LITMIR.BIZ

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painter), I could smell dinner. Giles does the cooking and he uses a lot of spice. My palate had certainly been expanded beyond my parents’ white-bread meals.

      When I opened the door, the smell became stronger. Not African, Italian.

      Marco’s mother, at least, must be here and probably also his father. If my parents were cold fish, Marco’s parents were as far as you could get in the opposite direction. Their affection was like being wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. All the time. They were overwhelming in their care of me and the boys after Marco died. In fact, they would have taken over our lives if I had let them. And I’d almost let them. It had only been in the two years or so and our move to Hyde Park that I’d tried to pull back a little and define our lives myself. It wasn’t easy.

      “Mom, Mom, Nonna and Nonno are here!” Two faces, two voices raised to a decibel no human voice should be able to achieve. Sam and Mike came barreling down the long center hallway and careened into me. At six, they packed quite a wallop. I dropped to my knees, both to hug them and to keep from being knocked over backwards.

      “Hey, guys! Big, big hug.” We all linked arms and swayed first right and then left, faster and faster until we all went tumbling onto the floor. It was our ritual greeting since the time they could walk, but it was getting tougher and tougher not to get flattened on the floor when we did it. They each weighed about fifty-five pounds and could take me down when they chose.

      “Kris-tin-a?”

      Mama Ginelli called from the kitchen at the back. Nonna’s rolling Italian accent made my name into three syllables. You’d think Nonna had been born in Genoa, but she was a native Chicagoan. She’d grown up in the kind of closed, ethnic community that so characterized Chicago with churches, stores and clubs rooted in particular immigrant identities. That was eroding some, now, but it hadn’t affected Nonna in the least. Or maybe it had, and she was clinging to it nevertheless.

      “Yes, Nonna, we’re coming,” I called obediently.

      I gathered a bunch of child under each arm and left my briefcase on the floor where it had fallen under their assault. I’d get it later.

      “Let’s march.”

      We frog-marched, arms linked, bumping into the walls of the narrow hallway and staggered into the kitchen.

      Nonna turned from the stove where she’d been stirring the sauce that was the source of the intense garlic smell in the house. Marco’s mother was fully a foot and a half shorter than I am, with a bosom that could double as a tray if she would ever eat in bed, a luxury, I was sure, she would never permit herself. With her steel-grey hair pulled back into a severe bun and a floral patterned dress, should could have been posing for an ad for pasta sauce. ‘Tastes like Mama made it!’

      “There you are. Finally. These boys have missed you so.”

      Yes, while Nonna was warm and basically sweet, was there a mother-in-law alive who would miss a chance to distribute a little guilt to a working daughter-in-law?

      “Now Natalie. You know she keeps better hours these days.”

      Marco’s father was behind us, seated at the built-in breakfast nook under the kitchen window. I was surprised he could still fit between the bench and the table. Since his retirement last year, Marco’s father, Vincent Ginelli, had probably put on a good twenty pounds or more. And that was on top of the weight his six-foot frame had already carried. The beer bottle in front of him looked like it was almost empty.

      I turned and winked at him. Vince winked back. He loved it when we shared a joke on Natalie.

      Marco’s father had also been a cop. He and Natalie had both been devastated by Marco’s death; I was surprised he hadn’t retired right after that. But he’d stuck it out—not just for the pension increase, but I thought because he had to continue or he would have been consumed by the anger as well as grief.

      He had certainly approved of my leaving the force since he’d never really approved of my being on the force to begin with. Not a woman’s job, though he’d also been a little proud of me. At least I hoped he had been.

      Now, both he and Natalie really liked it that I was a professor. They would have preferred I stay home, of course, but they found my ‘studying all the time’ a source of pride and a little awe. I was in Religion (never mind the Philosophy). Very respectable. (If they only knew). Marco had seen to it that the boys had been baptized Catholic, but we didn’t go to church. They knew that, but didn’t nag. As long as I mourned their son, they seemed willing to forgive me anything.

      “I thought you two were still in Wisconsin with Vince, Jr. and Marilyn.”

      Vince and Natalie had had five children, all boys. They spent their retirement now visiting the four boys and their families in turn in a large motorhome. I wondered where they had parked it.

      Vince, Jr. was Marco’s oldest brother. He and his wife had four kids.

      “Marilyn’s mother came on the weekend and we came on back,” Natalie explained without turning from her sauce.

      Well, that was why they were here. Daughter-in-law Marilyn was from California, and her mother Beverly, several times divorced, could not have been more different from Natalie. They were from different planets, different galaxies even. Not that Natalie would have had to share the kitchen with Beverly. Beverly knew exactly how to order take-out in any city she visited.

      On the other hand, I did know somebody who minded that Natalie took over the kitchen when she came.

      “Where’s Giles?” I asked.

      “Oh, he took that stew he was making up to their apartment.”

      Natalie knew she’d driven Giles out and her uncharacteristically short sentence revealed it. And she was probably still upset over Beverly’s unexpected arrival at Vince, Jr.’s.

      Great. I sighed inwardly. Giles took his cooking very seriously and did not like to have dinner plans changed at the drop of a hat. Now we were going to have someone in a French African funk for a few days until we ate enough Giles-cooked food to make it up to him. Fortunately, the boys would eat literally anything you put in front of them.

      They were over by the stove now, behind Natalie, sniffing around like hungry puppies.

      “When do we eat? When do we eat?” they chorused together.

      I wondered vaguely if their simultaneous talking, something they had done since they had learned to speak, as I’d learned twins did, should continue to worry me. I’d raised it as a concern with their pediatrician several times over the years, and been waved off with ‘they’ll grow out of it.’ Fine. But when?

      “Can we eat soon, Natalie? We have Tae Kwon Do class tonight at seven and I like them to digest a little before class.”

      Three nights a week the boys and I took classes in Korean martial arts at the local Y. They loved it and so did I. I’d learned some self-defense techniques at the police academy, but this was different.

      Taw Kwon Do meant “the art of hands and feet.” It was much more graceful than Karate, emphasizing quick kicks and jump turns to get out of an assailant’s way. The boys needed the structure of the class and a release for their nearly inexhaustible energy. I needed the chance to kick and punch the blue pads we used. I would imagine specific faces on the bags. I always felt like a rag doll after class, but more alive, more human.

      “So, show your old Nonno what you learn in this class of yours.”

      Vince extracted his bulk from the banquette and stood up, mimicking a martial arts fighting stance.

      With a whoop, the boys were on him, throwing kicks and punches at his knees and thighs. Their high-pitched yells, called a “kihap” by our teacher, attracted Molly, our golden retriever from outside where she’d probably been napping in the last of the sunshine. She banged through the kitchen dog door and jumped up on poor Vince’s back.

      “Ah, oh—coming to get me are you? Down, Molly, down.

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