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I heard the anxiety in his voice. Even though he was a grown man, when your parents depended on you the way his parents seemed to, I knew he had a rocky road ahead of him with his dreams.
“Will Frankie and Ted pick up the slack when you’re gone? And what about Rocco? He doesn’t seem to be connected to the restaurant at all.”
“Frankie can’t be depended on, at least not yet. I think he loves making pizzas and cooking in general, but he’s too interested in women to take his career seriously. Ted only works when he has to. He likes to bake. Ever since he spent an entire summer with our relatives in Florence and took that part-time job at Letti’s bakery in Williamsport, he mostly checked out of the pizzeria. My parents don’t know about his side hustle. I guess we’re a family of secrets. And Rocco, well, he likes to make hand-crafted furniture. Another secret my parents don’t know about yet.”
“I have some of that going on in my family as well. Mostly just from me. I tell my parents what they want to hear.”
“Seems we’re both holding back information from our parents. For Christmas, Uncle Louie offered to be my main investor if I ever got around to opening my own restaurant. He didn’t tell my parents about his offer. He felt as though my dad might think of it as a betrayal, and I get that, so I haven’t said anything to my parents either. Anyway, all I have to do is work up a proposal and give it to him. I don’t know if you know it or not, but Uncle Louie recently retired from his own law firm in Harrisburg. Now he wants to invest his money in family businesses. Mine will be the first, if I go through with it. I’m still torn. But if I do, I’ll need a good publicist to help get the word out, and from what I understand, that’s your specialty.”
“You’d be my first client,” I told him without thinking about what that might mean.
“I would love to work with you,” he said, sounding completely sincere.
“That would be fun!” I told him, turning on my stomach in bed. “Do you have a name for your restaurant? We could work up a brand for it, do a grand opening celebration, and get you a fun Facebook page, Instagram page, and maybe we could even do some Tik Tok videos of you getting the whole thing up and running. We might even be able to run a Kickstarter for you. People love to be a part of a new business.”
I was on a roll now, turning out a whole host of ideas for him, and not thinking about my resolution to leave once I finished my classes, my thesis, and received my degree. I wanted to walk with the rest of my graduating class this coming June. I didn’t walk when I received my bachelor’s degree, so I would like to do it with my master’s.
“That all sounds so amazing. I’d love to work with you on all of this.” He sounded excited about the possibility, and it enhanced my own excitement. I loved working with people who were more than talk… who did the work and followed through with their dreams and ideas. I knew so many people with great ideas, who would get all excited about the possibilities and never followed through. It saddened me when they did that, and no matter how many times I would try to help them get past their own fear, nothing would work.
Gianni didn’t strike me as that kind of person, at least not so far.
Thing was, I had some of that myself… fear… a whole lot of fear.
“In a perfect world, when would you expect to open?” I asked, hoping he had some sort of definite plan.
“If, and this is a monumental if… if I rented the storefront and started the remodel in the next few weeks, I would think sometime in the summer… maybe July or August.”
I almost sighed, but instead, I waited for a moment to speak.
“Dani… are you still there?” he asked, his voice now a little shaky.
“I’ll be gone by then,” I told him, feeling as though I’d just punched him in the gut. Of course, when I said it, I felt as though someone had just punched me in the gut as well. “But I certainly could do a lot of the campaign remotely.”
“Sure,” he said, but I could hear the total disappointment.
Gianni 13
The next day, while I was busy thinking about my conversation with Dani the previous night, before I realized what was happening, the pizza dough I’d been twirling went airborne and slapped my dad in the back of the head. Then it glommed onto his shoulders and back like it had a life of its own. I felt as if we’d been transported to some sci-fi movie with gooey white aliens attacking humans, and they would eventually take over the world. I stood silent for a moment, unable to move, watching as my dad yelled something in Italian about how he would send me to live in Italy if I couldn’t keep my mind on my work. That his brother Fredo would teach me a thing or two about discipline.
He’d been threatening us with his brother Fredo since we were kids. We’d never met Uncle Fredo, well, maybe Ted had when he spent that summer in Florence, but he’d never mentioned it. None of us thought Fredo existed, but when we were kids, it was like being threatened to be sent to another planet. We knew nothing about Italy and were deathly afraid of being sent there. Dad could get us to do almost anything if the threat of Uncle Fredo and Italy was mentioned.
Of course, it had no effect on us now that we were grown men, other than knowing our dad was pissed. We all wanted to spend some time there, even more after Ted had gone and returned with all sorts of great stories.
I wanted to go just to learn more about the regional food, but that trip would have to wait for a few more years.
My dad ripped the clinging dough from his back, dumped it in the large trash can, gave me a rap on the head, and said, “What’s wrong with you? Do I gotta start worrin’ about you too? It’s not enough that I gotta worry about your other brothers, but now I gotta think about you, too? I got plenty going on with them never coming into work when they say they will. Now I gotta wonder if you’re gonna waste food because your mind ain’t on your job? What are you, in love or something?”
We stood in our kitchen at Boston Pizza, my dad, Frankie, along with a chef in training Altero Ricci, a cousin just off the plane from Southern Italy. He spoke about ten words in English but was quickly picking up the language. Altero’s eyes widened when the dough hit my dad, but he never moved or spoke a word. He merely stared, waiting for something to happen.
The kitchen needed remodeling in the worst way. It was small and inefficient in its layout, but we’d made it work, so when the dough hit my dad, there was no hiding who did it.
“Gianni’s in love with the girl in red,” Frankie taunted as he ladled a thick tomato sauce onto one of our al forno pasta dishes before he slid it into the open brick oven.
“I’m sorry, Pop. It just got away from me, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything. I was distracted by…” I tried desperately to come up with a logical excuse. One that seemed more acceptable rather than agreeing with Frankie’s assessment. I quickly flashed on the flood of phone and text orders we had gotten for our pizzas. Apparently, no one wanted to venture out in this bad weather, so ordering a couple of pizzas seemed like the easiest way to eat. “… um… all the orders we have. How are we ever going to fill all these orders? I don’t think we have enough pre-made dough to make this many pizzas.”
“And now we got one less. But don’t worry. Your father stays ahead of the weather. I made extra dough early this morning while you two were still in bed. It should be ready by now. It’s in the pantry, in the back. I gonna get it. You keep your mind focused on the restaurant. You can think about that Christmas woman on your own time, not on mine.”
And he walked back to the pantry.
