Four Letter Word, page 8
“Yeah.” Sure.
“Remind-a me of mi nonno’s house. He live-a by the sea.”
Maybe Alberto wouldn’t hate Eureka if it reminded him of his grandpa’s place? Izzy found herself hoping that would be the case. For her mom’s sake, at the very least. He seemed to have a magical effect on her.
They crossed Second Street, with the ornate tower of the Carson Mansion looming at the end of the block. Alberto stopped to admire the iconic Queen Anne. “It is like your house,” he said, articulating every word. When he slowed down his speech, Alberto’s accent practically disappeared.
Similar to the Carson Mansion? Hardly. That estate had been built by the richest man in Eureka, a timber magnate who almost single-handedly founded the city, while her house had just been a regular old family home. Plus the mansion had been meticulously maintained over the last century. The Bell house was falling apart.
“They’re both Victorians,” she said, not wanting to explain how not rich her family was.
“But it issa very nice.”
“Yeah, thanks. Good place to grow up.”
“Many antiques.”
“Antiques!” Izzy said, tilting her head in appreciation. “That’s some advanced vocabulary.”
Alberto laughed. “I like-a the American television shows.”
“Which ones?”
He scrunched up his mouth in thought. “Yellowstone.”
“Like my dad.”
“The nerd show. Big-a Bang?”
“Big Bang Theory. My grandma’s favorite.”
“The Law and Order.”
“So does my grandpa. How old are you?”
Alberto winked at her. “How old-a do I look?”
She paused, hand on her chin, examining him as if he were one of her mom’s prized Italian masterpieces. “Twenty on the outside,” she said, an easy guess since she knew from his profile that he was nineteen. Then she smiled wickedly. “Fifty on the inside.”
She’d meant it as a tease, but the truth of it struck as she watched him ponder her words. His face was youthful, maybe a little older than Izzy and her friends, but then, the deep tan probably aged him. But there was also something mature about his personality, a watchfulness in his eyes, as if he knew more about the world than he was letting on. Alberto Bianchi was an anachronism. A worldly attitude mixed with clothes that didn’t fit. The heavy, almost comical Italian accent peppered with idiosyncratic English that belied his supposed struggles with the language. He was simultaneously exactly what she’d expected and a complete and total surprise, and she had no idea what to make of him.
Suddenly, Alberto leaned toward her, eyes soft at the corners. “You are very pretty, Signorina Bell. Like-a your name. Che belissima!”
Izzy stopped abruptly. “Oh.” No one had ever called her pretty before. Not even her parents.
Alberto plunged his hands deep into his pockets. “Oh?”
“Er, I mean, um, thanks?”
He continued walking. “You are very welcome, Izz-ee.”
Izzy felt her cheeks flush. She especially didn’t know what to make of this. No one was ever interested in Izzy Bell. Certainly not this charming stranger from one of the oldest, most cultured areas in Italy. Yet here he was, smiling at her shyly as they crossed the overgrown train tracks at the end of L Street into the same parking lot where Izzy and Peyton had watched Bodega’s Bane return to harbor just a couple of days ago. Alberto marched through the mostly empty lot to the grassy strip of land at the water’s edge and stared out at the slips on Woodley Island.
“Fishing boats,” Alberto said, less of a question than a statement of fact. If he’d grown up visiting his grandfather near the sea, then he probably knew more about boats than Izzy did.
“Yep.”
“They go to deep ocean?” He eyed the tiny ripples lapping the rocky embankment below the coastal path. Buffered by the channel islands and some natural sand dunes, the water of the inner reach seemed downright calm compared to the roiling North Pacific Ocean currently crashing into the western side of the peninsula beyond Tuluwat Island. Even from five miles away, Izzy could make out the faint roar of waves on Samoa Beach, nature’s own white noise.
“Yeah, they’re deep-sea fishing vessels.”
Alberto rubbed his chin while he scanned the rows of slips across the water, half of which were empty. “Not very many.” He sounded disappointed.
Izzy laughed. “Everyone’s working.”
