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now.”
    “Ciao.” I put the phone down. I had stopped going to church years ago, but if I was still a church-goer, I would have said four novenas and five Hail Marys that my date with Robert Wharton went off without a hitch.

Chapter 3
    C alling what my family does on Sundays “dinner” is like saying the pope is just another priest with a fancier hat.
    Lady Di and I arrived at Sunday dinner to the usual chaos of the Marcello clan with a couple of Gallos thrown in for good measure. In the kitchen my mother was making an immense pot of gravy. Not only was the pot big enough for one of my little cousins to use as a fort when not filled with gravy, but Ma couldn’t even move it from one burner to the next without the help of my cousin Tony.
    My aunt Marie, aunt Gina, aunt Connie and assorted other aunts, and wives and fiancées of my male cousins were all crowded into the kitchen as well, supervising my mother. This routine goes on until my mother has had it with the lot of them and chases them all out with a wooden spoon. For every infraction I committed as a child, the wooden spoon was threatened. Not that she ever actuallyspanked me with it. She just chased my brother and me throughout the house, screaming in Italian.
    The women all clustered around the stove. “Add more oregano, Rose.”
    “It needs a pinch of…something. Hold on…maybe some more garlic.”
    “Can’t have too much garlic.”
    For my mother, the red stuff she slaves over is a religion. She has been known to actually break out in a cold sweat at the sight of a jar of Ragú. That’s sacrilege of the highest order.
    Lady Di and I always gather in the kitchen because it’s what we do, feminism aside. The men watch football during the season, and with most of them heavy gamblers and bookies, it’s either a joyous occasion or the cause of a lot of screaming. Either way, the language flying through the room would make Sister Mary Catherine of my old grammar school roll over in her grave.
    Lady Di is considered an oddity, being as she comes from way across the Atlantic, and she had never even eaten true gravy before meeting my family, nor had she ever teased her hair, or even discovered the wonders of Aqua Net hairspray—the aerosol-can variety. I’m not even sure if the Aqua Net company still makes it, thanks to the ozone layer’s problems. However, my mother and her sisters have enough stockpiled to take them into the next decade.
    “Diana, honey, can you stand a little advice?” My aunt Gina cornered us in the kitchen. Diana had no time to answer before Gina, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, was pinching her. I don’t mean like a little pinch on the cheek, either. I mean she was pinching her upper armfor all it was worth—Lady Di showed me a bruise later. “You could stand a little meat on these bones.”
    “Well…I—”
    “Honey…men don’t like bags of bones. You wonder why you’re not married? This is why.” She stated this with such certainty, oblivious to Di’s beauty.
    “Actually, Aunt Gina—” I felt the need to defend my pinched roomie “—Diana has a lot of boyfriends, and she’s been proposed to three different times. She’s not married because she doesn’t want to be married.”
    “Bullshit.” Aunt Gina pinched her again. “Look at this. You see this, Andrea?” She motioned to one of my other aunts. “You see this? Both of them. Really, Theresa Marie, you, too. You think you’re all fancy living off in that city, but when your uncle Rocky proposed to me, I was the babe of Brooklyn.”
    I stared at Aunt Gina and glimpsed, beneath the pile of big hair, the perfumed face powder and the sixteen gold-and-diamond necklaces she wore stacked around her neck like a snake’s coils, the beautiful neighborhood girl she once was. I still love looking at old pictures of them, just as I loved looking at them as a little girl. I laugh when I see pictures of them all from back then, the girls in eyeliner and