What Gratitude Tastes Like

The first thing I learned about rich people is that they want you to be grateful.

Not in the way my uncle Beppe wanted gratitude, which was a clean kitchen and a rosemary sprig placed properly on the plate. Rich people want gratitude like a flavor. They want to taste it in the way you pour their wine, in the pause before you speak, in the particular angle of your smile that says: you are extraordinary, and I am lucky to be near you.

I was very good at that smile.

June in Positano is a performance. The village hangs from the cliffs like a painting someone tilted, all faded pink and crumbling yellow, and the tourists come to be inside the painting. They take photographs. They eat too much. They leave. Beppe and I served them limoncello in small glasses and watched them go, and every season the tables were a little emptier, the tips a little smaller, the envelope from the landlord's lawyers a little thicker.

Four months. That's what we had.

I was wiping down the terrace when the yacht docked.

Le Dore, I read from the stern. French-registered. Forty meters, maybe more, the kind of vessel that makes the fishing boats in the harbor look like toys left in a bath. The hull was so white it hurt to look at in the afternoon sun. Crew in navy polo shirts moved along the deck with practiced invisibility.

I set down my cloth and watched.

They came off the yacht in a loose group, five of them, dressed in linen and certainty. Two women, three men. Sunglasses and bare feet and the particular looseness in the shoulders that comes from never having carried anything heavy. They moved through the harbor like the harbor existed for them.

I noted the dynamics before they reached the restaurant. The tall blond one, Romain, I would learn later, walked slightly ahead, claiming space. One of the women, dark-haired with a sharp bob, stayed close to the one at the center, the one in the center, but her attention tracked the blond. The other woman, strawberry-blonde with freckles, hung back. She was watching the group the way I was watching them.

And the golden one.

He walked like someone who'd been taught posture and forgotten to apply it. Tall, slender, hair the color of light on warm stone. He was looking at the village, not at his companions, and his face had the quality of someone listening to music no one else could hear.

They chose the terrace table with the best view. Of course they did.

"Limoncello?" I offered, setting down small glasses without being asked.

"God, yes," the dark-haired woman said, already reaching for one.

The blond barely looked at me. The strawberry-blonde smiled. The one with the gold chain and the open shirt, Tibo, grinned like we were sharing a joke I hadn't heard yet.

The golden one looked at me.

Not through me. Not past me. At me, with a directness that landed somewhere behind my ribs.

"You pick," he said. "Something real. Not the tourist limoncello. The good one."

I held the look for a beat longer than service required.

"We only have the good one," I said.

He smiled. It was a careful thing, that smile, like he'd practiced it but wasn't sure if he'd gotten it right. I saw the Breitling on his wrist, the kind my uncle would have needed three good months to afford, and the paint stain on his left middle finger that he hadn't quite scrubbed away.

I brought the Ferrante limoncello. The one Beppe made with the lemons from the grove above the town, the recipe his mother carried in her head and never wrote down. I poured it slow.

The golden one tasted it with his eyes closed. His throat moved when he swallowed.

"This is beautiful," he said, opening his eyes. "What is it?"

"My uncle makes it. These lemons." I gestured up the hill. "This soil."

"And you? You make it too?"

"I make everything here," I said, which was true. I also cleaned the floors, fixed the plumbing, and slept in the room above the kitchen where the pipe rattled at four in the morning. I didn't say that.

"I'm Augustin," he said, and offered his hand.

His palm was cool from the glass. No calluses. Charcoal under one nail.

"Nico."

"Nico." He said it like he was tasting that too. "We're here for the summer. On the boat."

"I saw."

The blond one, Romain, leaned over. "Can we get menus, or is the service here purely conversational?"

I smiled the smile. The grateful one. "Of course. Right away."

I went inside, and I didn't look back at the table, because looking back is a tell. You look back when you're interested. You look back when you've been affected. I was both of those things, but they didn't need to know that yet.

Beppe was at the stove, stirring something that smelled like my childhood.

"Big yacht today," he said.

"Caravet," I said.

His hand slowed on the spoon. He didn't look up. "That's the name?"

"On the registration. Caravet Holdings."

The name sat between us like a stone dropped into still water.

Caravet Holdings had purchased our lease six months ago. Caravet Holdings had tripled the rent. Caravet Holdings was the reason Beppe couldn't sleep, the reason the pipe went unfixed, the reason I spent my nights reading lease law on a cracked phone screen instead of sleeping.

Caravet Holdings was out on our terrace, drinking our limoncello, and the heir had cool hands and charcoal under his nails.

"Nico," Beppe said quietly.

"I know."

"Whatever you're thinking..."

"I'm thinking about menus," I said, and picked up five.

I walked back to the terrace. The sun was low enough to gild the water. The golden one, Augustin, was sketching in a small notebook, and when I set the menus down, his pen paused but his eyes didn't lift.

Then they did.

"Thank you," he said, and smiled again, and I felt the warmth of it in my sternum like a second pour of limoncello.

I told myself the warmth was satisfaction. A plan taking shape. The beginning of something I'd rehearsed in my head for months, now finally in motion.

I am very good at telling myself things.