“Ah, sì. Of course.” He narrowed his eyes as if trying to make something out on the island. “It is always this, eh, deserted?”
He wasn’t going to need many English lessons from her mom. Alberto’s grasp of the language was much better than Izzy thought it would be. “Only during the day when the boats are out.”
“They work all the days?”
“Pretty much.”
“Even your-a famous American weekends?”
Izzy knew the Italian word for “weekend” was literally “il weekend,” which meant the concept of a five-day workweek had traveled back across the Atlantic to Europe, but she had no idea why Alberto was so interested in the comings and goings of sleepy little Woodley Island.
“Boats go out when the tourists are here,” Izzy explained. “So there isn’t really a weekend until the weather turns.” She wondered how different the Italian harbors must be from dank and dark Eureka. She pictured yachts with supermodels tanning on deck, moored up in a sunny port surrounded by the glittering warm waters of the Ligurian Sea and the craggy shores of Corsica in the distance.
“And-a the weather, it is always so clear?”
Izzy snorted. “I wish. When the fog rolls in, or a big storm, visibility is almost nothing. You can’t even see the island from here.”
“Ah,” Alberto said, then shivered. “Like a haunted story.”
That sounded way more romantic than it felt in reality. “I guess so.”
Alberto stared at the boats for a few more moments, then abruptly turned toward the park. “Shall-a we walk?”
With no word from Peyton, Izzy readily agreed, and the two of them headed north up the coastal path. She’d learned to ride her bike on this asphalt as a kid, wobbling along behind her mom’s more confident pedaling cadence while her dad chased them both on foot, attempting to steady her without training wheels. It was one of her happier childhood memories with both of her parents, and she smiled.
“You are happy?” he asked. She never even saw him look at her.
“Yeah.” For the first time in a while, it wasn’t a lie.
“Why?”
Izzy opened her mouth to reply, then stopped. She wasn’t entirely sure—yeah, it was nice to have a guy call her pretty, something that had literally never happened before in her entire life—but there was something else about Alberto that made her smile. Maybe the effect he had on her mom, who seemed happier than she’d been in months, despite the episodes with her dad yesterday. But also, when Alberto looked at Izzy with those dancing blue eyes, she felt as if he actually saw her. Not what she looked like, but who and what she was. Izzy felt important when Alberto spoke to her, and she’d only ever felt something like that once before.
With Jake.
Her heart ached at the thought of him, and for the first time since his return from Monterey, Izzy wanted to cry. Maybe her feelings were more than just friendship?
Shit.
Izzy hadn’t realized she’d stopped walking until Alberto stood in front of her. “Izz-ee. You-a no happy now. What-a is wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. It was many things and nothing, all at the same time.
She felt his fingers slide across her palm, then up to her wrist. She shivered, despite the warm day. “Can I help?”
Before she could answer, a blaring horn ripped through the quiet morning. Izzy turned to see a blue Ford Explorer stopped on the road that paralleled the park. Peyton leaned out the window. “What the fuck, you guys?”
PEYTON GLARED OVER HER SHOULDER AT IZZY AS SHE CLIMBED into the backseat. “Don’t you check your phone anymore?”
Izzy flinched at the venom in Peyton’s tone. The two friends had radically different personalities: the extrovert and the introvert, the brash girl and the shy one, the hot chick and the wallflower. They frequently disagreed about everything from boys to books to where Izzy should go to college, but never in the history of their friendship had Peyton been overtly hostile.
Don’t you get up before the crack of noon anymore? The words itched on Izzy’s tongue. But she said nothing.
Alberto didn’t seem to notice the friction. He slid into the passenger seat, eyes glued to the panels of city-sanctioned graffiti art that decorated the retaining wall along Waterfront Drive. “Issa so colorful. My heart, it-a leaps with the love of the art.”
“Cool, right? It began with—” Izzy was about to explain how the city had started a program where they commissioned artists to decorate utility boxes all over town, which then became walls on the sides of buildings in Old Town and finally blossomed to this art installation along the waterfront, but Peyton interrupted.
