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Loretta Castorini has been married before. The whole of New York knows this to be true, except for Ronny Cammareri who also knows, but sometimes acts like he doesn’t.
For example, in the early hours near dawn, when the apartment smells like fresh bread from the ovens downstairs, Loretta rolls over. The old bed creaks and Ronny grumbles in his near sleep.
“Listen,” she says. “There’s something you gotta know.”
The apartment is otherwise quiet, as are the streets outside. Loretta has already been awake for an hour because this is the day before her second wedding and because there is a lot to think about. She has to get back to her own house before her family wakes up, but that can wait.
“I'm listening, sweetheart,” Ronny nods into his pillow, eyes still closed.
Besides knowledge of her widowhood, the entire city also knows that Loretta’s previous marriage is not something that she enjoys talking about. For this reason, she doesn’t beat around it.
”You gotta know that me and my first man, we had bad luck.”
Ronny doesn’t appear to have much to say about this. He makes a small grumbling noise and shifts beneath the sheets. His hand comes up to rest on her hip.
“I don’t want us to have bad luck,” she adds.
“We won’t have bad luck,” he mumbles, slightly more awake now.
“But how can you be sure? You can’t.”
“I won’t let us have bad luck.” This is said like a growl, fierce and protective, but that’s all it is: noise muffled by the sheets pulled up to his face.
“Just do me a favor and keep an eye out for buses,” Loretta tells him, getting out of bed and reaching for the robe on the floor. “You know, look both ways.”
Ronny cracks an eye open and cranes his head up to look at her. His hair is a mess, pieces sticking up here and there where they shouldn’t. In the armoire mirror, Loretta’s hair is like that too.
“Will you stay?” he asks. “The sun’s not even up. Five minutes, baby.”
Now what the whole of New York doesn’t know is that Loretta Castorini is crazy about Ronny Cammareri, the man who ruined her life and then somehow made right. It’s a good blessing that nobody knows, because Loretta doesn’t know if she could stand it if they did. At least not until tomorrow, God help her.
She thinks for a moment and then slides back into bed. Ronny smiles, already dipping back into sleep, and rolls towards her to press his cold feet into the crook of her leg. Loretta scowls and he smiles against her neck.
“I love you, Loretta.”
“You’re awful, but I love you too.”
And five minutes turns into two hours.
If they were getting married in New York at the big church on Sullivan Street, the one with the high dome ceiling, loud organ, and rows and rows of hardwood pews, where she probably would have gotten married the first time had her first man not been Presbyterian, two hours would not be that much of a problem. An apology after showing up an hour late for her wedding dress fitting and then a rushed coffee afterwards. A small pain in the neck, but not that big of a deal.
That’s if they were getting married in New York.
But they are not getting married in New York.
“Where the hell were you?”
Loretta hears her mother before she sees her standing with her father by the empty departures gate. An announcement for final boarding Flight 26 to Rome and Palermo rings loud overhead.
“Mrs. Castorini,” Ronny says. He’s wearing a new pair of shoes, black leather and shiny, bought specially for the occasion, and carrying both of their suitcases. “You have my most sincere apologies.”
Rose looks at him critically: the suitcases, the shoes, the one tuff of hair still sticking up in the back, and says, “You might have picked a good one, Loretta.”
Cosmo’s looking at Ronny too. “Almost missing the plane the day before you get married?” He turns to Loretta, pointing with both hands to the heavens. “I won’t say it. I won’t say it.”
“Then do us a favor and don’t say it,” Rose says.
“I don’t understand,” Ronny says to Loretta after her parents walk to the ramp, shifting the weight of their bags.
Loretta groans and reaches out to help balance the luggage Ronny's hands, careful to mind the wood. “Bad luck. He means we’re already having bad luck.” She groans again. “And now I’ve gone and said that we have bad luck right before a plane ride.”
“I thought you said you don't believe in curses.”
“I don’t. Curses and bad luck are two different things.”
“Listen,” Ronny says as they board. “We have good luck because we didn’t miss this plane. We have good luck because we’re getting married.”
