Page 36 of The Summer You Were Mine

“We’d be delighted.”

A cooling breeze swept up to Cris, Ellie, and Piero as soon as they rounded the other side of the stone house, which was set up a bit higher than the valley below.

A long wooden table stretched out under a tall pergola with a leafy roof.

The table was laden with dishes and silverware, small pots of flowers, and bottles of wine from one end to the other.

Men and women crowded around, pouring wine or water into one another’s glasses, bringing trays of cheeses or bread to the table, and already digging into the feast. There were baskets of grissini, bowls of salad greens and beans, a wooden board covered in sliced salumi, cups of fat green and black olives, and platters of sliced tomatoes, zucchini, and fennel doused in olive oil.

On a side table, there were several rustic-looking cakes set out under white mosquito-netted domes, and painted ceramic bowls of fruit.

In typical Italian fashion, “practically nothing” was a euphemism for “you won’t need to eat again until three days from now. ”

Cris had been so hot up to that point that the thought of food hadn’t even entered his mind, but as soon as the crisp scent of fresh basil hit him, he was all in.

Ellie looked a little stunned, standing by the table with a look on her face like she’d forgotten what she was doing here in the first place.

She was probably stressing about interview questions and timing and anything else that would threaten their plans.

It wasn’t like Cris hadn’t seen that face on her before, but he couldn’t stand to see her worry right now.

“ Ragazzi, sit anywhere you like,” Piero called to them. He turned back to the group, explaining who they were.

“Welcome, welcome,” said an older woman with sandy-blond hair and riding boots who sat at the head of the table.

Her gold rings glinted as she gestured toward the empty chairs at the end of the table.

“I am Luisa,” she said as Piero sat down to her right.

“Please, help yourself. We’re not formal here, just a workman’s lunch. ”

“Thank you, you’re too kind. This is amazing!” said Ellie.

Cris pulled two chairs away from the table, and they were seated for less than one second before the parade of platters and dishes descended upon them. Wineglasses were passed down, and someone tipped a fizzy red liquid into their glasses.

“This is the frizzante ,” said a man with thick brown waves pulled into a low ponytail. He pointed at the tray of cheese. “I like this with the formaggio di capra stagionato .”

Cris took two small pieces of crumbly goat cheese from the tray and handed one to Ellie.

They both picked up their wine, and the whole table raised glasses in a toast of “ Cin! ” before taking first sips.

Cris turned to Ellie, raising the nugget of cheese toward her.

He picked up her hand and bumped the cheese chunks together.

She laughed and took a bite. Whatever apprehensiveness he’d observed in her up to that point was officially gone as her eyes rolled back.

“Good gravy, that’s phenomenal,” she said with eyes closed and her golden-brown lashes fanned out against her still-flushed skin.

He had to agree. “We are going to work on questions right after lunch, you know.” Ellie pulled out the top half of her notebook from her bag and tapped it before sliding it back in.

“Yep,” he said. “We totally are.”

And so it began. Ellie and Cris were not only fed but treated to stories about the vineyard and the family.

Luisa, Piero, and their son, Marco, had been running the winery since Piero’s parents passed away.

Over the years, they’d expanded to produce cheeses, honey, vegetables, olive oil, and even salumi.

All three of them, plus the collection of employees, chimed in throughout the meal to encourage them to sip one wine with a bite of salty prosciutto, another with a tangy caper berry, bringing out the flavors in the wine, the food, the day.

Cris had edged a bottle of sparkling water closer to them and kept refilling their glasses, but even rehydration and the stomach-lining benefits of thinly sliced pork fat were losing the battle against six kinds of Chiaro di Luna’s wines.

At a certain point, Ellie had stopped shooting impatient glances his way and released the furrow in her brow.

Her cheeks were pink, but under the cool shade of the pergola, it couldn’t be from the heat anymore.

That was about the time when Marco decided to introduce them to the house-made pear cordial, and Cris made the executive decision to forget about driving for the next several hours.

He wasn’t feeling overly loopy, just unwilling to risk getting pulled over and trying to explain to the local carabinieri why he and his passenger smelled like the six cases of wine in the back of the car.

“So, you are the ones getting married?” Luisa asked with a smile from the other end of the table.

