Chapter 7

The Fail Festival

Two grilled paninis arrive on the kitchen island in front of me so quickly, they might have been conjured by magic. Arugula, banana peppers, pepperoncini, sliced olives, veggie gravy, oil and vinegar, and tons of cheese smashed between two halved baguettes. Aunt Ro wrings tension out on her dishrag as she watches me take my first kingly bite, which is salty and divine.

I then set the panini down, clean my fingers of oil, and say, “Thank you. Now…What. Is. That. Awful. Boy. Doing. Here?”

Her crimes finally laid bare, Ro slumps onto an island stool and chomps into her own panini. “Ben was cheap,” she says, thinking through her bites. “And more importantly, he loves Vero Roseto. We need this place to be like it was again, or we’re not gonna make it. The tax bills are doubling. And I can’t take on any more debt. Paul and I don’t have kids. I can’t spend the rest of our savings just to hang on to a place you all barely even visit. I have to get serious about Vero Roseto as a business, or it’s time to move on.”

“Move on?” A chunk of panini goes down hard. “Like sell it?”

“There’s already been offers.” She shudders. “Vultures are circling. The Wishing Rose brand is strong, so we’re looking like very tasty roadkill. Pretty soon, I won’t have a choice.”

I’m speechless. For eighty years, this place has been our family’s beating heart, and overnight, it could all just…stop?

“But I have a plan,” Ro says, steeling herself as she chews. “Ma always said during lean years, the Rose Festival kept us in the black. We’re the crown jewel, the last stop on the tour. If we do the festival big, and I mean big, it could keep us in fighting shape. The festival’s in August. That gives us two months. You, me, Paul”—she mutters her next words into her panini—“and Ben.”

My sandwich drops to the plate with a dramatic thud. “I knew staying here was a trap.”

Aunt Ro grabs my wrist to stop me from leaving. “It’s perfect for all of us! You’re a designer, and I need something designed! You won’t have to build anything! Ben will do whatever you want.”

My gaze bores flaming holes into my aunt. “Designing is one thing. Working with Ben is…something else. Did you and Mom plan it this way?”

I don’t have the stomach to remind her my last ex and I fell in love designing a show together. It ruined me in six million different ways. Go through all of that again, but this time with someone I already have baggage with? A HOMICIDAL IDEA, RO.

“If it’s too much, I get it. It’s just…I’m not good at these festivals.” Ro dabs her eye, careful not to dampen her eyeliner. “Losing the home my mother was born in, and it’ll be all my fault…”

Italian opera at its finest.

Quietly, I reach across the island and stroke Ro’s hand with my thumb. “Aunt Ro, that’s not a tear, that’s vinegar. Stop fake crying because I caught you lying about Ben.”

Huffing, she hurls a balled-up paper towel at me. “You!” She waves her panini like a weapon. “I’m gonna slip meat into the next thing I cook you.”

“Answer the question, criminal! Are you plotting to smoosh me and Ben together again?”

“The last thing on my mind! We’re in big trouble, buddy. We’ve got more things that need fixing than people to fix them. Ben McKittrick is a gift from God—”

I sputter into my sandwich. “Did Ben tell you that?”

As Ro chews, her narrowed eyes study me. “This is why I said nothing.”

The oodles of cheese in this panini are soothing my beast into a more patient creature. After a long moan, I say, “By not telling me, you really made sure I found out in the most hilarious way.”

“How’d you find out?”

“I looked out the window, saw a hot gardener outside, and strolled outside to chat him up.”

Uncontrollable giggles take over my aunt. “Oh no, I really set you up. I told you all my angel boys grew into men when I wasn’t looking!” Her laughter dies as her brow darkens. “Wait, what were you gonna do if the gardener ended up being some regular guy? Were you gonna romance some grown man in my house? You’re still a baby! That’s not why I invited you here.”

I jab my finger in her direction. Ro and I can duel better than anyone. “You’re up to something besides this festival.”

Ro grows quiet. Coyness creeps into her smile. “Fine. It’s not just about the house.” With a new seriousness, she slips her cool, painted fingers inside mine. “I know you think you’ve got a curse. That Ben—and the Wishing Rose—started the curse.”

I wasn’t expecting that much accuracy.

“We’re a superstitious family,” Ro says in a mea culpa. “Sorry, but it’s in your blood. And I believe healing things with Ben will break your curse and heal you, too.”

I try to pull my hand back, but Ro holds firm. “I don’t know how you know all that,” I whisper dangerously, “but Ben doesn’t seem like he wants to heal things. And neither do I.”

“Leave that to the Wishing Rose! Make a new wish and set things right. The rose has brought together four generations of this family. Your great-grandmother, your grandmother, me—”

“Then that’s how it works for straights!” Now I pry my hand back for real. “For little gay boys, we make a wish on it and”—I flick my hand under my chin—“cursed. It happened instantly.”

I collect my plate to leave, but Aunt Ro follows me from the island to the sink to the fridge and back again. “Grant, that last summer, I saw you sneak out to the garden at night…I heard you make that wish.” A tear breaks down her cheek. “Sweetie, that wish was bad. That’s not how it works. The rose reveals your true love, not—”

“Ben was my true love, but he blew up my life instead. And the rose can’t fix that.”

Ro wipes another tear from her cheek. “Believe what you want, but what I believe—and remember, I’m Mama Bianchi now—is that Ben’s going to fix the rose garden, you’re going to fix the Rose Festival, the Rose Festival will fix Vero Roseto, and the Wishing Rose is gonna fix you.”

As Ro pulls me into a desperate hug, I let it happen, even though I’m as rigid as a statue.

That wish was the most private moment of my life, and she was snooping?

Better her than my brother, but Jesus, Ro.