Loretta frowns. “I’ll say we have good luck if we make it to Sicily.”
They make it to Sicily.
There's some turbulence over the Atlantic and a small delay out of Rome. Her father's suitcase is accidentally left on the plane but eventually retrieved, and all of her grandfather’s dogs successfully clear immigration. They stay with Loretta's elderly great aunt, who, as grand fate would have it, lives around the corner from where Ronny was born.
“I don’t want to see her,” Ronny decides as soon as he sees his mother's house. It’s just before dusk and the street is busy with people. He’s wearing his new shoes, and Loretta, her new hat.
“You’ll be happy you did later,” she says. “It’s no good to get married when there’s bad blood in the family.”
“She won’t be happy.”
“You don’t know that, and besides, we’re here to fix what’s wrong. She doesn’t have to be happy about it. You fixed things with your brother, so now you’re going to fix things with your mother.”
Ronny dwells on this.
“I’m going to fix things with my mother,” he echoes, softly at first. And then, “I’m going to fix things with my mother!”
And for better or for worse, richer or poorer, Ronny walks across the street to the house he was born in, to the house his mother almost died in, and bangs on the door with his good hand. The family of starlings nesting on the windowsill take off.
“Ma!” he shouts at the upstairs window. “Ma!”
The window smacks open. A head, small, fragile and swathed in black lace, pops out. The question - who the hell are you and what do you want? - unspoken.
“It’s me,” Ronny says. “Your son.”
Now Loretta’s Italian is halting and slow, by no means fluent. She knows the important things - bread, thank you, get the hell out of my house - and clearly Ronny mother’s, a native of this city but also once a resident of Brooklyn knows some of those in English too.
“I have no sons like you,” she says following by a string of rapid Sicilian that Loretta can't translate exactly, but doesn't need to.
The window bangs shut.
She thinks she gets the main idea.
Ronny glares at the closed window, hand clenching and unclenching at his side. “I told you she doesn't like me.”
Loretta shakes her head and strides forward to knock on the door. After a moment, harder.
The door swings open.
Mrs. Cammareri is slight in frame, but big in stature. In her hand is an old wooden spoon.
“Who’re you?”
“Loretta Castorini.”
“I’ve heard about you.” This comes as more of an accusation than a fact.
“Well I’ve heard about you too,” Loretta replies. “Will you invite us in?”
Mrs. Cammareri pays no attention to her son standing next to her. Instead she makes a low guttural noise that could mean several things and turns to hobble slowly down the hallway. Loretta follows and eventually, Ronny too.
The house that Ronny Cammareri grew up in is dark and warm. Immaculately clean, with the colors long faded from the furniture and the walls that Ronny eyes with suspicion.
Loretta finds Ronny’s mother waiting for them at the kitchen table. She takes a seat.
The silence is wide and awkward.
“You know, when I first met your son,” Loretta says. “He threatened to kill himself with a big knife.”
Mrs. Cammareri, sixty-six years old next September, sits back and laughs like nothing is funny. “That’s why I told him never come back,” she says. “He’s too like me.”
Ronny snorts, still lingering in the doorway.
“We’re getting married," Loretta adds. “Will you come?”
Ronny's mother drags her chair from beneath her so it screeches against the old tile floor, pulling it close so that Loretta can see the veins of her eyes. She’s an old woman who nearly died, but Loretta’s willing to be fair: she still looks good. Outside the window and down on the street, an accordion plays.
Mrs. Cammareri frowns and then turns to Ronny.
“You’re staying for dinner,” she says before jumping up to the stove. “You need to eat.”
“Alright, Ma,” Ronny says, although he doesn't look away from Loretta. “Alright.”
She rings Johnny in Brooklyn afterwards.
“Is my mother dead?” Johnny asks before Loretta can say hello. The way his voice breaks over the phone is pitiful but sweet.
“Oh, she’s alive,” Loretta says. “I’m to tell you to wash your socks with the special soap.”
“Thanks, Loretta. We break our engagement and still, you look after me.”
“I kind of like her.”
“That’s good. Have you married my brother yet?”
