Lattes, Ladyfingers, And Lies

I hummed as I stacked boxes in the back room of the café. I couldn’t have been in a better mood. I was due to fly to Italy with my boyfriend, Matt, in seven short days, and I was so excited I could barely contain myself. I picked a pack of napkins out of the shipping box, pirouetted to the shelves behind me, and made my best attempt to set the box on the shelf with the grace of a ballet dancer. It had been more years than I cared to think about since I’d last taken ballet, though, so I was pretty sure it looked more awkward than graceful.

I spun again and plucked another box from the shipping container. “La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, la-da-da-daah!” I sang. “Da-da-dah.”

I jumped into the air—and not a graceful ballerina jump either. My hand flew to my chest as I turned to look at her. I could tell from the burning sensation that my cheeks flamed.

“What?” I was so startled I couldn’t remember what she’d said, only that she’d caught me smack in the middle of my Dean Martin/Gene Kelly song-and-dance routine.

Sammy pressed her lips together and blinked hard, but she couldn’t hide the twitching in her cheeks as she tried to keep from laughing. “You were singing ‘That’s Amore,’” she said as evenly as she could.

“Was I?”

“Mm-hmm.” Her blue eyes twinkled.

I shrugged, trying to play it cool. “My grandmother used to play it a lot. It gets stuck in my head sometimes.”

“I’m sure.” She laughed. “It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a certain trip to a certain foreign country with a certain man.”

If it was possible, my blush grew even deeper.

A laugh bubbled up out of Sammy’s throat. “Don’t worry, Fran. It’s our little secret.” She stepped into the room and grabbed the box I’d put on the shelf. “I just need some more napkins for the counter, and I’ll be out of your way.” She flashed me a smile and disappeared back into the café.

I waited for a few seconds with my eye on the doorway in case she came back then returned to unpacking. I found myself still humming but managed to keep my dancing mostly in check as I emptied the last few supplies from the box. When I was done, I broke down the box and tossed it out the back door with the recycling, perhaps with a bit more of a flourish than I normally would have.

As I walked back inside, I lingered in the doorway between the storeroom and the café, surveying the space with a slight smile on my face. It was simple and cozy, and no place in the world felt more like home to me. I had spent nearly as much time inside these walls as I had inside my own house. The exposed brick walls, the mismatched tables and chairs, the handwritten menu hanging high on the wall—they had all been the same for as long as I could remember, since I was a child running around and getting in the way as my grandparents and my mother served coffee, sandwiches, and desserts to the people of Cape Bay, Massachusetts. I considered it both a duty and a privilege to be the sole proprietor of Antonia’s Italian Café, the business that had been my immigrant family’s life work.

The café was moderately full, pretty much what I expected on a mid-October Tuesday afternoon. A group of women clustered in the armchairs in the corner, ostensibly for their book club meeting, but I hadn’t seen any of them crack a book yet. They sat with their lattes and ladyfingers or scones or—for the daring few—cupcakes and chatted. Rhonda, who worked for me part time, was one of them. She caught my eye and waved. The Mommy Brigade, she called them—a group of mostly stay-at-home moms, who got together while their kids were in school to relax and enjoy one another’s company.

A few other customers were at the café tables along the wall: a couple of retirees, some people on break from their jobs at other shops along Main Street, others just enjoying a cup of coffee and a few quiet moments to themselves.

Sammy bustled around behind the counter, checking to make sure we had plenty of clean dishes on the shelves, straightening things up, and exchanging a word here and there with the customers. I knew the name of almost everyone in the room, and I recognized the faces of most of the rest of them. The tourist season was all but over in our small beach town, but ironically, it was actually busier than it usually was on a weekday afternoon at the height of the season. It was as if all the locals hid in their homes when the vacationers were around and came out again when things were quieter.

It was busier but somehow easier to manage at the same time. The vacationers came in noisy packs that were confused, demanding, or both—multi-generation families who seemed to think we were a full-service restaurant, groups of college students who assumed we served cocktails, New Yorkers who thought we were Starbucks and couldn’t be bothered to order in normal English. None of that from the locals—they came in, ordered something we actually sold, and sat down to enjoy their drinks without snapping their fingers or yelling at Sammy or me when they wanted sugar for the coffee they’d only moments before sworn they wanted black. The locals were more laid back—busy enjoying their everyday lives and the company of their friends, not trying to make the café and its offerings into something they weren’t.

A man came in, and Sammy greeted him with her trademark brilliant grin. She moved to fill his order almost as soon as he started talking. She had a plate topped with a paper doily resting on the counter, ready for his dessert order before he had even finished paying. After handing him his card and receipt, she picked up the plate and stepped over to the case displaying our array of baked goods. She put a glove on one hand and slid the case’s door open with the other. She reached her gloved hand into the case and pulled out a small handful of ladyfingers. Instead of putting them on the plate, she stopped and looked into the case. She stood up suddenly and turned toward me.

“Fran?” she said loudly then jumped when she saw me standing in the doorway. “Oh! I didn’t realize you were right there!” She paused for a second, looking thrown off by me not being deep in the back room. We were getting good at this startling each other thing today. “Um.” She hesitated. “Can you check on whether we have any more ladyfingers in the back? We’re all out up here.”