After finishing the hug, I pull open the fridge for something cold and sweet. I pop open the bottle cap on a Mexican Pepsi with the real sugar, and try to pivot. I don’t want to talk about my curse or my wish anymore. “So, we need to design a five-star festival plus fill the renovated B&B rooms. How am I supposed to do that? Copyediting your ad?”

Grinning slyly, Ro unfastens the oil-stained apron from her raspberry-colored frock and returns it to the hook on the side of the fridge. “Yes. I need a social media teen to help me fill these beds through the summer into the festival. You’re not getting paninis for free around here.”

I roll my eyes. “You olds think we’re all just sitting on the nuclear codes about how to make a viral post. It’s luck. It’s about trends you don’t even know are happening. It’s like saying, ‘Teach me how to get struck by lightning.’ You just get struck by it.”

“True,” Ro says, sliding back on the rings that she took off while she was cooking. “But you can teach me how to wrap myself in metal and hold up a golf club in a rainstorm.”

As I sigh, an invisible weight settles on my shoulders.

“I’ll take a look at your social stuff,” I say, “But…I’m off my game. I don’t even have school lined up for the fall yet.” Each word exits as stubbornly and painfully as an extracted tooth. “My portfolio was way stronger a year ago. I stopped sewing. Stopped planning. My spark just went away.”

Ro watches from across the kitchen. Her face is soft and sympathetic. “It happens.”

I laugh bitterly. “Happened at the worst time. It’s hard to explain to colleges you took a gap year for a mental spiral.”

Silence fills the kitchen as I, apparently, got too real. And so it goes with this family. I miss talking to Dr. Patty, my therapist. She had this way of taking the roller coaster in my head and making it all make sense. She didn’t try to tell me I wasn’t on a roller coaster. She didn’t ask why I didn’t just get off the roller coaster mid-loop. She just…let me ride it and talked me through it.

I’d love to see her again, but it’s been so long, I doubt she’d have room in her schedule. Anyway, apparently I’m about to be a lot busier here than I thought, so maybe I won’t have the time either.

Finally, my aunt nods, her eyelids growing heavier. “This house is important to so many people, and I’m failing them. Bad things happened out of my control, but I also made mistakes. I know what it’s like to have one thing after another come down on you hard, throw you off your game, and you can’t correct it no matter what you do.”

She gives me a little smile, and I return it.

“But it’s not over,” Ro says. “I know we can fix things.”

“Sounds like I came at the right time,” I say.

Grinning more broadly, Ro extends her ring-laden hands. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

I sigh. “The thing with Ben…” I wince. “I would love it if things could be better—if Ben could magically be a different person, and I could magically not be messed up about it—but that true love shit is out of the question. It’s off the table. It’s in the trash can. In the garbage truck, heading for the dump. I’ll be nice. We’ll work nicely together. But anything more than that, forget it.”

Ro starts to protest again when—creaaaaaaak—the floor outside the kitchen doorway whines noisily. Aunt Ro—closer to the sound—leans through the arch. “Hello?”

Sheepishly, Ben emerges from around the corner. He wrings his ball cap in his hands, his wavy red hair sticking wildly in every direction. When he actively avoids eye contact, I know the truth: he’s been creeping on our conversation.

A sour sneer comes over me as I turn into a gargoyle by the fridge.

“I need the wheelbarrow for the compost,” he says. “Can’t find it where I left it yesterday.”

“Paul’s got it!” Ro says with a nervous laugh. “He should be done by now—let’s find him.”

Aunt Ro floats outside merrily, repressing that she just tricked me into confessing my jagged feelings for Ben while the dickhead himself was eavesdropping. Of course she doesn’t care. She’s another eavesdropper, listening in on my lowest, most desperate moment at the Wishing Rose!

That’s Vero Roseto. Ears everywhere. Privacy nowhere.

Ben doesn’t follow her out. He lingers in the doorway, half looking in my direction as if he has something to say. But he doesn’t. He heard me admit I’m a flop, still wounded by his carelessness, and all he has is pity.

“She runs fast,” I say. “Better catch her.”

He shuffles outside. And I’m left alone.

Before heading upstairs, I open a rear kitchen cupboard to see how little this place has changed. On the floor of the cupboard, surrounded by loose pantry items, is Grandma’s Singer suitcase—the first machine I ever learned to sew on. She taught me, but at first she just let me watch her work, whether it was hemming our clothes or mending the drapes.

I am the amalgamation of the skills of everyone in my family.

Lugging the suitcase in one hand, with its ancient iron weight, I open a kitchen drawer full of a dozen dishrags, each patterned with different fruit. I choose two towels with strawberries and take everything to my East Wing bedroom.

The silence is nice, especially after such a noisy day.

I open the suitcase, plug the 1960s monstrosity behind my room’s writing desk, and get my fingers feeling needle and thread again. Hours pass. The sun sets. I trace an outline of my hand on the strawberry dishrags, slice out the patterns, feed the cloth into the machine, and proceed to sew myself a matching set of strawberry fingerless gloves.

As I flex the gloves open and closed, my power returns. My skills are all still there. I just need the intent and to focus on what I’m doing. Yesterday’s fog—dissipating slowly since arriving at Vero Roseto—now clears entirely.

I’m me again.

I raise my eyes to the ceiling and ask Mama Bianchi—not Ro, the real one inside the walls of Vero Roseto—what I should do. Stay, save the house, and deal with Ben? Or leave and rebuild my life—and my portfolio—some other way?

I don’t hear a voice, but the answer still emerges.

Stay. Save the festival, the house, and the family, and use your new designs to get into a great school.

Then I’ll start a new life somewhere else with zero baggage.

And for God’s sake, I won’t ever let a boy get in my head again.