Free Begin Again: Short stories from the heart by Mary Campisi

“That’s odd. My daughter looked at twelve while I was helping Mr. McKinley load a tree and then she escaped for hot chocolate, telling me she wanted the Douglas fir in the fourth row, three back.”
    Maggie and the stranger looked at one another. “Wait a minute,” Maggie said, remembering how her daughter kept glancing at her watch, hurrying through the trees, scampering away. She should have guessed something was amiss—Danielle never rushed anything and rarely even wore a watch. “Would you happen to be a photographer?”
    The man nodded. “How did you know?”
    “And I’ll just bet your name is Matthew Webster, isn’t it?”
    His blue eyes narrowed, moving over her face, her hair, studying her in detail. “Maggie?”
    She nodded, a faint smile on her lips.
    The man threw back his head and laughed. “This is the first time I’m actually going to thank Nicole for butting into my love life.”
    “You have a little matchmaker in your family too, huh?” Maggie asked, grinning.
    He laughed again. “I sure do, but she’s never joined forces before. That could prove deadly.”
    “Do you think we can fend them off?” Maggie teased.
    “I don’t think I want to,” Matthew said, his blue gaze meeting hers.
    Despite the cold and snow, a wave of warmth washed over her. “Nor do I,” she said softly.
    Bursts of yelling and cheers startled them both. They turned and spotted two figures running toward them.
    “Finally,” Danielle said, out of breath when she reached them.
    “Hi, I’m Nicole.” A pretty girl with brown hair and blue eyes held out a red- mittened hand.
    “I feel like I already know you, Nicole,” Maggie said, shaking her hand.
    “Sorry we kind of tricked both of you,” Danielle said. “But we knew you’d like each other once you met.” She looked from one adult to the other. “You do like each other, don’t you?”
    “Of course they do, silly,” Nicole said. “Didn’t you see how they were looking at each other? It was so obvious.”
    “Yeah, they did kind of have weird looks on their faces,” Danielle agreed, her eyes darting from one to the other.
    “All right you two. You’ve done your jobs. I think Maggie and I can take it from here.”
    He smiled down at her and Maggie almost forgot to breathe. Danielle was right. Matthew Webster was totally awesome. And then some.
    The End
     

Chapter 6
     

The Death of Mary Alice Olivetti
     
    Some say it was the Catholic Church that killed Mary Alice Olivetti. Others say it was her mother, Nicolena’s obsession with holy water and olive oil. And there were others still who blamed the rest of us, throwing out words like indifference and ridicule.
    Me, I think it was a mix of all three, a trinity if you will; Church, mother, and us. I was Mary Alice Olivetti’s friend, her best friend, according to her. It wasn’t true, not for me, at least not in the beginning. I let her be my friend because she copied psychology notes for me while I did more important things like wrote my name along the margins of a black and white steno book, block style. And she saved me a place in the cafeteria line on pizza day, like it was an honor for her to be doing it. Of course, there were the pizzelles —vanilla because I didn’t like anise—thirty of them that she brought once a week to our lunch table to guarantee herself a seat.
    Mary Alice believed us when we said Alex Delensen had a crush on her. Didn’t she know the captain of the football team would never look twice at a girl with a big fat braid who wore rosary beads around her neck and black elastic pants with white cotton shirts?
    I don’t like to think too much about the early days when I thought she was just the new girl in the robin’s-egg-blue house with yellow trim whose parents spoke broken English and drove a beat-up Plymouth Fury.
    I like to dwell on the after; after I went to her house that day to deliver a dozen freshly made cannoli because my mother said we were just as Italian