Dolci di Love by Sarah-Kate Lynch & Sarah-Kate Lynch

Author:Sarah-Kate Lynch & Sarah-Kate Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

Lily woke early the next morning, the sweet smell of baking cantucci drifting up the stairs and lightly tickling her taste buds. It was a delightful way to greet a new day and put her in an upbeat mood that her circumstances didn’t otherwise warrant.

She sat on her windowsill drinking in the glorious view and wondering which piece of her broken-down life she should start picking up today, but those rolling hills, those jewel-like rooftops, that hazy blue sky over distant green horizons…

A day perched on top of such a stunning vista could only be so grim.

The vista that met her in the mirror was nowhere near as pleasing: Lily’s dark roots needed urgent touching up and that, at least, she knew how to fix.

She followed her nose downstairs to the kitchen, pushing open the door to find the two sisters hunched over the refectory table covered in flour once again.

‘No rest for the wicked I see,’ she joked at which Luciana dropped the bin she was holding with a clang, sugar spilling like paint across the stone floor.

Violetta gave her sister an earful, which Luciana robustly returned, then they both looked miserably at the mess on the floor and just as miserably up at Lily.

With a deep sigh, Violetta attempted to sink down to ground level but didn’t get farther than the mildest of knee bends. Luciana then leaned on the table for balance but winced with the pain of putting even a fraction of her weight on one wrist.

‘Hang on there,’ Lily said. ‘Neither of you is going to get anywhere near the floor without a crane and a trampoline and possibly the local fire brigade. Here, let me do it.’

She took the dustpan and brush that she saw Violetta heading for and started to sweep up the mess.

‘I may already have mentioned,’ she said as she cleaned, ‘that I am not really a kitchen person. My sister, Rose, is the domestic one. She would have this cleaned up before it even hit the ground. And I’ll tell you something else, if Rose were here, I bet her biscotti, I’m sorry, I mean her cantucci would be perfect. I’ve never seen anything come out of her kitchen that wasn’t.’

She found the trash can and poured the spilled sugar into it.

‘Mind you,’ she continued as she crouched to sweep the floor again, ‘if Rose were here we wouldn’t be speaking to each other because she thinks I’m turning into an abusive alcoholic like our mother, and I think it’s not fair she got to have all the children.’

When she stood up again, Luciana was holding an egg in the air.

‘Oh, will you look at that,’ Lily said. ‘An egg. But seriously, I am the original person who can’t even boil one.’

‘Uova,’ Luciana said, pointing at it with a curled finger. ‘Uova.’

‘Uova?’ Lily repeated.

Luciana nodded, holding the egg even higher. ‘Uova.’

‘Uova,’ Lily said again, putting the dustpan back in its place. ‘Oh! Uova. I get it. Egg! Uova! How about that? I feel just like Helen Keller with the water.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.