“It’s just like the Venice Art Walls,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go see them. Is Venice far from where you live?”
Since when did art count among Peyton’s interests? Besides, she didn’t even have the right Venice.
“The Venice Art Walls are in Venice, California,” Izzy said, trying not to sound as deprecating as she felt.
Alberto laughed. “I am sure issa similar wall in Venezia.”
Peyton beamed at him, and somehow, just sixty seconds into this car ride, Izzy was relegated to sidekick status.
They looped back around to R Street, then over the Samoa Bridge, which looked more like a freeway overpass than the majestic Golden Gate. To the north, Eureka Channel opened up to the expansive Arcata Bay, protected from the onslaught of the Pacific Ocean by a narrow strip of sand dunes stretching from Humboldt Beach all the way down to the North Jetty. Below them, the fishing boats still moored at the dock bobbed in water that seemed uncharacteristically choppy.
At the end of the bridge, Peyton rounded a corner too fast, swerving into the oncoming lane. She had to slam on her brakes as a pod of cyclists swarmed her SUV, each of them flipping her off as they passed.
“Bike dicks,” she muttered as she continued, more slowly, behind the peloton. “Think they own the road.”
“You-a no like the bikes?”
Peyton chewed at the inside of her cheek, a signal that she was contemplating her response. Probably trying to guess Alberto’s stance on the matter. Was he pro-cyclists? Anti-cyclists? Izzy shook her head. Why would anyone want to tailor their opinions to what a guy thought?
“I like the bikes,” Peyton finally said, tossing her hair over one shoulder as she turned left into the marina. “Just not the cyclists.”
“Nota bene,” Alberto replied.
He spoke Latin too?
Peyton parked in an empty spot near the marina restaurant and slid out of the driver’s seat. It was the first time Izzy got a look at her outfit, a form-fitting sleeveless mini dress and strappy gladiator sandals that laced up her calves. She looked like she belonged in Venice, Italy, in the hottest part of summer, not Eureka on a warmish day where, despite the sun, the wind was beginning to whip in off the ocean.
“This is the marina,” Peyton said, then sucked in a lungful of air. “I love the smell of the sea. It makes me feel so alive.”
Izzy had literally never heard those words come out of Peyton’s mouth. She wasn’t sure how much of this she could stomach.
“And-a your friend’s boat?” Alberto prompted.
Izzy turned toward Dock B, expecting to see Bodega’s Bane moored at the very end, but the berth was empty.
Peyton gasped, her eyes fixed on the same spot. “She’s not here!”
“I thought you said they weren’t working today?” Izzy said.
Peyton clicked her tongue, hands on her hips in disappointment. “They must have booked a last-minute trip,” she said with a pouty frown. Then she held up a finger as if she’d just had a brilliant idea. “Hey! Why don’t we have lunch first? They should be back by two.”
The pose, the pout, the delivery—Peyton had planned this. She knew Hunter would be out on a fishing trip today; she just wanted to have lunch with Alberto. Without her boyfriend around.
Izzy loved her friend, but that was pretty fucked-up. Peyton was practically engaged to Hunter and had never expressed any concerns or problems with their relationship. But after spending an hour with Alberto last night, she was suddenly willing to throw away two-plus years of a relationship on a guy she just met? And who lived on the other side of the planet? She had no idea what had gotten into her friend, but she didn’t like this side of Peyton.
“Lunch sounds-a lovely.” Alberto offered her his arm, and they pranced toward the side entrance to Woodley’s Bar.
Izzy had only been to Woodley’s once when she was a kid, but the dark wood interior and nautically themed accoutrements were exactly as she remembered. The bar looked empty, and for a moment Izzy hoped they weren’t open yet and Peyton’s lunch plans would be scrapped. But movement at the darkened bar caught her eye. A guy in the corner, hunched over his drink. He wore the work pants and woolen sweater of a deckhand, the sole customer.
“Let’s sit outside,” Peyton said, pulling Alberto toward the patio that fronted the marina. She didn’t even wait for a hostess to offer, marching straight through the double glass doors to a shaded table above the water. Alberto pulled a chair out, and Peyton beamed up at him as if he’d just proposed. Her face visibly fell when he did the same for Izzy.
