The door flew open.
Luciano stood, feet planted wide and pointed at Edo. “You! You think you can come around with your nice words and your offers to . . . to . . . purify my house. I don’t need you! I don’t need any of you! Just stay away! All you lousy blights. Stay . . . away!” Luciano thrust his finger at each person standing, open-mouthed, at the bar before he took a deep intake of breath and shouted, “None of this is normal! You act like it’s normal, but it’s not! You’re not! You’re not normal!” He glared at Edo and then grumbled and turned, stumbling a little, and then shambled down the street.
Sauro mumbled, “What was that?”
Ava peeked at Edo through lowered lashes.
Edo answered, “I don’t know. I saw him yesterday and I did offer to come by and help. He didn’t answer, I didn’t even think he heard me.”
Chiara put her hand on Edo’s arm, “He doesn’t mean it, Edo. He loves you, always has.”
Edo shook his head, “Maybe. I clearly did something wrong. I’m clearly ‘not normal’.”
Ava bit her lip and ventured, “It’s not you that did something wrong. It’s Massimo. It’s just made Luciano so angry and sad that he’s confused.”
Chiara leaned toward Ava. The girl seemed to be trying not to cry.
The bar was quiet.
Sauro cleared his throat, “Dante says we’re finally getting recycling bins.”
Edo darted his eyes at Ava. She blinked and then turned to Sauro. “Really? And only ten years after Perugia got theirs.”
Everyone visibly relaxed. Arturo added, “My prediction is that Carosello will use those recycling bins more than everyone else put together.”
Edo laughed and said, “At first maybe. But people will catch on. Northern Italy has been doing it forever, and it works. Santa Lucia will figure it out.”
Talk turned to the gossip about Rosetta, the principal, and her trip to the Dolomiti. Her son had had a narrow miss with a drunk Russian man careening down the ski slope. The child was fine, but Rosetta had come home hopping mad. Who were these Russians to come to their country and act like it was their playground? Ordering the most expensive food and eating it all with sides of vodka and the wrong wines (selected purely because they were the priciest)? And then drunk skiing with no regard for Italian children.
Soon the bar was full of laughter again, and Chiara returned to the business of making coffee, her hand ducking into her pocket one more time to touch the corner of the envelope.
Magda stormed into Bar Birbo moments before the end of the morning rush, her head swiveling from side to side, as if she were watching an invisible, aggravating game of tennis. Chiara smiled and greeted her while flipping on the La Pavoni to make Magda her cappuccino.
“Tutto a posto, Magda?”
“Sì, sì . . .” Magda took a breath, “Only, um.”
Chiara glanced over her shoulder at Magda still standing in the center of the bar. “Are you okay?”
“Yes! Of course! I mean, well why . . . I mean . . . I just wanted to see. It’s probably not anyway,” Magda stammered.
You can’t be familiar with this side of Magda. It is so rarely on display.
Chiara poured the milk into the cup with the coffee and handed it to Magda with an expression of concern. She must be having the same thought. “Seriously Magda, I’ve never seen you not be able to get a sentence out. What’s wrong?” Ah, yes, exactly.
“Nothing! Well, I mean, not really it’s just a strange thing, and I . . .” her voice trailed off.
“Oh, Madonna mia! Did you hear something about your husband? Did they find him? Is he alive?”
Magda clucked, “Chiara, why on earth would I care what that scumbag does? I have no idea if he’s alive or dead and I don’t even have a preference as long as he stays away from me.”
“Okay. What is it then?”
Magda hesitated before straightening her shoulders, “It’s not a big deal, Chiara, so don’t turn it into one. It’s simply that I keep forgetting to ask you if you found my amulet in the bar.”
“Amulet? Like for malocchio?”
“No, no, nothing to do with warding off the evil eye, just an amulet. I think it slipped off of my necklace some weeks ago.”
“It did? Why didn’t you ask me sooner?” Chiara pulled out a box under the register and began extracting items. Sunglasses, a scarf, a keychain, a faded photograph, a child’s tiny doll.
“Maybe I would have, but there are always people in here. I didn’t want a lot of questions. ‘Oh, Magda! What are you looking for? Oh, Magda, you mean you dropped something? What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it special?’ This town is full of interfering gossips.”
Chiara smothered a smile. “Well, it’s not here.”
Magda sighed. “I didn’t think so. And you clean regularly on the edges of the shop? Could it have been kicked against a wall and gone unnoticed?” Magda began frowning at the place where the wall, covered with signs for the sagra, met the floor.
Laughing, Chiara said, “I’ll go ahead and ignore the implicit accusation that I’m slovenly when it comes to cleaning my bar and just say . . . oh! Wait a minute.” Chiara hit a button on the register so that the drawer popped open. “I just remembered, Edo found a little golden something on the floor a month ago. It was small, and looked like it could be important, so we put it in the register rather than in the lost box.” Chiara fished through a small well in the drawer, extracting coins from other countries that she’d accidentally accepted and keys to her grappa cases, while Magda hurried over to watch.
Chiara pulled out a golden ‘Y’ shape with an extra prong, like a trimmed down representation of a broom, and held it up with triumph, “Here
