Free Advice for Italian Boys by Anne Giardini Page B

announcement.
    “So,” he said. “Angie, eh? She seems like a good kid.” Nicolo had met Angie once or twice. He thought he rememberedthat her family lived in one of the suburbs to the west of the city, Brampton, or maybe Rexdale, not as far out as Oakville. She was thin, large busted, with thick blonde hair teased and sprayed into a curling mass. She wore several jangling bracelets on each arm, and large gold hoops swung from her ears. Not a calm woman. Quick moving. Quick talking. Take charge. Smart.
    “Yeah,” said Mario. His breath puffed thin and blue into the cold morning air. “She’s got a good job at the bank, management track even, it looks like, and now that I have my licence, we thought, you know, get a house and some proper furniture of our own, maybe think about beginning a family even, start to live like grown-ups. You know?”
    “Yeah,” Nicolo replied. “Big wedding too. That’s good. I’m really happy for you. For the both of you.”
    “She’s okay, Angie,” Mario said. He stopped and turned toward Nicolo.
    Nicolo could hear more than a trace of self-persuasion in Mario’s voice. Which was only natural, he thought. Getting married. What could be bigger than that? He wondered too what would make someone take that leap, commit to someone else for the rest of his life. It would be like deciding to go on an uncertain trip with a stranger instead of staying safely at home.
    Nicolo and Mario stood for another half-minute, facing each other but not talking. Nicolo kept his gaze near Mario’s shoulder, which he thought about punching lightly, but that seemed not quite right. Nicolo stubbed a booted toe against a ridge of ice on the pavement. A companionable silence, easy as breathing, was broken finally when Mario said, “I guess Ishould be…” and Nicolo said at the same time, “So, I’ll be seeing you around…” Nicolo threw his book into the front seat of his car and they each slammed their car doors and drove away in separate directions, their quick minds already moving on to the next thing that the day held and the next thing after that.

CHAPTER SIX
    A fter Jessica, Nicolo successfully avoided even the possibility of romantic humiliation for two full years. He had decided after several weeks’ deliberation that he needed to be wiser, more attuned, more fully on his guard before he could hope to be able to engage with women on anything like equal terms. His mother may have known more than she let on about the humiliations of his graduation dinner and dance, because she didn’t mention Jessica Santacroce again, even in passing. And it wasn’t much longer before the family was overtaken by the need to make wedding plans for Nicolo’s older brother Enzo and his girlfriend Mima. Mima’s family, the Bonfiglios, had six daughters, of which Mima was the third, as well as the third in four years to have disclosed during her last yearof high school that she needed to get married. Enzo, who was twenty, wasn’t given much choice in the matter; as far as Nicolo could tell, no one had even asked Enzo how he felt about a marriage. Instead, immediately after Enzo and Mima had disclosed the situation to their two sets of parents, the mothers had taken over; they hurried the young pair in for an urgent talk with the priests from the families’ churches, and then took turns telephoning around to the local banquet halls to ask about cancellations. Within three days, a small wedding was scheduled and planned for early August, and printed invitations were ready to go out to two hundred guests.
    “What are you going to do?” Nicolo overheard Mima’s father, Joe Bonfiglio, say to Nicolo’s father at about ten o’clock in the morning on the day of the quickly organized wedding, his voice an aural shrug of fatalism. Nicolo walked into the kitchen and saw Joe sitting with his back straight as a plank of wood in a chair that had been pulled back from the kitchen table. He had one of Paola’s aprons,