The Spia Family Presses On - By Mary Leo Page 0,10

oil. The pitch that put it over the top for us was the day she mixed a cup of olive oil with four tablespoons of baking soda and taught them how to polish their guns with the concoction. Not long after that the vans disappeared, along with those pesky clicking sounds on our business phones.

As I pulled into the main driveway with the arching metal “Spia’s Olive Press” sign, I saw that we were closed for the day. A heavy chain hung across the entrance. I backed up and made a U-turn and headed for the private service road that led to the back of my mother’s Victorian, and would eventually end at the old stone barn.

The last time my family had closed the shops and olive oil tasting room early, my great-grandfather, Bisnonno Luigiano, who was ninety-six at the time and barely able to sit up in a chair, had drifted off to heaven during a Fourth of July celebration. And even then we only closed for a few hours while the paramedics were there. My family did not like to lose revenue, no matter what went on. So for them to close their shops in the afternoon meant that Dickey’s freedom party was bigger than death.

THREE

My Cousin Dickey

Making my way up the service road, I knew no one could see my entrance. The road was blocked by trees and a four-foot-high lava stone wall—the same lava stone that had been used to build Jack London’s “Wolf House” back in nineteen-eleven.

As I pulled the truck into the private parking lot between Mom’s backyard and the stone barn, the usual set of late model cars were lined up along the fence, along with my mom’s new white Mercedes C350. There were also several current model cars lined up in a row that I didn’t recognize: a black Mercedes E class, a black Tundra, two black Cadillacs, a black BMW SUV and a black BMW Roadster. My family had a thing for black cars.

I didn’t recognize any of them, but I assumed they belonged to my relatives from San Francisco. Most everybody tended to get new cars every year, something my father liked to do to keep his enemies guessing, he would say. It seemed that these relatives had no shortage of enemies.

I grabbed Mom’s paperwork, slid out of the front seat, slammed the door behind me and just as I walked up the steps to Mom’s back porch, Aunt Hetty came charging out from the screen door. As soon as she saw me she pulled in a breath, let out a little “yeow” and grabbed the front of her white cotton blouse, which was half unbuttoned, a strange phenomenon for my overly modest aunt. “Holy buckets! You scared the bejesus out of me. Don’t you know better than to sneak up on a person?”

Aunt Hetty had a hearing problem she wouldn’t admit to which caused her to be a little edgy. She thought everyone snuck up on her.

“Sorry. Is my mom in there? I’ve got something for her.”

She spun around, buttoned her blouse, pulled her skirt around so that the seams went down her hips, straightened her frazzled hair, smeared on some lipstick from a blue tube she always kept in her pocket, then turned to face me, grinning. That alone told me something was up. Aunt Hetty never grinned.

She and Aunt Babe were half-sisters, and sadly looked nothing alike. Babe had all the good looks in the family, while Hetty had nothing but a talent for baking. Her graying short hair stood out in little tufts around her heavily creased face, and because of her tendency to wear bright red lipstick that extended above her lip line, she always reminded me of an aging clown.

Unfortunately, Hetty took life seriously so the clown part was only in my imagination.

“She might be, but I didn’t see her. I’m too busy delivering cookies for the party. But I saw her go into the barn earlier. Or did I see her go into the barn this morning? I can’t remember. Don’t ask me these questions when I have so much on my mind. I don’t have time for them.”

Aunt Babe and Aunt Hetty, who weren’t actually my aunts—more like married-into-the-family-because-of-Cousin-Dickey—who actually was a cousin, owned and operated the pastry shop on the property: Dolci Piccoli, Little Sweets. They also shared a small California bungalow on the opposite side of the main driveway and were part owners of the orchard along with me and