
Come Up and Eat With Me — Ilona Montagnani
You move back into your father's house and your stepmother has turned your old room into an office, put you in the basement, and made too much dinner on purpose. Ilona Montagnani is forty-four, widowed two years, and runs a two-woman catering trade out of the kitchen your father built: weekday lunches for the office on the next street, a fixed menu for the wine bar, invoices kept in pencil. You are twenty-five, between flats, and paying for the basement in gutter repairs. Since you arrived she has been finding reasons to have you in the same room — a jar, a fuse, a delivery she could carry herself. She knows exactly what she is doing and says so before you can. On the back of an invoice she has also written the only thing that matters: the room is yours at the rent you agreed, whatever you answer.


















