Chapter One i would just like to state for the record that I tried to say no. In fact, I did say no. But my sister, as usual, refused to hear it. And then she dragged my credit rating, ten years of pent-up guilt and my ex-boyfriend into it, so what was I to do?
This was late June in Florence and I was holed up in a narrow-halled hotel near the Piazza del Duomo. Skye and I were thirty minutes into a intercontinental AT&T marathon. Between the crackling overseas connection and her wet, honking noseblows, details were sketchy. But all signs seemed to indicate trouble on the marital front.
"Mitzi!" she shrieked. "Her name is fucking Mitzi!"
My brother-in-law had a long history of dallying with poodle-named women. Before he married Skye, there had been a Brandi, a Lulu, and even, if the rumors can be believed, a Kiki.
"Mitzi, huh?" I said. "That cuts like a knife."
I did not point out that since Bob, ruddy-cheeked and shifty-eyed, had left his second wife for her after a few illicit trysts in a pickup truck, this situation was not quite the Stonehengian coincidence she was making it out to be.
My sigh stirred up a flurry of dust motes on the windowsill. This was not new territory for us. I turned back to the laptop perched on the hotel's spindly legged end table and put my Big Sister voice on autopilot while I started to proofread my latest attempt at a travel article. "Sweetie, I know you're upset right now -- "
"I think that there should be laws against calling your children bad seventies porn star names!" she sobbed. "The rule should be: What if your daughter wants to grow up and be a senator? Who's going to vote for Senator Mitzi?"
"Okay, just calm -- "
"What am I going to do? Bob is the love of my life! How could he dump me like this? No one ever dumps me." She paused. "Now I finally understand how you felt all those times."
I held my breath, counted to ten and tried to ignore the hot prickling in my chest.
"Faith? Are you even listening? I'm totally serious. I'm killing myself!"
This was my cue.
"Suck it up, Skye. Come on," I barked like a sergeant demanding six A.M. push-ups. "This isn't the spirit that won the West. You're not going to kill yourself over some chick named Mitzi and your jackass husband. First of all, you know you can do better. By your own admission, that guy Lars or whoever has been panting after you for weeks."
Ragged breathing over the line, but I thought I could hear a smile creep in.
"Second of all, have some dignity. My God. Don't give the whole town something else to talk about. Our family has already provided enough scandal for one generation, don't you think?"
A feeble cough.
"Third, this phone call is costing you about a million dollars and if you kill yourself, I'll have to pay for it." This was pretty much a done deal, regardless. My family had always had amnesia in matters of the heart and outstanding debt.
The note of hysteria in her voice melted into playground pleading. "But I need you."
I scrolled down to the next page of the draft for my article on Italian gelato. "Keep your shirt on, dude. I just need to double-check a few facts for this article, and then I'm flying back to California."
Since I moved to Los Angeles after high school, I had noticed some alarming changes in my diction. Along with a San Fernando slide-whistle lilt, the word "dude" had crept into my vocabulary, supplanting nouns, verbs, and exclamation points. I realized that this cut my subjective I.Q. in half, as effectively as snapping a wad of sugarless gum all day would do. But it had displaced the earnest Midwest intonations of my childhood, and I couldn't say that I was broken up about it.
"Look, Faithie, I need you to come to back home for a few weeks. I can't deal with this all by myself. I can't."
"No." I made my stand. "I live in California now. If you need me, you know you're always welcome there. But I am not going back to Minnesota."
"Come on! You haven't been home in years." I could hear Kleenex rustling against the earpiece.
"No."
"I really need you. I don't know where Bob went, and I think that -- " cough, cough " -- the bar might be having a little bit of trouble. Moneywise."
I stopped proofreading. If Skye was willing to admit financial glitches, I knew we were looking at ten pounds of trouble in a one-pound bag. "Define 'trouble'."
"Um, I'm not really sure."
"Well, you better get sure right now. What kind of trouble? Exactly how poor am I going to be?" I closed my eyes, once again cursing my own weakness. Three years ago, Skye, in the throes of her first divorce at the tender age of twenty-one, had suckered me into handing over all my worldly assets to help her buy and refurbish a ramshackle backwoods tavern, which she dubbed "The Roof Rat" and immediately turned over to Bob's management. That was back when I still co-owned a juice bar in Santa Monica (long story), before I gave it all up to travel the world and write "Street Food," a tiny little column in a tiny little food magazine for which I earned a tiny little salary. I started out writing about fresh produce and juice in California, then progressed to hot dogs and pretzels in Manhattan and beignets in New Orleans. Now we were into the European fare -- gelato in Florence, crepes in Paris -- you get the idea.
