I cleared my throat and she looked up.
“Well,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, speaking carefully, because my tongue was still a little swollen where I’d bitten it.
“Would you like to sit down?” She gestured to a chair covered in the same material as the couch.
I did so. “How long have I been sleeping?”
“Nearly a day,” she said, “but not straight through. You’re in San Francisco, by the way. We’re at-”
“The Fairmont, I know,” I said. “It’s on the shampoo bottles. I can read.”
She glanced down, perhaps taken aback by my rudeness. I was a little surprised by it myself.
She went on: “I looked in on you several times, checked your hand for signs of infection and changed the dressing. There was no serious inflammation and you were never running a fever, so I let you sleep.”
“Are you a nurse?”
“No, but I did some volunteer medical work overseas, right after college.”
“Well,” I said, “what’s Christmas without a saint?”
I wasn’t sure why I was giving her such a hard time. She had saved my life, after all. I cleared my throat and tried to start over.
“Look,” I said, “I think we should talk. Miss Skouras-”
“Tess,” she corrected me. “And my last name is D’Agostino. Using his name last night was dramatic license.”
“Miss D’Agostino, I don’t know how else to say this: You are the last of the Skourases and I am the only person in the world who knows where the Skouras grandchild is. Are we going to have a problem?”
She smiled a deeply curved smile, like a Valentine heart. “That statement contained a rather large contradiction in logic,” she said. “The ‘last of the Skourases’ part. If there’s a grandchild, then-”
“Don’t play games with me.” I leaned forward. “Are we going to have a problem?”
She sobered. “About the baby…” She picked up her cup of tea. “You allowed yourself to be tortured and maimed for that child. I’m fairly sure you didn’t do that after abandoning him in a cardboard box somewhere.”
“But-”
She interrupted. “You tell me, then. Is he safe?”
“Yes. More than safe. He’ll be loved, and he’ll never want for anything. But for me to get him back would be difficult. Making the arrangement that I did was… fraught, to say the least.”
“That sounds like an interesting story,” she said.
“It is.”
“Maybe you’ll tell me someday.”
“That’s it?” I said, disbelieving. “You’re satisfied with that?”
“I haven’t decided if I want to take over my father’s businesses,” she said. “But I do know I’m not ready to be a mother.”
I sat back, still baffled, but silent. I wasn’t sure why I was even arguing the point.
She interrupted my disordered thoughts. “Are you hungry? I can’t imagine you wouldn’t be.”
When she said it, I realized that I was.
She said, “I’ll get you something to wear.”
“I thought you were going to say ‘something to eat.’”
“We can get room service here,” she said, “but first, I’m very particular about coffee, and I have a favorite place for cappuccino. You’ve said you feel well. You might as well get out and stretch your legs after lying down for such a long time.”
When I didn’t move to get up, Tess said, “You’re from San Francisco; you must know how lovely North Beach is on Christmas Eve.”
“I’m not really from here,” I said, “and no, I haven’t been in North Beach at Christmas.”
“Then you should see it.”
That was how I ended up walking around North Beach on Christmas Eve with a mobster’s daughter. I was wearing lost-and-found motley, things Tess had sweet-talked the hotel staff into surrendering: a big fisherman’s sweater and brown wool trousers and leather ankle boots. Everything was slightly too big for me, but comfortable. Tess’s clothes wouldn’t have fit. I’d realized that she was inches shorter than she’d appeared in the projection booth. I supposed it was both my literal and psychological perspective on the situation that had made her seem taller.
Although it was Christmas Eve, Tess had assured me that many of the shops would be open until six for frantic last-minute purchases, both by traditional nonnas and non-Italian yuppies. And, she said, there would be a café or two open late.
As we walked, me navigating carefully in my slightly-too-large borrowed boots, Tess greeted and was greeted by people on the sidewalk. She seemed to invite the courtesy of passersby. They were clearly looking at her, not at me. She wished them Buon Natale, and something lovely and Italian happened to her voice when she did.
“People like you,” I said.
“You don’t,” she said mildly.
“That’s not exactly true,” I said. “It’s just that-”
I broke off then, because we were standing at the doorway to Café Puccini, and a pair of tourists, chatting in German, held the door for us to go in. We did.
At the counter, Tess ordered herself a cappuccino. I opened my mouth to second it, when she interrupted, speaking directly to the man behind the counter. “She’ll have a steamed milk.”
“A what?” I said.
To me, she said, “You haven’t had anything to eat or drink in over a day. You’re not starting with coffee.”
I thought of objecting but realized I didn’t feel legitimately indignant enough to do so.
She came back with two paper to-go cups, handed me mine, and then added a packet of raw sugar to hers. As she stirred it in, I sampled the milk cautiously.
“Is it okay?” Tess asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had hot milk before, not even as a child.” I tried it again. “It doesn’t taste anything like cold milk.”
“It’s not supposed to,” she said.
“Listen, Miss D’Agostino-”
“Tess,” she said.
“Tess, what I was saying outside was, the past few months have not paid a good return on faith in my fellow man. And I really don’t know anything about you.”
She sealed a plastic lid onto her cup. “Would you like to?”
As we walked back toward the hotel, she told me her life story.
She was from a small Italian clan of fishermen in Bodega Bay, who later ran a bait-and-tackle shop on the water, with a small deli inside. Soon the deli was the heart of the business, with tourists and working fishermen alike coming in for espresso and cappuccino and her grandmother’s sandwiches and pasta salads. Her mother, Anna, worked at the store in her teenage years.
That was how she met Tony Skouras, who had a second home and moored a pleasure boat in Bodega Bay. He seemed like the perfect gentleman. Anna knew he was married, but she was young and swept away.
Skouras supported his illegitimate baby financially until Anna married a nice working man, a roofer. After that he sent several checks a year anyway, for extras, nice Christmas presents, and piano lessons. Teresa always knew the roofer wasn’t her real father, but she loved him. And when she met her biological father in her last year of high school, she was as charmed, in a very different way, as her mother had been. Skouras was mannerly and interested in her. He was willing to pay for whatever higher education Teresa could win through her grades and aptitude testing. She went to college back east, then to grad school in London. Tess, as she became known in England, stayed in touch with Skouras. She sent him notes and small gifts on holidays. Of course, she’d become aware of who this man really was, where his success in business came from. But like many middle-class civilians, she had a romanticized view of organized crime. She never stopped writing him notes and sending small gifts on holidays. She revered him.
“The truly ugly side of that, I didn’t see that for a long time,” she said. “My father made it possible for me to become who I am, and not just financially. I love my mother and her family, but they were simple people. None of them had any success in school, or much in business. It was my father who gave me my intellect. I wasn’t brilliant like Adrian, granted, but my mind… it was a good deal more than my stepfather could have given me.”