Page 52 of My Fake Italian Marriage

Laughing, Cleo shook her head, and handed him the gelato which was rapidly melting over her fingers.

“I need to leave, too.” Beatrice rose reluctantly from the bench. “I must help serve lunch at the taverna, but I’ll see you at the football tomorrow.”

“What football?” Sarah asked.

“It’s the last match of the season, and it’s a home game. Luca’s our town’s best midfielder,” Beatrice explained with pride.

Sarah turned to Cleo. “You’ll be there too?”

“Of course I’ll be there.” Cleo cast her own mischievous smile at Luca. “After all, a good wife should support her husband in everything he does, shouldn’t she?”

ChapterTwenty-One

Pan di sudore, miglior sapore.

(Bread tastes better if you have to work for it.)

Sarah hadn’t been joking when she said Cleo could barely crack an egg. Correction: Cleo could crack an egg; she just couldn’t do it without breaking the yolk and sprinkling shards of eggshell into the mix.

However, it turned out her biggest handicap in the kitchen wasn’t her lack of culinary skills, but her lack of Italian. Since Pierina didn’t speak a word of English, and Cleo’s Italian was still severely limited, the cooking lesson was one long mime act.

The first hurdle was that Pierina expected her to make her own pasta. Why make your own when you lived in Italy and every corner deli sold the most delicious ready-made pasta? But she followed the housekeeper’s gesticulations—which involved a lot of incomprehensible and dramatic pointing at her chest—and mixed the ingredients in a big bowl. After a great deal of mixing and stirring, Cleo had a sticky, lumpy ball of dough which, at Pierina’s direction, she wrapped in cling film and left to set.

“Oggi facciamo una cosa semplice e facile,” Pierina said, as they turned their attention to making a sauce.

Simple and easy. As far as Cleo was concerned, simple and easy would be heating a store-bought sauce, but she did as she was told, chopping tomatoes, celery, onions and carrots. Luca made dicing vegetables appear easy, but Cleo’s pieces looked as if they’d been hacked with a machete. And there may have been a touch of blood added as seasoning to the carrots.

Resolutely tuning out Pierina’s despairing moans of “no, no, no,” she set to sautéing the vegetables in a pan with red wine and tarragon. At least the concoctionsmellededible, so how bad could it be?

When they removed the sauce from the stovetop, Cleo unwrapped her pasta dough ball on the cleaned, floured surface of the kitchen table, and Pierina handed her a long, thin stick of smooth wood that looked like a weapon. Cleo eyed it with trepidation. What was she supposed to do with this?

Pierina waved her arms in a circular motion. “Ora stendi la pasta.You roll.”

The kitchen was as big as the Blue Salon, intimidatingly modern and professional, and fitted with a bunch of fancy appliances—but not one was a pasta maker?

Kneading and rolling out dough was not as much fun as Sarah made it look. Despite the intense work-out to her arms, the dough remained thick and lumpy. Then Pierina showed her how to cut the pasta into thinfettuccine. By hand. With aknife. The job required muscle control, concentration and patience, none of which Cleo had in vast supply, but at last the tagliatelle were cut into uneven strips way thicker than they should be, and Pierina set Cleo to boiling them.

If this lesson had taught Cleo anything, it was that she was better off buying microwave-ready meals.

If she’d hoped she could now sit and watch the pot boil, she was out of luck. With the air of a drill sergeant, Pierina made her stir the pot. And stir. Someone really ought to invent an automatic stirrer. There were at least ten other, far more productive, things Cleo could be doing than standing here stirring a pot of boiling water.

“Isn’t it ready yet?” she asked for the third time before Pierina finally allowed her to remove the pot from the stove to drain the starchy water. And drat, now her glasses were fogged up, turning her momentarily blind.

At last, Cleo collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. Her hair had frizzed in the heat, and her back was plastered with sweat, but she’d done it. She’d made her first ever meal from scratch. Despite Pierina’s unimpressed expression, she was proud of the achievement.

The kitchen door banged open, and she jumped.

“Hi, honey. I’m home!” While she no doubt looked like a half-drowned sewer rat, Luca looked particularly delicious, his hair mussed by the breeze, his sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned, toned forearms. He leaned against the doorframe, arms across his chest, as he took in her dishevelled state. “Have you and Pierina been cooking or wrestling?”

“Ha-ha.”

Pierina waved Luca to wash his hands and then she plated the meal, pouring the vegetable sauce over Cleo’s handmade pasta. Luca slid into the seat beside Cleo and she waited, heart in her throat, as he took a bite. And then another.

“Well?” she demanded impatiently.

He grinned, clearly enjoying tormenting her. “The sauce is not bad. Not up to Pierina’s high standards, of course, but at least it’s not as bad as store-bought sauce.” He patted her hand consolingly. “You cannot expect to be good at something the first time you do it.”

Hmmm. Not quite a compliment, but she’d take it. “Isn’t a husband supposed to support his wife in everything she does?” she muttered.

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