From award-winning author Millie Criswell comes a palate-pleasing contemporary rom-com about two people with nothing in common—except their undeniable attraction.
"Hilarious . . . Romantic comedy has a new star and her name is Millie Criswell."—Janet Evanovich
THE TROUBLE WITH MARY IS . . .
She's unemployed. Her huge Italian family is driving her crazy. Her love life is nonexistent. In fact, she needs a life! So Mary Russo decides to open a restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. And despite her mother's assurances that she will fail, the place is a big success—until the local paper delivers a scathing review of her pizza, pasta, and chocolate cannolis.
Food critic Dan Gallagher hates Italian food—and his column shows it. Now Mary would like nothing more than to serve Dan on a steaming platter. Problem is, Mary is the most delectable woman Dan has ever met. And Dan is the most exasperating man Mary has ever encountered. The trouble with chemistry is, neither one can resist it.
Release date:
December 24, 2008
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Print pages:
340
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On any given day Mary Russo could usually find a compelling reason to eat chocolate. Maybe the sun was shining too brightly, or perhaps the cloud cover was too thickly depressing, and there was always the possibility that her cat, Morty, had coughed up more than his usual share of hair balls.
But on this fairly cloudless, not too terribly sunny day, as Mary bit into a luscious, palate-pleasing chocolate cannoli oozing with chocolate ricotta filling and covered with the most fabulous chocolate sauce she'd ever invented, she had an even better reason to indulge, to eat herself into oblivion, and to feel totally crappy about life in general, much crappier than she usually did.
Luigi Marconi was dead.
Luigi's death might not have come as a shock to most people who knew him. The restauranteur had been dread-fully overweight, suffered from diabetes for years, and he'd been unusually depressed for the past four months. But no one, including Mary, who'd worked for the owner of Luigi's Pizza Palace for the past ten years as head cook and book-keeper, had expected him to put a gun to his head, say ar-rivederci, and check out.
Boom! Just like that. One shot. One lethal, impulsive bang, and Mary had lost not only a dear friend, a man whom she'd come to adore like an uncle, but her job as well.
And finding another job at her age was not going to be-- no pun intended--a piece of cannoli.
"If you have one more bite of that cannoli, you're going to gain another ten pounds. The trouble with you, Mary, is that you've got no willpower. You haven't lost the last ten you gained after breaking up with that nice Marc Forentini. And that was two years ago!" Sophia Russo's mouth pinched tight as she gazed disapprovingly at her daughter. "Men don't like fat."
Mary looked up, chocolate smearing her lips. Her mother never failed to comment on just what it was that was wrong with her. If it wasn't her weight, it was Mary's choice of men, or clothes, or friends. Mary's self-esteem was somewhere at basement level--low didn't even come close. There was no pleasing Sophia, and Mary had given up trying long ago.
"I thought you said they don't like bones." Sophia was al-ways telling Mary's younger sister that, because Connie had escaped the curse of the Russo hips and thighs, even after having three children. She was skinny, fashionably skinny, and Mary envied her that.
Just the ability to put on a pair of jeans and zip them up without having to lie prone on the bed sucking in your breath for all you were worth was Mary's idea of pure heaven. She didn't have to be bones, she just had to be zipper-proof. And she knew she wasn't going to get there by eating cannolis-- even if they were her latest delicious recipe--but at the mo-ment she just didn't care.
"Lascia la bambina solo. Leave the bambina alone, Sophia," Mary's grandmother said with undisguised hostil-ity toward her daughter-in-law. "She suffers a terrible loss. Whatsa matter? You no gotta heart for such tings?" And to Mary: "You wanta some nicea creama, bambina?"
Mary didn't usually enter into the ongoing hostilities be-tween her mother and grandmother. It was the classic in-law dislike that had plagued dysfunctional families for genera-tions. Mary suspected it had started the moment the love of Flora Russo's life, her son, Frank, had brought Sophia home to meet his mama.
No woman would have ever been good enough for Flora's Frank, that was a given, so Sophia took the criticism in stride, though she didn't take it lying down. Sophia knew in her heart of hearts, though she'd deny it to her dying breath, that no woman would have ever been good enough for her Joe, either. Fortunately Mary's older brother had become a priest, so whoever the unsuspecting future daughter-in-law of Sophia's might have been, she had escaped a fate worse than death.
Besides, who in their right mind would enter into a family that made Vito Corleone's look normal?
Though Mary disliked her mother and grandmother's con-stant bickering, she did appreciate her grandma taking her side in the numerous disagreements she had with her mother. They were allies, of sorts, and Grandma Flora had been there for her more times than not over the years.
For an eighty-three-year-old woman who walked with the help of a cane, employed two-inch-thick lenses while she cro-cheted, and wore tentlike undergarments she referred to as bloomers, Grandma Flora could hold her own with Sophia, which was no easy feat.