Why, one might well ask, would I give up regular income and stability for jet lag and isolation?
Well. Family life and stability had never been my strong point. Exhibit A: the conversation currently in progress.
"My life is falling apart!" Skye gasped. "How can you complain about money at a time like this?"
"I can complain about money because I have to pay my rent." "That bar is my only investment, and I'm not expecting to make untold millions, but I warned you about Bob -- "
"Stop yelling!" she yelled. "God. It's only been two months since I sent you the last check."
"This deal was your idea, Skye -- you're supposed to send me $2,000 a month. The last two months have netted me negative $4,000 and some strongly worded letters from Visa. I understand you're going through a rough time right now, but again I ask you: What has the bar done for me lately?"
She whimpered. "This isn't my fault! Bob took a lot of cash with him."
"Well..." I threw my hands up and looked toward the ceiling, searching for divine intervention or at least a modicum of patience. "I thought you guys were talking to a financial counselor. What happened to that?"
"Bob said we couldn't afford to pay someone else to manage our money."
I closed my eyes. "Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick. Skye, I swear..."
"Don't be like this, Faith, I can't take it. Bob always handled the money and the vendors and everything, and now he's gone. I don't know what to do about the bar. I'm in deep trouble." She started crying again, big heaving chokes.
I fought the urge to remind her that I was not on the Academy Awards nomination committee and gritted my teeth. "I'll try to help you out with the bar. But you know I am not going back to Minnesota."
"Yes!"
"No."
"Please!"
I remembered the time she'd worn her new red galoshes out to recess in first grade. She'd waded into a puddle of mud and gotten stuck in the thick brown sludge. Squirming and squalling, she'd refused help from her teacher and the principal. Finally, they'd had to call me out of a spelling test so I could lift her out of her boots and carry her to the asphalt. She'd wrapped her arms and legs around me like a koala learning to scale a eucalyptus tree.
I thought about Skye as a ringletted six-year-old. I thought about my credit rating.
But then I thought about all the reasons I'd had to leave Minnesota in the first place, and I held my ground. "Listen. We'll work something out, okay? Don't go Lady of Shalott on me."
"Lady of who?"
"Never mind. I'll fix this when I get back to L.A."
The broken wailing resumed. "Everything's falling part, and I'm all alone, and the memories, Faith, the memories..."
I rolled my eyes. "Listen. I head back to California next week. Send me all the legal documents and financial accounts for the bar, and we'll take it from there."
"And, what should I do about Lars?"
I blinked. "Nothing. Listen. Skye, are you listening to me?"
Sniff. "Yuh-huh."
"I don't care if it's raining men. Wait until we find Bob and get this whole Mitzi situation sorted out before you get the next victim lined up. I'm begging you."
"But -- "
I dropped my head into my hands. "Begging you."
She paused. "Okay. But I really think you should try to get out here, because -- "
"No!"
"For a week!"
"No!"
"A weekend!"
"Bye, now. Say hi to Mom." I hung up the phone, leaned back in my chair, and tried not to drown in my sister's anxiety and fatigue. She was a grown woman. She had to learn to clean up her own messes. I couldn't just keep dropping everything to bail her out every time she made a mistake. She knew she was asking for too much this time. I was perfectly justified in drawing the line at the Minnesota state line.
Right?
I shut down my computer, rubbed my temples, and grabbed my hotel key off the table. Maybe a walk and some gelato would clear my head. And my conscience.
*** Florence in the summer smells like a backwoods bar. If you close your eyes and plug your ears against the mosquito whine of motorini, you can smell the ripe melange of smoke and sweat charged with emotion. So it was not surprising that I spent much of my time there thinking about my hometown, finding familiar pieces of my past in a language and culture I didn't understand.
I was wandering through the Piazza della Republica, trying to stay out of the tourists' photo ops, when my cell phone rang. This was highly unususal -- hardly anyone called my cell when I was on the road, which I almost always was. I dug the phone out of my leather tote bag and frowned at the unfamili...