A woman emerged from inside, a curvy Latina with heavily tattooed arms and a frizzy French braid in her light brown hair. She huffed, glaring over her shoulder toward the bar as she approached the table, but even with her face turned away, Izzy recognized Kylie—Riley’s on-again, off-again—immediately.
They’d met once last spring, when Riley drove their dad’s truck into the creek while he and Kylie were getting handsy in the cab, and Kylie might have recognized Izzy as her fuck buddy’s little sister except, from the moment she arrived at their table, her eyes latched onto Alberto and refused to let go.
She smiled and sucked in her abs as she approached, the scowl from seconds ago completely vanished. “How can I help you?” It definitely was not a plural “you.”
“Buona sera, Signorina,” Alberto said, wishing her a “Good evening” despite it being the middle of the day.
Kylie’s eyes grew wide. “You’re French?”
“Italian,” Peyton said, her tone impatient, as if she could have told the difference between the two languages offhand.
Kylie ignored her. “Sexy accent.”
Peyton growled deep in her throat and leaned possessively on the arm of Alberto’s chair. “Are you the waitress?”
“Bartender,” she said, not even looking at Peyton. “But we’re shorthanded today so I’m here to, uh, take care of you.”
“Can we get some menus?” Peyton snapped.
Kylie smiled at Alberto as if he’d made the request, unruffled by Peyton’s snark or her territorial display. She simply pointed to a plastic frame with a QR code sitting in the middle of the table.
“Oh,” Peyton said. Point to Kylie.
“Grazie,” Alberto said.
A thud from inside the restaurant was the only thing that could wrest Kylie’s gaze from the Italian. It was followed by a crash, as if someone had knocked over a heavy item and then launched it across the restaurant. Kylie glanced over her shoulder again, and when she turned back to the table, her face reflected a new emotion: fear.
“I’ll give you some time to look it over,” Kylie said, hurrying inside. Izzy thought of the man sitting at the bar and wondered if one of them should go with her. Before she could voice the idea, Peyton angled her chair so she was facing Alberto.
“Did you see those tats? So ratchet.”
Alberto smiled, amused. “You no like-a the waitress?”
“Not particularly.”
“You know her?” he pressed.
“Uh, no,” Peyton faltered. “But the way she threw herself at you…No class.”
The same way you’re throwing yourself at him? Izzy wanted to ask. But she didn’t.
Alberto seemed to intuit Izzy’s thoughts. As he pulled his phone from his pocket to scan the menu, he glanced at her, a twinkle in his eyes, then winked.
Kylie quickly returned to take their order, and so began the worst, longest lunch of Izzy’s life.
Not that the food was bad—kinda hard to mess up a turkey sandwich and potato chip—but the atmosphere on Woodley’s patio was uncomfortably tense.
It was like watching two walruses battle for dominance on a beach: rearing, maneuvering, retreating, regrouping. Kylie made twice as many trips to the patio than were absolutely necessary for the ordering and delivery of food, lingering as if she didn’t want to go back inside, and Peyton made sure she was touching Alberto whenever she saw the tattooed bartender approach the glass door.
The conversation between Kylie’s visits was no less painful. Peyton peppered Alberto with questions about his life in Italy, his family, his friends, not-so-subtly fishing to see if he had a girlfriend. He answered happily as he ate his steamed chicken and vegetables, easily the least appealing item on the menu, and attempted to include Izzy in the conversation every chance he got.
It felt like hours before Kylie brought the check. The bartender smiled coyly as she slid the paper across the table to Alberto, and before he picked it up, Izzy caught an added scribble at the bottom: Kylie’s name and phone number.
Poor Riley.
Kylie swiveled around to leave, hips moving hypnotically as she walked, and Izzy hoped that Peyton didn’t catch the inscription at the bottom of the check. No such luck.
“Are you kidding me?” Peyton said, eyes wide. She didn’t even wait until Kylie disappeared inside.
