In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

against the glass as the elevator rumbled up. Sandro bounded up the
stairs.
From two floors down, they could hear her monologue,
peppered with his curses. They heard a crash, then a series of thuds as
he rolled down a flight of stairs. He rushed down the remaining stairs
to the desk to apologize to the terrified desk clerks. They were all over
him.
"Are you all right?"
"Do you need an ambulance?"
He just said, "Tutto va bene, Grazie mille, signiorine," and
joined Penny and Ula in the lobby.
Sandro recounted what had just happened as they waited for
their pizzas in the little wood oven pizzeria down the street.
"She met an old boyfriend, from before my father, a movie guy,
now richer than my father ever was. They had drinks and some coke, so
now she is arrabiata! He laughed at her, told her she was too old, so
the new hair, the clothes, the fur, all of it a waste! This was her
Christmas plan, and now she is really mad! So upstairs, she tells me
never loved my father, that she seduced him in those rooms for the
money!"
He ran his hand through his hair, looked down at his steaming
pizza. "Putana, my mother, always the whore."
"Let it go, Sandro, nothing you can do," Penny said.
"She's no different than Dick, really," Ula said shaking her head.
"Veramente! How you say, the birds and the feathers?"
"It's 'birds of a feather' and 'the birds and the bees,' and that's
about sex between flowers," Ula observed just as Beatrice trotted into
the pizzeria.
"Bambini! Sandro! Carino, perdone me, it was the coke, and
that arrogant old bagolone, I will never do it again, I promise. You
forgive me?" She pecked him on the top of the head and sat down in
the fourth chair. "Pizza Margherita per me! E due carafe di vino qui,
per favore!" Snap of the fingers, jingle of the bangles.
And Ula pulled out her book. No one spoke, Penny could think
of nothing to say, so she pulled the strings of cheese from her pizza
with her fork, to see how much tension it took before they snapped.
Beatrice started on Ula, pointing to the cover's dainty Chinese
lady on the leopard's back.
"Is that an immortal sister? She has a fat face. The only pretty
shape is an oval shape, with the bone structure. What do they do these
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