Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Read Free

monogram. I had never seen them on her bed. Smal packets of cedar were scattered in the drawer and the pungent smel indicated to me that the drawer had not been opened in a long time. I lifted the linens and found a box-like shape wrapped in another embroidered cloth. When I unwrapped the cloth, I saw that I had indeed found the cigar box.
    It was papered in garish yellow and brown with the portrait of some nineteenth-century barrel-chested tobacco mogul on the cover, and a Spanish label. The box had once held Cuban cigars, but I was sure it wasn't cigars I was bringing to Giulia.
    I sat on the floor and careful y lifted the cover. Inside the box were stacks of letters on pale blue notepaper, each stack tied with a thin strand of satin ribbon. I could see that the letters had been written in a flowing hand in Italian and signed Paolo, the father my father had been too young to know, the grandfather whose red hair I had inherited.
    I closed the box, feeling I'd already gone too far, that I had violated the privacy of a very private woman. Why she would want me to remove these letters from what appeared to be a hiding place and carry them across the Atlantic to her was both perplexing and intriguing. The woman who was asking me to do this was not the woman I knew my grandmother to be— the matriarch of our very large family, who had not only her sons and daughters, but her nieces and nephews, grown men and women in their fifties and sixties, listening to her and deferring to her as if they were stil children; the businesswoman who'd asked me to col ect her mail as wel as her checkbook so she could manage her real-estate investments from her hospital bed; the woman who could be counted on to have a sharp opinion and directive about everything that touched the lives of her children and grandchildren.
    Perhaps because I'd been a baby when her husband Salvatore had died and I had only known Giulia as a widow, I could not fathom her ever being in love. I knew, of course, that she'd been married before Salvatore to Paolo Serafini. But that had been long ago, and whatever traces of him remaining in her memory were wel hidden. We did not even have a photograph of Paolo.
    Giulia had never seemed to have much use for love. She had warned me away from romantic entanglements more than once when I was a teenager.
    "Stay away from Joey Costel o," she told me one evening as we were shel ing peas on her front porch. I was thirteen; Joey lived next door to her. He was a year older, ful of the swagger and bravado of the good-looking Italian teenage boy. But he had noticed me and was paying attention to me in ways that I, bookish and reserved, found thril ing.
    "He's nothing but trouble. You don't need to be hanging around the likes of him. At the very least, you'll get a reputation, like that putana of a sister he has. And at the worst, he'll break your heart as soon as somebody who can sway her hips better than you walks by him. You're too smart, Cara mia. Don't waste your time on boys like that."
    Later, when I was sixteen and spending a week with her while my parents were away, I developed a crush on a neighbor who lived nearby, one of her tenants. He was married and in his twenties, with two smal children.
    But he did chores for Giulia around the garden and the house, so he was around to talk to as he fixed a faucet or dug up some rosebushes she wanted to transplant. He was cute and funny and attentive and, in the short time I'd been there, it seemed to me he was finding quite a few things to do for Giulia. When his wife went to visit her mother with the kids, I suggested to my grandmother that we invite him to Sunday dinner.
    "Phil's al alone today. Wouldn't it be nice to ask him to eat with us?" I was trying to sound like the gracious lady of the manor, bestowing kindness on the hired help, rather than the infatuated teenager I was, looking for any reason to be in his presence. I was nonchalant, mentioning it as an afterthought as she and