Tasting Fear Read Free

Nancy,” she muttered. “Hit me over the head with a brick. I barely even blink.”
    “Wrong,” Nell snapped. “Solid. Solid is different from stolid. You’re tough. Not flaky. Tough is sexy. There’s nothing sexy about flaky.”
    Nancy grunted. “Yeah? Ask any of my ex-fiancés.”
    “Hell, no.” Nell made an exaggerated pantomime of spitting on the ground. “Not unless you want me to slug them out for you.”
    Vivi burst out of the kitchen, eyes alight. “I found it!” She waved a yellowed scrap of paper in one hand and a wine bottle in the other.
    “Found what?” Nancy asked.
    “The recipe! For that horrendous grape thing! Schiacciata all’ uva! We even have some grapes, with seeds! Elsie left some with the casserole. The recipe’s in Italian, but you read Italian, right, Nell?”
    Nell adjusted her glasses, took the paper out of Vivi’s hand, and peered at it. “The measurements are metric, but we can find a conversion table online with Nancy’s BlackBerry,” she said.
    Nancy was bemused. “I thought you hated the grape thing!”
    “Oh, I do,” Vivi assured her. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s the perfect thing for Lucia’s wake. Just us three all sniveling together, a couple of bottles of port, and the gross grape focaccia.”
    Nancy grabbed her and hugged her hard. “Okay,” she whispered.
    None of them were good at pastry, but they put their hearts into it for Lucia’s sake. Their ragged version of sciacchiata all’uva was a far cry from Lucia’s elegant traditional Tuscan dish, but whatever. The oven timer did not go off. The smoke detector did. But the quantity of port they had drunk made them indiscriminating enough to actually eat some of it. It was as wonderfully awful as ever, especially burned.
    They toasted Lucia until dawn, alternately laughing and crying at the impenetrable mysteries of life and death. The cruelty and the beauty of it. Il dolce e l’amaro, as Lucia would’ve said. The bitter and the sweet.
     
    Nell leaned out of the passenger-side window of Vivi’s gaudily painted Volkswagen van the next morning. “Take-out dinner, eight o’clock, my place,” she reiterated forcefully. “Be there.”
    “If I can,” Nancy hedged. “I’ve got a million things to take—”
    “To take care of, yes. You always do, but you still have to eat,” Vivi scolded, leaning over Nell’s lap from the driver’s side.
    “If you’re not there, we’ll think you don’t care,” Nell warned.
    Vivi’s taillights glowed in the morning mist until they turned at the corner and were gone. The sky was heavy with bruised-looking clouds. Nancy’s head felt bruised, too. No surprise, considering the port they’d sucked down in their drunken revels. Cathartic, yeah, but this morning she felt like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe.
    Too bad. Time to get busy and do all the normal things in her crazy schedule, plus everything that had been put off last week because of Lucia’s death and funeral. Fortunately for her, frantic activity was her favorite coping mechanism, considering her career choice—an agent manager for singer-songwriters and folk bands. Back in college, she’d wanted to be a musician herself. She’d learned, to her cost, that she didn’t have the chops for it, and decided to make the best of it, and help the musicians who did. And that she was good at. Damn good. She had just the detail-minded, dogged determination for it.
    She had nudged her handpicked group of folk artists and ensembles out of the pub and coffeehouse concert series circuits and into theaters and more prestigious folk festivals. They were getting better record deals, more airtime on radio stations. Some were poised to break into the big time. If that happened, her hard work would start to pay off. This was the last push toward that glorious day when she could hire a staff, instead of being a one-woman agency. She’d been working sixteen-hour days, sometimes working nights as well, for