“Tomorrow morning. And what's wrong with you, Johnny? You sound beat.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night. I was watching the moon.”
“What do you mean you were watching the moon?”
“It was big and bright, Loretta, you should see it.”
“I will in a few hours,” she says. “Ciao now, remember the special soap, bye-bye.”
In a few hours, when she lies awake in her aunt’s house on the night before her second wedding, vaguely aware of her grandfather’s loud snoring next door and Ronny quietly playing a record from an opera she’s never heard of in his own room across the hall, Loretta looks out the window upon the city below.
There’s the moon above, big and bright.
The day that Loretta Castorini gets married for the second time, everything is done right.
They get married in Palermo because both of their parents had gotten married in Sicily and all of their grandparents before them. They decide to get married in the month April because it is following the holy seasons of Advent and Lent, and because the weather in Sicily is cool and pleasant, because the winds blow the right way. She goes to the big church on Sullivan Street to make her last confession before her second marriage, to let God know that she has thoroughly, thoroughly reflected on all her sins. She forces Ronny to come with her and after great reluctance, he stays shut in the confessional booth for nothing short of twenty-five minutes.
But before she walks down the aisle of a small chapel in Sicily and becomes bound to this man who was once the brother of her fiancé, Loretta fixes her veil outside the front of the church while everyone else waits inside.
“Pop,” she says, “you look like you’re at a funeral.”
Her father, dressed in his best suit, keeps pacing.
“It smells like a funeral.”
“That’s the incense because we’re at the church. This is a wedding, not a funeral.”
“Loretta, it’s all the same.”
It is known in their part of New York that Cosmo Castorini made his small fortune not off of faulty plumbing or copper pipes, but in his ability to read a face. In this respect, Loretta is his daughter.
She smiles. “Are you nervous for my wedding, Pop?”
Cosmo stops pacing.
“Where you gonna live?”
“At Ronny’s place. Above the bakery.”
“Why leave the house?”
Loretta stops smoothing out her dress. “What do you mean? You didn’t want Johnny to live in the house.”
“That was Johnny,” Cosmo says. “This is Ronny.”
“What’s going on, Pop? First you refused to have anything to do with the wedding, now you've paid for the whole thing and won’t hear otherwise. Then you didn't want us in the house, and now you do. You just met the guy. How’s this about Ronny?”
“This has got nothing to do with Ronny,” Cosmo says, and Loretta thinks - thinks - that she might see her father cry. “This is about my daughter.”
Loretta tries for words, but finds nothing.
“My daughter,” he says again, his hand brushing her cheek like he used to when she was a girl. His eyes are wet but happy, and Loretta is halfway down the aisle, her hand tucked into her father’s arm, before she looks up to see her man at that altar and realizes that she might be harboring those same tears too.
The first time Loretta Castorini got married, it had been at the City Hall. It was a Tuesday morning and she had been wearing a grey dress with boots wearing down in the sole and she hadn’t said a word to her parents until the papers were signed and what was done was done. Her first man was a good man, but maybe not the right man, and there, she supposes, might lie the difference.
When she marries Ronny Cammareri, there are bells ringing and rice thrown for good luck and all of the dogs of Palermo barking as they leave the church. There is a honeymoon in Rome and a safe trip back to New York before Ronny Cammareri moves into her house and like that, it becomes his and their home.
Loretta wakes up that first morning just as the sun rises. Outside, the city is quiet. Ronny shifts next to her in the bed.
"What's wrong?" she asks, still half-asleep.
“Back in the church," Ronny says, his voice rough. "Before we said our vows and became man and wife, your mother asked me a question.”
“What did she ask you?”
“If I fear death.”
She cracks an eye open and tilts her head. Ronny’s staring at the ceiling.
"Do you?"
“I told her that since I am now the happiest of men, so I’m not scared of dying. I’m not scared of anything.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing, but she seemed pleased."
An alarm clock goes off on the bedside table and Loretta groans. Ronny groans and reaches to turn off the alarm. He hoists himself out of bed and moves to grab his robe.
"Stay?" Loretta asks. "Just five minutes."
And five minutes becomes an entire morning.