Sophia Russo had an opinion on just about everything, es-pecially when it came to one of her children. Though Mary loved the woman dearly, there was no denying they didn't see eye to eye on anything, including Mary's penchant for exper-imenting with traditional Italian recipes. Except perhaps the amount of time it took to cook pasta; both liked theirs al dente.
Winking at the old lady, Mary replied, "Thanks, but no thanks, Nonna," then she smiled somewhat spitefully at her mother before grabbing another cannoli off the plate and shoving half of it into her mouth, knowing she'd be sorry tomorrow when the scale tilted into overdrive, but needing the comfort that would not be forthcoming from her mother.
What Sophia lacked in compassion she made up for in conviction. "Luigi Marconi was a stupid, selfish man. Killing yourself is against God's law. He broke a commandment and now his poor wife will suffer because he was a coward and took the easy way out." She crossed herself, as if poor Luigi's indiscretion against God might come back to haunt her.
Mary didn't understand why Luigi had decided to kill himself, but she, unlike her mother, could empathize with his need to take the easy way out. After the realization had hit her that she was out of a job, and that her miserable exis-tence had just gotten a whole lot more miserable, she'd con-sidered doing the very same thing, for about five seconds.
She came by her morbid obsession with death legitimately. Like any good Italian girl, she was raised on the belief that judgment day was just around the corner. Both her mother and grandmother implied with unrelenting certainty that their demise was imminent, ending most of their sentences with "if I should live so long." Which was usually proceeded by "Only God knows how much longer I'll be on this earth," and "Your grandmother (or mother) is driving me to an early grave."
However, Mary would never have considered a gun as the ultimate method of suicide. Too messy. She could still recall the gruesome sight of Luigi's brains splattered over the stainless steel stove and Sub-Zero refrigerator when she'd showed up for work that fateful Friday morning two weeks ago and had discovered his body lying on the kitchen floor. The memory made her cringe. At the time, it had made her barf.
In her opinion, a swan dive off Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge would have been far more preferable. And she had briefly entertained the idea until she remembered how awful the traffic was on the bridge at any time of the day or night, how she hated to drive anyway, and how death by chocolate seemed a far better way to end it all.
"You always take her side, so I think you should just keep quiet, old woman," Sophia told her mother-in-law, who kept on crocheting and glaring. "Mary's been depressed and wal-lowing in her grief for too long. She needs to get over it and go out and find a new job. It's not healthy for her to be sit-ting around, stuffing herself with cannoli. Whoever heard of chocolate cannoli anyway? That's not Italian!"
As if the matter was already settled, Sophia nodded to herself, adding, "I'm going to call Father Joseph to come over and counsel her."
At the suggestion, Mary swallowed the remaining half of her pastry, licked the chocolate sauce off her lips, and grinned. "Joe'll just tell me to say three Hail Marys and call him in the morning, Ma. And why do you keep referring to your own son as Father Joseph, for God's sake?"
Not that she minded talking to Joe. She and her older brother were very close, and she loved him. But he would al-ways be Joe to her, not Father Joseph, and she wasn't about to go sit in some confessional and pour out her guts to the poor guy. She was positive he got a daily dose of some pretty hideous stuff.
Besides, Joe already knew all her terrible secrets, like about her addiction to chocolate, and how when she'd been twelve she had read all of the dirty parts of the Bible, underlining them with a yellow marking pen.
Unfortunately--or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it, because it could have been her mother--Joe had been the one to catch her alone in the closet doing her thing. But he'd never told anyone, and for that reason alone she would always adore him.
Growing up a Russo hadn't been easy; all three of Sophia and Frank's children wore battle scars from their upbringing. Connie had chosen to escape their domineering mother by marrying right out of high school. Of course, to Sophia, who considered marriage the end-all to the world's prob-lems, this had been a blessing.
Not as big a blessing, however, as when Joe had announced his intention to enter the priesthood shortly after graduation from college. He'd been at loose ends and very unhappy and had sought to lose himself in the church.
Mary blamed her parents, mostly her mother--though her father bore some responsibility for allowing Sophia to ride roughshod over him--for her sister and brother's flight from the family. They'd never been encouraged to have goals or aspirations, never been told to live up to their potential. And that was especially true in Mary's case.
As the middle child, Mary had always felt somewhat ig-nored. She wasn't as smart as Joe or as pretty as baby Con-nie. She was just, well, rather ordinary. She'd gotten average grades in school, had never been encouraged to think beyond getting married and having kids. She'd been programmed from birth to be just average.
So when she didn't graduate from college, no one was surprised or angry, just disappointed. And when she'd ended up working in a dead-end job, no one really said anything. Living at home had become safe. Nothing was expected of her, and she, in turn, expected nothing of herself. To sum up her life in a nutshell, Mary had taken the easy way out. Just like Luigi. Only she wasn't dead, just living a dead existence.
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