Free Flirting in Italian by Lauren Henderson

next to Andrea, twirling a fat blond ringlet around her fingers and saying brightly:
    “Well, hello! My name’s Paige, and it’s very nice to meet you!”
    “
Grazie!
Thank you!” Leonardo says to me as I take a seat as far away from Elisa as I can manage. “I like my English to be very good. I practice a lot. I like it to be better.” He sits down next to me. “My English is much better than my sister Elisa’s,” he adds affably.
    “Your English ees better,” Elisa snaps, “because you love to talk to foreign girls.
All
foreign girls,” she adds, sweeping her cold, dark, mascaraed gaze around at us to emphasize her message: that her brother is a big slut and we shouldn’t be flattered by his attentions.
    Ilaria giggles dutifully at this.
    “Cool,” Kendra drawls, slipping her long, sculpted thighs onto the chair next to Leonardo. “You like foreign girls, and I like Italian boys. Sounds perfect to me. I’m Kendra.”
    Leonardo takes Kendra’s hand and raises it to his lips.
    “Sei bellissima,”
he breathes.
    “Ooh!” Paige heaves a gusty sigh. “That’s so romantic!”
    “Our first course,” Catia announces loudly as a small, dark-skinned woman enters the room buckling under a large silver tureen, “will be
fusilli con zucchine
. Fusilli pasta with zucchini and lemon.”
    We serve ourselves with big, silver-handled spoons as the tiny woman staggers around the table, presenting the tureen to each of us one by one. Then a plate is passed around with a grater and a big hunk of Parmesan cheese, so we can grate our own.
    “It is always best to serve the cheese fresh,” Catia tells us. “Not already grated.” It’s clear that she runs this course at least in part because she relishes telling people how to do things correctly, and why; you can barely put your fork in your mouth without Catia telling you how to hold it.
    The pasta is delicious; short and curly, with lemon zest flecking the bright green of the grated zucchini. I definitely like it. Elisa and Ilaria, I notice, have taken very little, and are only sipping at their glasses of Prosecco; the rest of us have already finished ours by the time Catia tells Leonardo to open and pass around a couple of bottles of red wine. Kelly, beside me, hasn’t said a word since we came into the dining room. Her flush has abated, but when I glance at her, it looks as if she’s on the verge of tears: her eyes are suspiciously red-rimmed.
    “It’s really nice, isn’t it?” I say, finishing my fusilli and laying my fork down on the plate.
    The table’s been laid with a big underplate at each place, decorated with swirls of gold; the pasta dish, on top, is a shallow bowl, and I put my fork on that, as my mother’s taught me. Kelly nods quickly, a swift duck of her head, picks up her own fork from where she’s put it down on the tablecloth, and places it on her plate as I just did. It looks as if the fork tines left a mark on the white cloth, and she tuts nervously when she sees the green stain, trying to scrape it off with her nail.
    “It’s fine,” I mutter, but she keeps on scratching in a vain effort to remove the stain, a bright red color coming back to her cheeks.
    “This is a light Chianti that we make ourselves, here at Villa Barbiano,” Catia says as Leonardo fills my glass. “It is a table wine,
vino da tavola
in Italian. Only twelve percent, pleasant but not too strong.” She directs a hard glance down the expanse of white cloth at the foreign girls. “In Italy,” she says pointedly, “we drink only with meals.
Not
like other countries. When we do not eat, we do not drink.”
    So don’t act like drunken foreign sluts with my son and his friend
, I translate. I’d whisper this to Kelly, but she looks frozen, and I’m afraid I might upset her. The little servant is coming around again, to clear our plates, and before I can stop her, Kelly tries to help by lifting not only the pasta bowl, but the underplate too; the woman has to stop