The Supreme Macaroni Company Read Free Page A

that, once again, match the bridesmaids’ dresses. As dessert is served, the flowers are removed from the tables and the cookie trays become the centerpieces. They’re pretty and delicious, but never forget, it’s also a competition, fig bar against fig bar, but no one sings the National Anthem and gets a medal in the end—you just get bragging rights.”
    “I see,” Gianluca said as he pondered the insanity of our cookie competition.
    “Dress gloves are not for style—they were invented in the third century in Italy to hide the burn marks from pulling five hundred hot cookie sheets out of the oven the week before a wedding. The women bake as though their lives depend on it. It’s cookie-lookie! You got snowballs, pizzelles, amaretti, sesames, chocolate biscotti, mini cupcakes, jam-centered thumbprints, peanut butter rounds with a Hershey kiss hat, seven-layer cookies, coconut bonbons, and confetti—don’t forget those candy-coated almonds. They’re good luck, even when you crack a molar when you bite down on one.”
    “I’ll avoid the confetti.” Gianluca smiled.
    “While you’re at it, don’t eat the coconut cookies. They put something in the frosting dye that could survive a nuclear winter.”
    “Frosting dye?”
    I was beginning to lose patience with him, so I spoke slowly. “The frosting on the cookies is dyed to match the Barbie dolls dressed as the wedding party that become hood ornaments on the convertibles.”
    “Convertibles?”
    “Borrowed cars that carry the wedding party from the church to Leonard’s.”
    “Who is Leonard?”
    I put my hand on Gianluca’s face. He had the bone structure and profile of an emperor on a lucky Roman coin that turned up in my life and changed everything on a dime.
    “I’m getting ahead of myself. Forget all this. Let’s go to Tess and Charlie’s. But step on it, or we’ll miss the crab legs. They’re always the first to go.”
    M ontclair is a sweet village on the coastline of the Hudson River on the Jersey side. We laughed when Tess and Charlie moved to another state but still picked a place where they would be close enough to look across the river and find the Angelini Shoe Shop. It’s a comfort to me that I can reach any of my immediate family by phone, car, or canoe.
    Gianluca maneuvered deftly into a small space next to the driveway on Tess’s lawn.
    “God, I love Christmas,” I told him.
    My sister Tess knew how to throw around the merry. There was a big Christmas tree in the bay window clustered with tiny blue lights that twinkled like sapphires. She had settled a series of big red-and-white candy-cane decorations up the front walk. On the roof, Santa in his sleigh and Rudolph with a glowing red nose clung to the slates, fully lit and ready for takeoff. There was a wreath on the door with giant brass bells and red velvet ribbons. Two ceramic elves the size of my nephews flanked the door. This Santa Village was so elaborate, it needed its own zip code.
    Gianluca turned off the car. I took a deep breath. He leaned across the seat and kissed me. “Shall we go inside?”
    “No. Let’s sit in the car all night and make out.”
    “Your father is watching.”
    I looked up at the bay window, and there, next to the tree, was my father’s silhouette, with its big head and square, trim body. As he turned, you could see the outline of the Roncalli schnoz I’d inherited, but which had somehow magically skipped my sisters.
    The sight of my father alone in the window reminded me of all the times throughout my life that he’d waited for me.
    I remembered him sitting alone on the bleachers of the Holy Agony gym when I didn’t make the cut for JV basketball, at the foot of the sidewalk with the video camera when I emerged from our house in my First Communion dress and veil, and the night he came over to my studio apartment when I broke off my engagement with Bret Fitzpatrick, the perfect man for somebody else. Dad stood in the doorway, knowing that I was