“You are all the things the closest man in my family could never be to me.”
He switched to English after, maybe not having the appropriate words. “Time and place, Alcina. There will come a time when life will revolve around my family, my business, and I will need your council then. More than I need it now. What’s done is done.” He paused. “Right now I’ll enjoy my wife, getting to know her, to spoil her on our honeymoon.”
“I like the getting to know me part,” I said. Then I looked down at myself, at one of the nicest dresses I owned, which meant that it hadn’t first belonged to my mamma. “But I am fine with what I came with.”
“Not the point,” he said. “You need new things. I’m your husband. It’s my job to provide you with everything. Or would you rather insult me?”
“When you are being so romantico?” I laughed. “I would not dare!”
“If I was acting like a bastard?”
“Then I would reconsider.”
“Yeah,” he said, a smile coming to his face. “Thought so.”
We talked the entire time he drove about what we were going to do.
Villages in Como that were worth sightseeing.
Places worth eating.
He told me he could drive a Vaporina, the kind of boats they used on the lake, and would teach me. We even discussed going across the border into Switzerland, since I had never been.
A slow song came on in the background, the radio on low, and I asked him what kind of music he liked. He mentioned a few bands and artists I had never heard of. I told him I enjoyed the older stuff.
“Like that song you were listening to the night—”
“Sì,” I said, remembering the night we had under the moon. When he found me touching myself, and he came out of the darkness like a fantasy come to life. “To me, they don’t make music like that anymore.”
“That’s what my grandfather says,” he said. “Bugsy agrees. He listens to Roy Orbison—music like that.”
I reminded him of the song he sang to me the night he serenaded me under my balcony. That was old, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s a classic. So is the song we danced to the night of our wedding.”
“That is my favorite song,” I said. “It will always be special to me.”
He kissed my hand and then pressed a button on the dash. A second later the song came on. I understood then why mamma cried when a song she had danced to with papà came on. I had always thought it made her sad because she missed those times, but the music gave her the power to relive them.
“Remind me to thank Bugsy,” he said.
“Per?”
“For teaching Dom the classics.” He turned it up some. “When we get back to New York, we’ll listen to it in my old Cadillac.”
There was so much about him that I did not know. “Tell me something about yourself that will shock me,” I said.
“You first.”
“That is not fair!”
“Agree or not.” He grinned. It was mischievous to its core.
“Let me think.” I tapped at my chin. “I am so boring. All I did before you was hide and make candles.”
“And touch yourself.”
“No!” I laughed. It sounded wild in the car. “I thought about it a few times, to find the release, but I did not go through with it. Not until the night of the moon—ah! That is it. I go a little…wild…when the moon is full. It does something to me.”
“That doesn’t shock me,” he said.
“That is all I’ve got. Now tell me yours.”
“You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” He laughed. “I enjoy the opera.”
I thought about that for a moment. “I can see that about you,” I said. “The opera is…how do I want to say this?” I arranged the words in my mind for another moment. “It is refined, romantic, but there is something about the music that is…ruthless, at times. It is an emotional ride. You do not shy away from any of that.”
“You ever been?”
“No. I have not done much. But I remember watching it on the television with my zia once.”
“My mother—” It was the first time I ever heard him hesitate, but he went over it so smoothly that, if I had not been paying attention, maybe I would have missed it. “Emilia, she’s the one who used to bring me. She said it was a date, and one day, I’d bring the girls there to make them fall in love with