Julie and Romeo (24 page)

“I don’t know why we have to shake her down on her birthday,” Alan said. His pretty Italian wife stood next to him, nodding.

“Because we’re not going to come back and do this again next week,” Nora said. “It isn’t that much fun.”

It occurred to me that if the old woman didn’t give her secret up to Plummy, she would have to take on Nora in the next round. It would be a different kind of shakedown altogether.

“What letters?” Tony said.

“Wait, wait!” Raymond pulled back from the window. “She’s coming in.”

I imagine that I now have some idea of how the defendant
feels when the jury files back into the courtroom with a folded-up piece of paper. Plummy came back alone. She pulled her hair away from her face and twisted it into a knot, which miraculously held itself in place without the aid of pins. “Where’s Grammy?” Raymond said.

“She’s sitting down outside for a minute. She wanted some air.”

“So what’s the story?” Nora said. Nora, more than anyone else, wanted to get the hell out of there.

“The story is this.” Plummy leaned back against the counter and spread out her arms behind her. She spoke to Nora. “My grandmother and your grandfather had a love affair.”

“My grandfather?” Nora pointed at her chest.

“The hell they did,” Joe said.

Plummy held up her hand but didn’t look at him. “Please,” she said. “This was a very long time ago. The Rosemans had their shop in Somerville and Grammy and Grampy had a shop in the North End. Grammy met Mr. Roseman buying vases and they fell in love. I guess it was all pretty hot. Grammy wanted to be closer to Mr. Roseman, so she talked Grampy into moving their shop to Somerville. She told him it was a better place to raise children. Daddy was three years old then and they called the place Romeo’s. The way I understand it, Mr. Roseman strung Grammy along big-time. He kept promising Grammy that he was going to run away with her, but every time she was ready to go, he would come up with some lame excuse and they never did it. After a while Grammy got really angry, and I guess she started doing things to the Rosemans. She said it started out small at first—she’d bad-mouth their flowers to other people, she threw
a rock through their window once. Then she hid a dead fish in their storeroom, a flounder. That was when Mr. Roseman got mad at her and he paid a kid to dump a box of fleas in their store. It was back and forth, one thing and then another. Grammy told Grampy that the Rosemans were trying to ruin them to get their customers, that the Rosemans were trying to force them out of the neighborhood and that they had to fight back. Who knows what Mr. Roseman told Mrs. Roseman? No one actually got ruined until now. There were some other details, but I think that’s pretty much the story.”

“And they fell for it?” Nora asked her. “My grandmother and old man Cacciamani? They just picked up the feud and ran with it without any more information than that?”

“Well, all of us did, too. Our families hated each other, and we didn’t even have the fleas to deal with.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Raymond said.

“Go ask her. She’s told it once now, I bet she’ll tell it again. Or go and read the letters under the mattress. They’re pretty steamy.”

“But she hated Mr. Roseman,” Nicky said. “She hated him more than any of them.”

“That’s the way it works sometimes,” Plummy said thoughtfully. “Big love makes for big hate.”

“I still hate him,” old Mrs. Cacciamani said. She was standing at the door, suddenly looking older than ninety. Her blue pantsuit was wrinkled. Her party hat was tipped to one side.
I’m 90!
it reminded us. “And I’ll hate every last one of them until I die.”

My father? I thought. My father and the Wicked Witch of the West? The woman he hated above all other life-forms? I could still hear his voice clearly in my head. I could hear every terrible
name he called her. Of all the possible explanations, I had to admit this one seemed the most implausible to me.

“Mama, are you sure about this?” Romeo asked.

“Of course I’m sure about this. What do you think, I don’t know who I was in love with?” Then, with the surprising vigor of a woman in love, she slammed through the kitchen door and back into her party. It swung open, shut, open, shut, behind her.

The rest of us stood there listening to the accordion music coming through the wall.

“Just to recap,” Nora said, taking a drink from a cup of red punch that was sitting on the counter. “What this means is that the birthday girl was in love with my grandfather, my mother is in love with your father, and my sister is in love with Tony here.”

