“Yeah?” he says. His eyebrow knit. He’s smiling. “No, Nario, but thank you very much for the offer. Yes, Nario, maybe next time. Sure, sure.” He shakes his head. “Are you ever going to get tired of this?” He laughs. “Didn’t think so. All right. Goodbye.”
“What was that about?” I ask.
I’ve heard a little about this Nario over the weeks. I know he and Carlo work together, but that they’re more friends than colleagues. Maybe they’re more like brothers.
“Nario finds it hilarious to invite me to dinner every couple of weeks. He’s done it for years, even though I say no every time.”
“But why do you say no?” I ask.
The question seems to surprise him. “Well.” He shrugs. “It’s too … I have no desire to be an unwanted addition to somebody else’s family, to pretend that I am something I am not. Nario is the family man, not me. I suppose I would feel uncomfortable in such an intimate setting with them. Not like that. In their home. Well, their hotel, I should say.”
Nario is the family man, not me. I feel a stabbing in my belly. Suddenly, it’s really important that we go to this fricking dinner.
“Call him back,” I say, reaching for his cell phone. “Call him back right now and say you’d love to go to dinner and that you’re bringing a date. Make sure to mention how glamorous this date is, too.”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “I hope you’re joking.”
“I am in no way joking. I mean it. Or no sex for a week.”
“Really?” His fingers trail temptingly up my bare thighs. I really need to stop wearing shorts around the house. “Do you think you could hold out that long?”
I dart my hand down and grab his wrist. “Just try me, motherfucker,” I growl.
Laughing, he holds his hands up in defeat. “You’re serious.”
“I am deadly serious.”
He reaches for his cell phone. “Then I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”
24
Hazel
Two hours before we’re due to leave for dinner, Alda appears at my door with an almost hungry look in her eye. I get the sense that Emily won’t let her near when she’s wielding an eyeliner pen and hairclips, so I’m it. She has a bag that wouldn’t look out of place in a bank robbery. She looks serious.
“I am helping you prepare for tonight and I will not take no for an answer. Understood?”
I rise from the bed, placing my book on the side table. “It doesn’t sound like I have much of a choice.” I walk over and put my hand on her shoulder. “But really, I’m glad you’re here. I was going to ask for your help, anyway.”
Maybe that’s not one hundred percent true, but what’s a little white lie to see her smile? I try not to look at her scar as she places the bag on the bed and zips it open to reveal the tools of her trade. If I look too closely at it, I’ll think about what Carlo told me, about the complex web I’ve fallen into it. I might scream. I might run. So I do what I got good at during childhood: lock it all away in a box in my head.
Alda spins on me. “Ready?”
She sounds like a referee before a fight, but I manage a nod. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Over the course of the next hour and a half, I find out what it would be like to trade places with my canvases. I am painted, prodded, pruned, touched-up, perfected, erased, re-perfected. “No, that’s not quite right.” She does my makeup twice. She piles my hair on top of my head with golden pins that somehow form an intricate honeycomb. We cycle through about ten different dresses, because, apparently, they have to match the necklace she’s lending me.
During the whole process, I don’t get to look at myself in the mirror. She’s very particular about that. “I want it to be a surprise,” she tells me.
As she’s applying my eyeliner with the same look of concentration I imagine brain surgeons have in the operating room, I ask, “What was it like when you find out you were pregnant, Alda? The first time, I mean.”
“You move your face too much when you talk,” she scolds. “Pregnant? Oh, it was … it was wonderful, dear, a gift from God.” She’s talking absentmindedly, everything fixated on my eyes. “I felt this immediately, well, I suppose you would call