Free The Supreme Macaroni Company by Adriana Trigiani Page A

necessarily the good kind.
    My phone buzzed. I fished it out of my coat pocket.
    “Who is it?” Gabriel lay back in the lawn chair.
    “Bret.” He texted, “I’m sorry. Hope you’re okay.”
    “I’m fine. Sorry about everything,” I texted back.
    “Are you going to tell him that you got engaged?” Gabriel asked.
    “I can’t text that.”
    “I would.”
    “Why?”
    “Otherwise he’s going to think that kiss was something other than friendship.”
    “It was friendship.”
    “He doesn’t know that.”
    “I think he does.”
    “You better write a disclaimer then. Say something about Gianluca without saying anything too specific.”
    I texted, “Went to Jersey with Gianluca.”
    Bret texted, “I am at my parents’. Kids are with Mac in the city.”
    I texted, “Hang in there.”
    “ ‘Hang in there’? After what the man has been through, you act like he lost his wallet?” Gabriel sipped his tea.
    “What am I supposed to say?”
    “I don’t know, but not that . That’s a platitude you find on a poster at Denny’s.”
    “It’s all so bizarre. All of it.”
    “You can’t change history. You were once engaged to Bret. And now you’re engaged to Gianluca. All these threads tie together.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “You’re not being clear. You have a diamond ring on your hand, and you didn’t discuss the conditions of the agreement to wed. You kissed one guy and got engaged to another in the time it took your sister to boil a lobster.”
    “What do you recommend I do?”
    “I don’t know. I can only identify problems. I don’t solve them.”
    “Gianluca forgave me for the kiss. He didn’t assume the worst about me. He figured I had my reasons.”
    “And what would those reasons be?”
    “History.”
    “You should erase your history, if you ask me.”
    “No, it’s the opposite. When you marry someone who’s been married, or someone like me, who’s been engaged, the history part is a gift.”
    “Or a constant reminder of past mistakes.”
    “Maybe, but what’s wrong with that? I bring a lot of what I’ve learned to our life together. One of the things I love about Gianluca is that he’s already seen and done so much, and yet he’s not jaded.”
    “Well, Val, one thing’s for sure, you’re marrying an optimist. He has a few years under his belt, and he still sees the possibilities in the world and wants to start over with you. Good for him.”
    “I’m lucky.”
    “Poor Bret. He’s ending as you are beginning.”
    “He’ll bounce back.”
    “I never liked Mackenzie, and she never liked you. She always thought Bret carried a torch for you.”
    “Bret came here to see me because he had nowhere else to go. There’s no romance between us.”
    “What about the kiss?”
    “It was a lifeline kiss. He wanted to be reassured that everything would be all right. It wasn’t about any feelings he had for me. He was scared about being alone.”
    “I know those kisses. They come around closing time.”
    “Right. A closing-time kiss. That’s all it was.”
    “Would you have been as forgiving had you caught Gianluca kissing his ex-wife?”
    “Probably not.”
    “Probably? Most definitely not! Fidelity has always been your big issue, and isn’t it ironic that you went and did the very thing you’re most afraid of someone doing to you?”
    “Are you trying to make me feel worse?” I asked.
    “I want you to think about how amazing it is that you’re going to marry a man who really loves you and who didn’t let a kiss with an ex ten minutes before he proposed marriage ruin everything.”
    “I get it, Gabriel. I really do.”
    “We’ve got another problem. A different complication. You know we work with Bret, right?”
    “Yeah, I’m going to have to have a conversation with him.”
    “I hope you straighten everything out. He’s our banker. He gets us our loans. He gets along with Alfred. We need him.”
    Gabriel was thinking about the shop, but I was worried