Sandy looked mortified.

“That’s what it’s looking like,” Plummy said.

Nora continued. “So the basis of this tedious, never-ending fight is that three generations of Cacciamanis and Rosemans have been in love with each other.”

The room took a moment to digest this piece of information. Then Nora started to laugh and pretty soon Sandy was laughing, too. Then Plummy joined in. She put her hand over her mouth, but she was laughing. At that point none of the rest of us got the joke.

“Mr. Cacciamani,” Nora said. “Keep your store. Think of me as your benevolent landlord. You,” she said, pointing to Joe. “Turn the delivery service back on for my mother’s flowers tomorrow. Now I want very much to get out of here. I’m taking my car.” She looked at me and Sandy. “Something tells me you two will find rides home.”

THE STORY ENDS WITH A WEDDING, RIGHT? THESE STORIES
practically have to. This wedding was on the first of July. Some people said it was awfully quick, but once they heard the whole story, they had to agree it was, in fact, a long time coming. There were no peonies that late in the summer, but the roses were fantastic. We’re talking garden roses, not the kind you buy in stores. When we were done, it looked like we had gotten our hands on every rose in Massachusetts. Romeo and I did the whole thing together. That was how we got the idea of combining our stores in the first place. We worked together like a dream. I made the bride’s bouquet. I had long been liberated from the idea of white. Every color I could find went into that bouquet. It was even better than the one I had made when I married Mort. The wedding was in my backyard. We had a justice of the peace so that no one would get their toes stepped on religion-wise, but Father Al was there and I saw him moving his lips. Nora was the maid of honor. She insisted on the title. She said she couldn’t bear to be anybody’s matron of honor. Joe was the best man. Tony and Sarah did the rings and the flowers. It was a small wedding,
except that no Cacciamani wedding could ever really be considered small.

Tony and Sandy went to the Cape for their honeymoon. Not exactly Jamaica, but they were saving money to buy a house. For the time being they are living with me. I have more room.

What everyone was asking at the wedding was when were Romeo and I going to get married. Gloria all but demanded an answer. But for us it isn’t such an issue. We’d never get all of his family and all of my family into one house, anyway. We’re together, trust me on that. The rest of it will fall into place over time. We keep a little apartment that none of the kids know about. It’s an efficiency, a third-floor walk-up. It isn’t a whole lot bigger than the bed we dragged into it. We’ve got two cups there, a corkscrew, a couple of old comforters for when it’s really cold, some towels. It doesn’t take much to make a place feel like home. To anyone who ever thought that love and passion were for the young, I say, Think again. I am speaking from personal experience here.

Romeo says we live together at work. Most couples work apart but live in one house. We’re just doing it the other way around. Things have gotten busy now that we’re doing the wedding and party-planning service. It turns out we actually need all the various family members we’ve got on the payroll. We’re always at the same store, one day his, one day mine. The next thing we knew, they were both ours. It’s Romeo and Julie’s now. Two locations to better serve you.

I AM GLAD TO HAVE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK KAY
Horton and Pony Maples for parties and pictures; the Bates family and Lonnie Fuqua for telling me how to arrange the flowers; Karl VanDevender, Jeannine Hopson, Wendy Hill, and Pam Roberts for picking up my slack at work and for being so upbeat and supportive.

No one could find a better agent than Lisa Bankoff or a more insightful editor than Shaye Areheart. I feel lucky to have them both.

My most heartfelt thanks is for the home team: my mother, Eve Wilkinson, my husband, Darrell Ray, my daughters, Heather Nancarrow and Ann Patchett, dear Robb and Marcie Nash, and my best friend, Gloria Knuckles, whom no amount of fictionalization could disguise.

JEANNE RAY WORKS AS A REGISTERED NURSE AT THE
Frist Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee. She is married and has two daughters. Together, she and her husband have ten grandchildren. This is her first novel.