“Sure thing.” I went back into the storeroom and checked the box of ladyfingers. Crumbs. Usually we were better than that at keeping track of our stock.

Back in the summer, we’d worked out a deal for me to sell her tiramisu in our café. Monica delivered it a few times a week, and it was by far our top-selling sweet. A few weeks ago, it had finally dawned on me that the ladyfingers she made for the tiramisu would be great for dipping in coffee. As soon as Monica’s first batch landed in the display case, customers snapped them up faster even than I’d expected, as evidenced by our empty display case.

I spent a few minutes chatting with Monica on the phone after I let her know we’d need an extra batch. She was predictably unsurprised that they were selling so well. She never lacked in confidence when it came to her cooking and deservedly so. She wouldn’t let me off the phone until we’d had a nice chat about my upcoming trip. She was almost as excited about the Italy trip as I was.

“I talked to Stefano,” she said. “He and Adriana are looking forward to showing you Venice. I talked to them on the computer! It’s remarkable what technology can do now. To think, I cannot just talk to my grandson half a world away, but I can see him too! We couldn’t have dreamed of such things when I came here from Italy or even when Alberto was there, oh, twenty-five years ago now. And Adriana is lovely. I can’t wait to meet her in person! I’m so looking forward to hearing what you think of her, Francesca.”

Monica’s grandson Stefano had been in Venice for nearly two years, learning proper Italian cooking so that he could come back and work in the family restaurant. Monica was more than a little excited that he was bringing his trained-chef girlfriend with him and not just because she could help out in the restaurant. Monica expected to hear news of a proposal any day.

In addition to Monica extracting a promise from Stefano to give Matt and me the grand tour, she’d also given me a list of all the places in the entire Veneto region where we needed to visit or eat. I was fairly certain we would barely have the time to visit a fraction of the places she’d told me about. We’d be there for two weeks, but our itinerary had us covering the entire country, from Venice and Verona in the north, down to Rome and Naples and even Sicily, so we wouldn’t have much time to experience each place.

The bell over the door jingled, and a woman a few years older than me rushed in. She looked harried with her mousy-brown layer cut sticking out and her royal-blue sweater set pulled askew. She looked like a soccer mom who’d gotten a little too riled up about the wait in the carpool lane.

She gave a wave and said something to the book clubbers as she hurried past them on her way to the counter. She gave her order to Sammy and paid then darted back over to the circle of women in the corner, grabbing a chair and dragging it noisily over to their table. I noticed she did not have a book with her.

As Sammy prepared the drink, a couple of business types got up from their table and left. I wasn’t sure of their names, but I recognized them as regulars. Sammy glanced in their direction and smiled.

“Thanks guys!” she called. “See you tomorrow!” I saw her eyes flit over to the table they had just left and the dishes scattered across it. We hadn’t been working together long—only since I’d taken over the café after my mother’s sudden death a few months ago—but I could read her mind.

“I’ll get it.” I walked over, piled the dishes up, and took them into the back, then grabbed a rag to take back to wipe down the table. I turned the bud vase on the table so the Peruvian lilies in it had their most attractive side facing out. The tin that held the sweeteners was a little low, so I grabbed a handful from the back and brought them out to disperse among the tables. I finished as Sammy got the disheveled woman’s drink ready. “Here.” I reached out for the cup and saucer.

“The woman in the blue.” She nodded in the book club’s direction. She hesitated when she realized three of the women in the group were wearing blue shirts.

“I saw her come in.” I smiled.

“Thanks.”

I took the cup and saucer in one hand and grabbed a handful of napkins in the other. The book clubbers always needed more napkins. Someone was always spilling her drink or pouring it on herself or needing to wipe her hands or her mouth or blot her lipstick. No matter how many napkins they had, they always seemed to need more. I sat the drink down in front of the disheveled woman in blue and put the napkins in the middle of the table.

“I thought you ladies might need some more of these.”

“Oh, thank you!” one of them exclaimed, immediately picking one up and dabbing at an invisible spot on her blouse.

“Ellen always needs more napkins.” Another nodded at Ellen, who was still studying her shirt to see if she’d gotten the spot out. Based on the two other women who had also immediately grabbed at the pile, I suspected Ellen wasn’t the only one.

The woman who had spoken had her head tilted back at an awkward angle, and there was a band of light across the bottom of her face. I glanced at the window and saw that, indeed, sun poured in, trying to blind her.

“Do you want me to close these blinds for you?” I asked.

“Oh, please, yes! That would be wonderful.”

“If you’ll just excuse me one second…” I scooted behind one of the women as I wondered how the book clubbers all seemed to need things—napkins, the blinds closed—but didn’t ask for any of them. It was especially odd since Rhonda sat right there with them. Surely they knew she worked at the café and would know that we didn’t mind customers closing the blinds in lieu of squinting.

Certain the women needed something else—some sugar, a refill, directions to the restroom—I opened my mouth to ask if there was anything else I could do for them. Before I could say anything though, I realized why—today at least—they were all so reluctant to get up from the table.