“I’d rather walk.”
“Okay,” he backed off, and that was why she enjoyed his company. He saw her issues, wanted to help her, but never pushed too hard when she balked.
The night was in the high fifties, which was a nice change from the damp, frigid weather they’d been having. The scent of the pizzeria, Vincenzo’s, drifted onto the sidewalk as a man carried a box of food to the delivery truck parked out front.
It had been years since she ate in a restaurant. This wasn’t a date, but it still felt significant.
“After you.” Ryan hoisted open the glass door, and her lungs filled with the steamy scent of delicious ethnic cuisine. She thought she wanted pizza, but now she was reconsidering. Maybe she was in the mood for pasta.
Mambo Italiano played from a speaker in the corner, tucked above an old black and white photo of an unmistakably Italian family crowded around a large dinner table cluttered with enormous bowls of pasta, meat courses, salads, and other famous dishes. The kitchen walls wore a powdered dusting of dough flour, and the loud hum of employee chatter competed with the sounds coming from the dining room.
A young woman with jet black hair and full red lips came from the kitchen, brushing her hands across a sauce stained apron. “Ryan!” She practically yelled in greeting, her ruby lips splitting into a bright smile. “Hey, Angela, get out here!”
Another woman, roughly the same mid-twenties age with the same dark brown hair appeared and held out her hands. “You’re kiddin’ me!” She rounded the counter and cupped Ryan’s face, holding him in place with an equal mix of aggression and affection. Slapping a smacking kiss on his cheek, she yelled, “We were starting to think you were being held prisoner in that house of yours.”
“Yeah, Ry, you don’t want to come visit us anymore? What gives?”
He actually flushed, and Maggie got a small thrill out of seeing these women pick on him. They obviously had a close connection with him. She tried to guess what that link might be without overthinking, but she couldn’t figure it out. They looked too Italian to be his relatives, but then again, the woman at the café had an Italian name and she had been his cousin.
“Nicky!” the woman, Angela, shouted, causing Ryan to flinch. She turned back to him and pinched his bearded cheek. “All this hair! You’re like a werewolf.”
His flush darkened. “You don’t like it?”
“Nah, it suits you.” She made a muscle in her arm. “Rugged. Anyway, we got a nice veal cutlet today. Why don’t you let Nicky cook for you? She’ll start with a nice caprese salad.” She slapped his stomach. “Eh? You need a break from all that pizza.”
“Look who the cat dragged in!” A third black haired woman appeared, with similar enthusiasm, hugging and kissing him like the others had. She dragged him behind the counter and Maggie wasn’t sure if she should follow. It was a whirlwind of bad dye jobs, cheap perfume, and too much gold jewelry.
“Come on. We’ll get you a good table.” The third woman nudged him in the shoulder with zero subtlety. “You and your lady friend.”
Maggie fell into step behind them as the women shoved Ryan into a booth along the back wall. They collected the menus off the checkered red tablecloth and told him to give them five minutes. Apparently, they had no say in their dinner tonight.
When the three women disappeared to the kitchen, Maggie looked at him, noting the flush of his cheeks hidden behind the red of his beard, now marked with three crimson kiss marks.
She laughed. “They’re not Clooneys.”
“No, definitely not.”
There was something special about the pizza shop, the essence of family and acceptance with a dash of judgment that came from the deepest place of love. If she had a place to belong like that she’d never leave. Or maybe she would. She had family and still chose not to interact with them.
Not wanting to think of her own life, she focused on his. “Who are they?”
“They’re my cousins-in-law. Their brother Anthony is married to my cousin Kate McCullough.”
“There really isn’t anyone in this town you’re not related to, is there?”
“I told you, not many. If you look at our family tree, you could even trace our family back to the O’Malleys.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious.” His eyes turned to the ceiling, as if he were solving a complicated calculous equation in his head. “My grandfather on my mother’s side was an O’Leahey. But my grandmother was originally a Murphy twice removed from the Ó Máille generation, and everyone knows that was Caleb Senior’s family’s surname before they changed it to the Americanized O’Malley.”
She blinked, hardly able to follow a word of that. “Do they make you study your family’s ancestry as some sort of clan mentality training?”