I wouldn’t say I was abandoning my parents’ minimalist lifestyle, but being of the younger generation, there were just some modern luxuries I grew to love along with the rest of my peers during school. I had a cell phone, a laptop, and a desktop computer. I didn’t pay for any form of cable, but I could be a bit of a sucker for streaming services. After getting sick of glaring at my computer screens all day long, I finally sprung for a television. Maybe it was the reason I loved going home to my parents when they still lived in Woodstock. It was more of the natural and authentic way I’d been raised, whereas I’d fallen victim to the twenty-first-century vibe. I still didn’t have a ton of furniture, but what TV wasn’t complete without a couch?
Needless to say, my parents suffered a bit of culture shock the first time they came to visit and view the house they would eventually buy. I tried to maintain saging and burning incense and keeping my aura and energy clean, something my mom noted almost immediately, but I could see my dad scrutinizing some of my modern choices as he walked around.
“Yeah. I guess Philly turned me a little.” I chuckled nervously, not wanting to get into it more than that. “Work is good. Business is booming! I made a new friend. She’s really tied into the holistic scene here and helped get my name out there. I’ve had nonstop customers ever since. I have group walk-in sessions every two hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Certified health coaching on Tuesdays, and examinations and aromatherapy on Thursdays. Private sessions on Saturdays, though I send the receptionist home by two if we haven’t had any scheduled, and then I take Sundays off.”
I was a licensed physical therapist, though the degree was obtained only to the end of being able to offer people naturalistic health advice without modern medical professionals calling me a crack. I was always safe about the advice I gave, and I believed in medication and hospitals the same as the next guy over. I just also believed that Mother Nature provides some of the best cures money doesn’t have to buy.
Yoga was just one way I helped my clients, but I also provided aromatherapy to relieve stress, depression, and anxiety, and led health coaching classes to teach people about the natural ways to keep their bodies fresh and fit. I tried to cover different topics every week—weight loss, vegetarianism or veganism, sexual wellness—but sometimes the classes just ended up flowing with whatever the attendees needed, and I was okay with that, too. I was a typical, cliche go with the flow kind of girl. It was necessary in both my personal and professional lives.
My dad scoffed. “Well, jeez, sounds like you’re slacking there, kiddo.” My dad was a solid dad. If you were looking for a good dad joke or someone to call you sport, he was your guy. I always found it endearing, though it tended to embarrass my friends in high school. “You make sure you’re not overworking yourself, huh?”
“I know, Daddy.” I leaned over to kiss him on his cheek. “It doesn’t even feel like work when I love doing it so much. Most of my Saturdays end up being empty, though I’m up to charging three hundred an hour for a private session.”
My mom nearly spit out her food. “Three hundred? That’s a lot. You don’t feel bad?”
My parents knew that I wasn’t in my line of work for the money. I loved helping people be healthy, especially if I could help them do it naturally. When I first started out, I was charging the minimum cost for a group or private session. It was okay in Woodstock because my doors and windows were bursting with customers, and the rent of the building I worked out of was cheap, but along with a larger city came a higher cost of doing business, and my rent nearly tripled even though I looked for a place as far outside of the downtown area as I could get without sacrificing customers.
“I had to up it to cover rent. Being open on the weekends, especially with heating and cooling
and utilities, costs extra. If I wanted to be able to have private sessions on the weekends, I had to charge more. Besides, just living in Philly is more expensive, too. I wanted to be able to live in relative comfort.” I stirred around my vegan noodles on my plate. “Do you think I should lower it?”
“Oh, no, honey.” My mom waved the air about me, feeling my aura gathering some negativity. “If that’s what you have to charge to cover your costs, then you shouldn’t feel bad. I guess it’s just a far cry from when you used to charge fifty dollars.”
My dad stuck out his chopsticks. “That was too cheap. This one’s super smart and super talented. It’s okay to charge what you’re worth, baby.”
My mood lightened a bit. “Thanks, Dad.”