“No, amore, it’s his grandfather. Simone from Chiavari. You remember. Water polo,” said Piero.

“Ah! How lovely! And who is the beautiful bride?” Luisa asked.

“My grandmother,” said Ellie.

“Oh! That is really something! Wait, will that make you cousins? Or…” Luisa trailed off as she turned to Piero.

“No!” Cris and Ellie said in unison, then glanced at each other.

“It would make us step-something-or-other, but in this case, it really makes us nothing.” Ellie smiled.

“Well, not nothing,” Cris said, turning to her.

“Kind of nothing,” she said, the smile now tightening her neck muscles. “Nothing legal.”

“But we could be,” said Cris.

“But we’re not,” she insisted.

“Well kids, why don’t you visit the gardens for a bit? There are plenty of places to relax and enjoy. When you’re ready, we’ll load up the car.” Piero stood, collecting some of the empty dishes, and strolled toward the house.

“Great, we’ve succeeded in awkwarding people right off their own table.” Cris poured more water into his glass.

“We’re not awkward,” Ellie said, her face crumpling. “Oh no, we are, aren’t we?”

“It’s an awkward topic in most modern cultures, I think.” He laughed. “You’re not supposed to be thinking certain things about someone who’s practically your family.” Apparently, that pear cordial did exactly what it was supposed to do and let his subconscious slip right off its leash.

“But we’re not family,” she said, clearly getting flustered. “And what things?”

There was no way to manage this discussion with an audience.

Plus, he was pretty sure that if he kept sitting there his mouth would only improve its proficiency in letting loose every embarrassing thought he’d had in the last decade.

Cris looked over to the garden, where there were several comfortable nooks he could envision them sobering up in.

At the moment, his feet were going numb and Ellie’s forehead looked like a Twizzler.

They needed to get away from the table, ASAP.

“Do you want to go check out the garden?” he asked.

They wandered along the green grass flanked by beds of marigolds, pansies, and purple alliums. The cool breeze swept through Ellie’s hair and ruffled the hem on her sundress.

She thought about looking at Cris’s watch again but couldn’t remember how many hours it took to metabolize as many glasses of wine as they had drunk and didn’t bother.

“You know I am only teasing, right?” he said. “About being awkward.”

“Oh. Yes. Maybe. I’m not worried about that. I am worried about one hundred other things, so that can be one hundred and one. Can we sit?” Ellie asked. She didn’t wait for an answer and surrendered herself into a rocking chair. It moved. She flinched and stood back up again.

“Come over here,” Cris said, pointing to a hammock behind a eucalyptus tree.

Ellie stopped and put her hand up in protest. “No swaying. I will do anything but sway.”

“We won’t sway, I promise. We’ll just sit. Just come over here.” Cris sat on the edge of the wide canvas that was braced by wooden stays on each end. “See?” He gestured toward his long, muscular leg planted on the ground. He extended his hand toward her. “I got you.”

Ellie approached with a crinkled face. She scanned the situation, tucked the fabric of her dress between her legs, and sat, leaning back next to him as the canvas folded behind them.

If the hammock moved one inch in either direction she was going to end up tumbling out of it.

She kept the toes of her right foot on the ground, just in case.

“You don’t trust me enough to handle hammock navigation?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t need to. Your foot did.”

“Well, I—”

“Come on, you pain-in-the-butt. That’s enough of this,” he said, pulling her back against the canvas so that the top parts of their bodies were lying across the hammock sideways. His feet stayed planted on the ground, though she could only brush hers against the tips of the grass.

“This is nice,” she said, her body an ironing board.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Relative to what?” Ellie asked the canopy of tree branches above.

Cris let out an exasperated breath and rolled toward Ellie.

“Can I?” he asked. She nodded, blinking, and he shifted his arm under her so that her head rested on his bicep.

It did feel more comfortable. Plus, the hammock wasn’t moving.

Finally, it felt good to lie still. Of course, being Ellie, the longer she lay still, the more her thoughts came to party with a brass band and parade floats like it was Canal Street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

Her head was a never-ending stream of worries and fears, decked out in feather headdresses and honking horns.

Couldn’t they take the day off, just this once?

“What are we doing, Cris?”

“We’re lying in a hammock, Ellie. It’s called relaxing.”