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"What’s with that face?" Alberto asks as he scoots his toy sea-dragon forward into the cake, the jellybeans in its mouth rattling like stones.
You know where you are, right? she almost asks. Instead Giulia clasps her hands together and says carefully, "I want to say this feels vaguely racist."
"—But I’m a sea monster, so you can’t say that?" Alberto accidentally gives a particularly aggressive scoot that knocks one of the fat novelty candles over. "Whoops."
Giulia tries to shoo Alberto away as she rushes to his side of the kitchen table, biting down the instinct to shove him. Her hands instinctively go for her hat, but all her hair has been tied back, so she only manages to loosen her ponytail as she yanks on her scalp in frustration. "Why are you putting it into the cake?"
Alberto takes a step back to avoid catching her elbow in the face. "So that it stays up?"
"I worked hard on this, you know."
"Yeah, it was truly torturous pouring some sand out of a box and throwing eggs into it. Truly back-breaking labor."
She imagines snapping his back over her knee as though he were one of her old stuffed dolls. She imagines asking Machiavelli to eat his body like she's been told so often cats will do. "Oh, shut up," she says.
"Are those big novelty cakes even edible?" Giulia asks, using a toothpick to swirl the green icing around the sea monster’s coiled base back into flower-shapes. The theme had been “gardens,” since her father
(their father?)
(now that’s funny)
— since her father had gotten back into it as of late, pots of basil and Geraniums out on the windowsills, white sticks for tomatoes lined up like bowling pins underneath the treehouse.
"I can’t imagine all that fondant tastes good," Giulia continues.
Alberto, who had been tasked to sit there with his hands firmly pinned down under his chin, says, "I have a friend--"
Giulia shoots him a look.
"Yeah, I know, unbelievable right? That one of us could actually have friends."
"Imaginary friends don't count."
"I think your sense of direction's screwed up, sis," Alberto says, suddenly behind her now, suddenly turning her around by her shoulders. "The mirror's right over there."
Giulia rips her out of his grasp. "Don't call me ‘sis.’ My name is Giulia."
"Anyway," Alberto says, rolling his eyes. "My friend was saying that in chocolate shops in Germany, you can walk in and the guy's making a whole hippopotamus out of chocolate right there in the middle of the store."
The toothpick breaks in her hands before she realizes she’d been folding it. She tosses the splinters onto the table. "Push me all you want, Alberto," she says, turning back to the cake. "It won't work."
"What won't work?" he asks.
"I'm not fighting you in front of Papà," Giulia says, hoping that you can glare from the corner of your eye as she picks up the longer splinter and pretends to go back to work. "If you want to make an ass of yourself, be my guest, but I won't let you drag me down with you."
Alberto falls silent for a moment, staring at the back of her head, at the yellow icing-orchids around the curly scrawl of
(their?)
(well he’s not yours)
(but why shouldn’t she have to share?)
his boss’s name, at the blue “49” candles standing watching over it.
"We should add a big glop of icing here," he says, pointing behind the candles to where the sea monster’s mouth casts a shadow. He remembers when Massimo had bought that for him on one of their trips to get Alberto new clothes, the way he’d told Massimo in excited whispers about how he knew the brand of the tiny car between its teeth because he’d found one buried in the silt of a cave near the island.
He remembers that tattoo on Massimo’s arm.
Giulia freezes at the intrusion of his voice, all the malice within it suddenly washed out. "Why?" she asks.
"So the jellybeans have something sticky to land on and don't go flying all over the words as much."
They don’t mess up the words, but a few do scatter across the table before Machiavelli bats them right off. Giulia and Alberto both start towards the floor, but Massimo tells them to stay seated, we’ll get them later.
And he’s still laughing, just a little.
(Giulia had her hand out to Alberto underneath the table once her father’s head had tipped back, but Alberto had just looked at it in confusion.)
(Gimme a low five.)
(Like… a four?)
(What? )
Now Massimo smiles and pats Giulia’s hair, then Alberto’s, chuckling as Alberto almost stands up in his chair to push his head in. "I'm glad to see you two starting to get along."