My mom smiled at my dad, and we all turned our attention to eating in silence. I watched as my mom reached over to pick the corn off my dad’s plate and replace it with her zucchini. Even though she was tossing her unwanted greens at him every few minutes, each time she did it, he gave her a warm smile and a, “Thank you, my love.” They were a good pair. I was single because of them. Not because they were overbearing or intrusive; in fact, they were the opposite. My parents always tried to promote a healthy view of dating and sex, to the point that both of my parents often tried to set me up. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to date, but I’d grown up around two people who worshipped the ground the other walked on. Something about a guy wandering up to me any old way just didn’t strike me as worth my time. I wanted a guy who loved me like my dad loved my mom. High standards, some people called it, but I wasn’t looking for a man who was rich, or incredibly attractive, or held some six-figure vocation. I just wanted the kind of passion my parents had. I wanted to be able to look up in forty years and still be as head over heels as I was the day we met.
“You okay, Stace?” my mom asked, interrupting my thoughts.
I smiled. “Yes. Just lost in thought.”
My dad opened his mouth to make what I’m sure would have been a groan-worthy joke, but before he could get it out, my ringtone spilled into the room. I reached into the pockets on my sundress, my favorite part of its design, and pulled out my cell phone. It was my assistant-slash-receptionist at my studio. She did her best to avoid calling me on Saturdays, so I knew it must have been important.
“Sorry.” I held up a hand to my parents and answered the call. “Hey, Sam.”
“Hi!” Her voice was cheery and upbeat, so I could take that to mean nothing was wrong. “I know it’s getting pretty close to two o’clock, but I just got a call for a private session. I told her I’d have to check in with you since we’re almost closed. Do you wanna take it?”
I wasn’t in the business for the money, certainly, but I wasn’t about to turn down money on a day that would otherwise be a bust. “Yeah, I’ll take it. When is it?”
“She asked for the soonest possible slot.”
I stood up from the fake table and kissed each of my parents on their foreheads, whispering love-yous and goodbyes. “Call her back and tell her I can see her at two-thirty. I’m on my way.”
3
Gabriel
When Molly said that it would be in my best interest to wear comfortable pants to my yoga session, I didn’t quite know how to accomplish what she was looking for. My wardrobe was almost entirely made up of suit pants and a few random pairs of jeans that I never wore. Hours of digging through both mine and the remainders of Marco’s and Alessandro’s closets had resulted in the unearthing of a pair of sweatpants. I had a small collection of t-shirts, mostly plain white ones to go under a suit coat when I needed a wider range of movement than a button-up offered. I paired the two, trying to ignore how much I had to pull the pair of drawstrings on the pants to make them fit, added some tennis shoes to the ensemble, and headed out.
I still had about forty-five minutes before the yoga session that Molly had set up for me, so I planned to talk to Marco on the way. I’d decided that I would call Alessandro, too. I needed help with something, and they were probably the only two that could help me.
Try though she might to hide it, I could see the stress settled in the deep bags under Molly’s ordinarily vibrant brown eyes. She kept a brave face on. She needed to know that our resident knight in shining armor, Marco, was off in California, living the domestic dad-life, but she wore her listlessness like a thickly woven robe.
She and Luca loved each other, probably more than either of them loved anything else in their lives, but I couldn’t help but get vibes that were reminiscent of the time they broke up before they got married. Their self-defenses were covered in the sharpest of swords. Back before Alessandro left, Luca and Molly got into an argument that I feared they wouldn’t recover from. The business was destroying their relationship. I got more flashes of Alessandro’s ghostly expression in my mind and got chills down to my toes.
The Varasso men invested in women on a deeper level than they invested in anything else. They didn’t like to trust people, didn’t like to let them in. We’d been raised in a way that almost suggested family was all we needed, and with the way my father would occasionally treat my brothers’ mother, it was clear he believed that love was bothersome on a good day and an insurmountable obstacle on a bad one.