She squeezed my shoulder, then walked out of the room.
Ren looked at me. “Told you she’d be happy to meet you.”
“Does she really hate Italy?”
“No way. She’s mad that we can’t go to Texas this summer, but every year it’s the same thing. We get there and she spends three months complaining about the terrible food and all the people she sees wearing their pajamas in public.”
“Who wears their pajamas in public?”
“Lots of people. Trust me. It’s like an epidemic.”
I pointed to the table. “Is she an artist?”
“Yeah. She paints ceramics, mostly scenes of Tuscany. There’s a guy in Florence who sells them in his shop, and tourists pay like a gazillion dollars for them. They’d probably have a conniption if they found out they’re done by an American.” He picked up a tile and handed it to me. She’d painted a yellow cottage nestled between two hills.
“This is really pretty.”
“You should see upstairs. We have a whole wall of tile that she’s replacing one by one with the ones she’s worked on.”
I set the tile down. “Are you artistic?”
“Me? No. Not really.”
“I’m not either. But my mom was an artist too. She was a photographer.”
“Cool. Like family portraits and stuff?”
“No. Mostly fine-art kinds of stuff. Her work was displayed in galleries and at art shows, places like that. She taught in colleges, too.”
“Nice. What was her name?”
“Hadley Emerson.”
Odette reappeared, carrying two cans of orange Fanta and an opened sleeve of cookies. “Here you go. Ren goes through about a pack of these a day. You’ll love them.”
I took one. It was a sandwich cookie with vanilla on one side and chocolate on the other. An Italian Oreo. I bit into it and a choir of angels started singing. Did Italian food have some kind of fairy dust that made it way better than its American counterparts?