Cranston stood in his kitchen going through the cupboards. An empty, resusable cotton grocery bag lay on the counter in front of him like a sleeping kitten. “Leddy? Dr. Cuccello invited us over to her place for dinner. She gave me a list of things to bring. Care to help me find them? What we don’t have here I’ll have to pick up on the way. Leddy?”
Leddy, in a “Go Pats” neck to knee nightshirt, slid across the kitchen’s linoleum flooring on stockinged feet. “You have a list?”
“No.”
“She didn’t give you a list? C’mon, Pop. She’s more anal than you.”
Cranston kept shifting things around in the cupboards. “She TXTed me.”
Leddy sat on the countertop facing her father. “She TXTed you and you lost it, right? Deleted it by accident?”
“Damned phone.”
She held her hand out. He gave her his phone without looking. A few swipes and taps later she read off, “Hot or sweet Italian sausage. From Buello’s, not Brüdermann’s. Hey, Maria’s cool. She even umlauted the u in Brüdermann.”
“Women. And it’s Dr. Cuccello.”
“She lets me call her Maria.”
Cranston turned to her. “Maria? Not even Maria Francesca?”
“Just Maria.”
“She never let me call her just Maria.”
Leddy raspberried her father. “You know she likes you, right?”
Cranston stopped going through the cupboards and looked at the grocery bag. “She tell you that?”
“Women know these things.”
“Yeah, right. And since when are you a woman?”
“Pop, I’ve been having my period for two years now.”
“Do I need to know this?” He looked at his daughter. “For two years now?”
“You never noticed the box of mixed tampons in the shopping cart every month or so?”
He went back to filling the grocery bag. “I know I don’t need to know this. And where’d you learn about tampons?”
“Maria told me. She asked before my period started and told me to get ready and what to do.”
Cranston sagged. “Oh, god.”
“She even gave me a couple tamps and told me to keep them handy just in case.”
Cranston focused on the grocery bag. He roved his cupboards and moved items, desperate to return them to their place.
“It’s a Sisterhood thing, Pop. We Sistahs know things about each other.”
“Can we change the subject?”
She pumped her arms up over her head and sang, “Sistahs, are doing it for themselves!” She kept pumping her arms and shaking her head. “Come on, Pop! Sing! Sistahs, are doing it for themselves.”
Her father kept moving cans and tins back and forth on cupboard shelves. “What else is on the list?”
She read the remainder of the list and glanced at the clock on the stove: 8:30am. “Hey! We’re making pizzas, right?”
Cranston closed his cupboards, rolled the grocery bag into a ball, and took his phone back. “We’re going shopping.”
Friends offered to back Maria Francesca Cuccello should she want to open a pizza parlor. She politely refused. “I make pizza for friends, not for money.”
She had lots of friends. Her pizza was known from Portland to Atlantic through Central Canada, down to Chicago and Denver, over to Atlanta, DC, Baltimore, NYC, and back to Boston. Also overseas. In Naples. Where her life was jokingly threatened if she didn’t give up her recipes. “Watch me. Learn that way.”
But it didn’t matter. Each time things were slightly different based on the feel of the flour, the taste of the water, the freshness of the yeast, what vegetables were local, …
Leddy, ready in short order, came back into the kitchen with her backpack over one shoulder. She grabbed the car keys off their hook by the back door. “I’ll drive, Pop.”
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