Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan
Chapter Forty-nine
‘So. Good family?’
Marisa was suffering from her first hangover in six months, and the weather was dreary and raining and she was in absolutely no mood for an interrogation from her grandmother, bathed in sunshine and shelling peas in her little kitchen. Who? Marisa thought through her foggy head. Who even shelled peas any more?
‘Why are you shelling peas?’
Nonna held them up.
‘The brighter, the sweeter,’ she said. ‘Lilies of the field who do not weave or spin.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Marisa, who was exhausted. Nonna brought her near-sighted little black button eyes up closer to the screen.
‘You look tired. What time did you get home?’
‘Um, not too late,’ lied Marisa through her teeth. She hadn’t even noticed what time it was.
‘You didn’t drink?’
Her nonna’s face was stern.
‘Noooo . . . A little bit. He is Russian.’
Nonna sniffed.
‘Nonna! Things are different these days.’
‘You go to a man’s house, you take him food, you drink with him, you come home and you look terrible. Is this what you had hoped for the evening?’
Everything had seemed even worse in the cold light of the morning. Her nonna was right: she had offered herself up on a plate, and he had patiently explained how he much he missed his ex. And oh my God, of course, all the old ladies of the village who came up to practise Celine Dion songs for him. She was absolutely in that category too. She groaned. How could she have made such an idiot of herself?
But the worse thing was, when she put that to one side, she had felt the evening was . . . it was wonderful. She had liked him. Laughing together and drinking vodka, and how touchingly he had taken her into his confidence, talked about his life; it had been a real conversation, not idle chit-chat or the desperate flotsam of Tinder dates, where you talked about other dates you’d been on, or whether you liked dogs or pudding. It had been a real sharing of their lives.
And then when he showed her how to play . . . her fingers still tingled at the memory of it, of feeling engulfed by the music.
And then she’d gone and spoiled it all.
‘Do you like this boy?’ said her nonna.
Marisa shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s been such a long time.’
‘I think that says yes.’
Nonna was now adding the peas to some broad beans and making a mint dressing for the freshest, lightest salad Marisa could imagine. She wanted nothing more than to be sitting in her nonna’s courtyard, the sun pouring in, drinking sparkling water and waiting for lunch.
‘I just don’t meet anyone else.’
‘Well! Get out! Meet other people! Come and visit your nonna!’
‘I would love to,’ said Marisa avidly, even though the idea of getting to a crowded noisy airport and dealing with queues and strangers and boarding a plane was up there with nipping over to NASA and signing up for the Mars mission.
‘Now it is lunchtime. Get some sleep. Do not take him any more food until you know his intentions are pure.’
‘His intentions are non-existent,’ said Marisa.
Nonna sniffed. ‘He is a man; you are a woman. If he likes women, there is nothing wrong with you.’
‘I think,’ said Marisa, ‘that’s the biggest compliment you’ve ever paid me.’