An Italian Harvest
Bonus scene
Twelve Minutes
This scene takes place between Chapters Twenty-Nine and Thirty. Read the book first.
He sat there for a second with his hand on the key and made himself breathe out.
His hands had been like that since the kitchen. Not shaking exactly. Not doing what he told them, and he'd noticed it first with the front door and had thought, that's the cold.
It wasn't the cold.
The dog got in before he could stop him.
Fifty kilos of cane corso up onto the passenger seat, facing forward, sitting the way he sits. Marco looked at him.
"Fine. Be my wingman, Argos."
His voice came out wrong. He heard it come out wrong and had a moment of pure fright at that, because his voice does not come out wrong. It's the one thing that has never let him down in thirty-six years.
He got the car round in the yard and stopped at the top of the track.
Left, into Andria. Straight and grey with nothing on it.
There was a second where his foot wouldn't go down, and he sat there with the engine running and his own breathing sounding stupid in a cold car, and thought, she's going to say no.
Then he went.
***
She'd been out there since dawn.
It came at him about four hundred metres down the road and it went through him like cold water and after that he couldn't get rid of it.
There'd been no train. He'd sat at that table with his coffee going cold and looked at the timetable twice, and there was nothing at all before quarter past eight, and she'd have known. She'd have checked. She's checked everything since he’s known her.
And she'd sat down on that bench anyway.
Marco's hands came tight on the wheel and he made himself let go of it.
Two hours. In the dark. In December, in that coat, with a back that can't take a metal bench for eleven minutes let alone two hours, and a house full of who'd have got up and driven her, and every single one of them would have been glad to.
He took the bend by the Ferrero place far too fast. Argos braced against the door and Marco said sorry to him out loud.
***
"Evie. I should have answered you last night."
He got the whole sentence out before he understood what it was.
That's what a man says across a desk before he tells somebody the department's being restructured. He'd said it to a windscreen at seventy kilometres an hour and it had come out like a form.
He tried it again without the should.
Worse.
Something went through his chest sideways and he had to put the window halfway down to get some air into the car.
Argos looked at him.
"I know," said Marco.
***
When you get there, don't be funny.
That's a very easy thing to say to a man in a doorway when you've got a cup of coffee in your hand.
His mother had been in the colonnade with her arms folded and hadn't said one word, and he'd have taken almost anything over that.
***
The next one was good, and it was rubbish, and it took him half a kilometre to find out why.
There's a room in that house that's been hers since October. There was a chair in the shower before she got there. His mother had the flights booked, and she'd wanted to know her size, because it gets cold in that house in the mornings even in October.
All of it true. He built the whole thing and it ran beautifully and he got as far as the co-operative turning before he heard it back.
It's a speech about a house.
He isn't in it anywhere.
Thirty-six years old, and asked to say one thing about himself, and what came out was a description of his mother's spare room.
His face had gone hot. Alone, in a car, in the early morning, and his face had gone hot.
***
The straight comes up after the trees with the wall along the left.
The truck off the Trani road wasn't there yet. He changed up and got both hands on the wheel and said, to the car, "All right. All right."
Argos put his chin on Marco's forearm.
He hasn't done that since he was a puppy and he's far too big for it now, and it went through the gear change and neither of them did anything about it.
"I don't know how to do this," said Marco.
The wall went past on the left.
"I'm going to stand in front of her in about ten minutes and I don't know how it's done."
The dog didn't move his head.
***
Then it came up out of him with no warning at all.
"I'm in love with you."
Out loud, in his mother's car, to a dog.
And he had to pull his hands down the wheel and hold on to it, because it arrived with four years behind it and he had not been ready for how much of it there was. It was like being hit in the chest with a bag of sand.
I've been in love with you since a night in the middle of the Atlantic when you rang me instead of a doctor.
Before that. I don't know when. I've looked and I can't find the start of it.
I nearly said it to you on deck two with a tube in the back of your hand, and you couldn't have heard a word of it, and I still couldn't do it.
And then last night you stood in my courtyard and asked me, out loud, in my own house, and I stood there.
He drove.
His eyes had gone. He wiped his face on his sleeve because his hands were needed.
"That's it," he said, when he could. "That's the one."
And then, a while later:
"It won't come out like that."
***
He caught himself doing it at the water tower.
Working out what she'd want to hear. Sitting in a car on his own with nobody in it but his dog and constructing the version she'd like best, and he'd got about four lines into it before he heard what he was at.
Marco took one hand off the wheel and put it over his mouth.
Sixty people at a table. A Greek man on a cable car gate. A woman from Ohio at eleven at night with a complaint about a wine list.
"No," he said, out loud.
Argos leaned into the corner with him.
"Not her. Don't plan it. Don't put a face on for this one."
***
The truck came off the Trani road at the junction and there was nothing whatever to be done about it.
Marco sat behind it with the indicator going and a bend he couldn't see round, and he put his forehead against the top of the wheel for one second and then took it off again.
And it came back, and this time he couldn't get out from under it.
He knows that train station and that bench. He's waited on it himself, years ago, coming back off a leave, and it's metal and it has holes in the back of it and it's bolted down facing the line.
She'd have got up every twenty minutes. Antonella told her to, so she'd have got up and walked to the end of the platform and back and sat down on it again, in the dark, on her own, with the bag between her feet.
Marco put both hands on the top of the wheel.
The truck indicated and turned off.
***
The town started.
A shutter going up. A man on the other side of the road with a dog, who looked at the car with mild interest. The turn down towards the station, and a one-way system he's known his whole life and drove straight through.
He put two wheels up on the pavement outside and left it there.
His mother would have had something to say about that.
He got out and got the door open for Argos and stopped for one second at the entrance to the ticket hall with his hand flat on the stone, the way you do.
Don't be funny.
He had no idea at all what he was going to say.
He went in.
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Thank you for reading, and for signing up.
Book Three, Ciara's story, is coming. I'll write when it's ready.
Fair winds,
Sara Romera