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‘I’ll take him,’ I snapped, lifting Leo out of her arms. It wasn’t a request. She huffed and left the room.
It took me almost half an hour to settle him again. Twenty-seven minutes wasted unnecessarily because she’d just decided to rock up.
I gently shut the door and headed to the living room to see what she was doing now, but I found her in the hallway. Mopping.Too bloody right she should clean up her dirty footprints. I heard the key in the door. Thank God Lorenzo was back. Now he could deal with his mother. I’d already had enough of her.
‘Lorenzo!’ Marta gushed, rushing towards him, mop still in hand. She rested it against the wall and squeezed his cheeks like he was a baby.
‘Mamma!’ he said as Marta threw her arms around him like they hadn’t seen each other in years.Good grief.
They started babbling away in Italian and then Marta picked up the mop, started pushing it up and down the floor and wiping her brow like she’d been scrubbing for hours. Then she gestured towards the kitchen solemnly.
‘Grazie!’ He squeezed her hands, then came over to give me a hug and a kiss. ‘Mamma is so kind! She tell me that she come to help clean the house. She put washing on and now she clean the floors.So kind!’
What?
Icleaned the bloody floors! The only thingshe’d done was mop up her own mess and now Lorenzo thought Marta was Mother Teresa. And she put on the washing? I walked into the kitchen and sure enough, the machine was on. I was just about to do that myself whensomebodydecided to invite themselves over without warning, wake our son up and screw with his schedule in the process. Then she had the audacity to make out likeshewas doingmea favour. If I bit my tongue anymore, it would fall out of my mouth. Lorenzo was grinning, eager to hear my response.
Suck it up, Sophia. Play nice. It’s Lorenzo’s mum. Do it for him.
‘Grazie,’ I said, putting on my best fake smile.
‘Mamma, after all of your help, youmuststay for dinner!’
Oh, great.
I was hoping that after Leo woke up and Lorenzo gave him his bath, then fed and put him to bed, we could just relax on the sofa. Together.Just the two of us. But whenever Marta came for dinner, she often didn’t leave until late. Lorenzo would drive her home and even though it wouldn’t take him long, by the time he got back, I was usually fast asleep.
And what was I going to make for dinner now that she was here? I always liked to cook for Lorenzo on his days off, so thought I’d do something simple like a chicken pie, using the puff pastry sheets I had in the freezer, with mashed potatoes and a bit of veg. But if I did, Marta would make some snide remark about the fact that I hadn’t made the pastry from scratch.
God help me.
‘I’ll go and get started on the dinner.’
‘No need,amore. Mamma is going to cook for us.So kind.’
Mamma, mamma, bloodymamma.
To Lorenzo, Marta was just a sweet mother who had innocently popped round to be helpful and do some housework. But I couldn’t help but think sometimes her kind gestures were for show. Just to make herself look good and to make me look lazy and hopeless in the process.
Still, if I didn’t have to cook or put the washing on, I could recoup the time she’d cost me earlier. That was the least she could do. But if she pulled a stunt like disrupting our day again, I’d need to ask Lorenzo to have words with his preciousmamma...
