Chapter 3 #3
Bianchina, it starts. My small white. She called me that when I was little and too pale in winter. She called me that when I burned the onions and cried.
If you are reading this, Mr. Caruso is doing his serious face in my dining room, and your mother probably wants to throw me in the ocean. Let her. I can swim.
I blink until I can see the words again.
You think I did you a cruelty. I didn’t. I did you a favor. It doesn’t look like one. The good favors never do.
You are a cook the way a fox is a fox. You think because you left that means something changed.
It didn’t. Italy or Atlantic City, you are still the girl who smelled the sauce and knew exactly what it needed with just your nose.
You are the only person besides me who stirred when the pot told you to stir and not when the recipe said to. You will know what to do.
I can hear her saying it, that briskness that is love. To anyone else, it wouldn’t make sense.
If you don’t want it, don’t take it. If you want it later, take it then. If you want to run it, run it. If you want to find someone to run it who is not a fool or a thief, do that. It is yours, not to own you, but so that no one owns it instead. Do you understand me?
My throat hurts. I swallow, and it hurts worse.
The house is for you because you’ve never had a place that was just yours. Your mother made her bed under my roof once upon a time. Now she has her own, and this is yours. Let her be mad at me instead of you. I can take it.
There is a postscript in her cramped, quick letters.
Do not let anyone shame you out of what is yours. That includes your mother. That includes the voice in your head that says you don’t know what you are doing. That voice is a liar. Listen to mine.
I want to laugh and scream. I want to go into the kitchen and tell her she is arrogant and kiss her cheek, and steal a meatball. I press the page to my face. It smells like paper. It smells like nothing. It smells like her because my brain says it does.
Footsteps behind me on the steps. Zia sits, careful, like she doesn’t want to scare me off like a skittish bird. She hands me a mug. Coffee. No milk. No sugar. The way I learned to drink it in culinary school.
“She always said,” Zia says, sipping, “that if she didn’t make someone mad in a day, she didn’t earn her sleep.”
“She made Mama mad for a year,” I say. It comes out light. It isn’t.
“Your mother will come back to herself,” Zia says. “She loves you, and she loved her mother, and those are two dogs fighting in her head right now. They will stop barking.” She leans against me, shoulder to shoulder. “What does your letter say?”
“That she did me a favor,” I say. “That I can say no.”
“You can,” Zia agrees. “We will still feed you.”
I take a breath that rattles a little. “I don’t know what I want.”
“Good.” She nudges me with her elbow. “That means you are thinking. People who always know scare me.”
“Nonna always knew,” I say.
“No,” Zia says. “She just worked fast until it looked like she knew.”
I stare at the fig leaves until they become only green. “She made me a new key for the restaurant.”
Zia smiles into her mug. “Of course she did. She always loved the drama.”
We sit until the coffee cools. The house murmurs behind us—the clatter of cups, the rise and fall of voices, the soft whistle of the kettle.
I am aware of the weight of responsibility—of the house behind me, of the restaurant that sits empty today.
I can hear Regalia in my head: the scrape of chairs, the ring of the bell when the back door opens for deliveries, the hiss of the espresso machine.
Eventually, I go back inside because not going back inside is not a thing in my family. I wash my cup even though Zia tells me to leave it. I put it on the rack. I turn to the key hook by the back door and see the brand new key to Regalia.
The old one would’ve worked just fine, but Nonna always did have a thing for symbolism. New key, new future.
Zia must see me stressing over it.
“Later,” Zia says, which is her version of “rest.” “Now I will go home and get a bag. We will sleep here. Tomorrow you will go to the restaurant and see it in the morning before anyone else does. That will tell you more than any letter.”
“Chef Sorrentino expects me back,” I say, because the practical will not be shut up by fig trees and keys. “He told me the late summer menu would be mine to run.”
“Call him,” Zia says. “Tell him your grandmother died. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is not someone you work for.”
“He understands,” I say immediately, loyal because he has been good to me. “He sent flowers.”
“Then he will understand another day,” she says. “Do not build a life on someone else’s clock.”
I tuck the key into my pocket. It is heavy for its size.
Slowly, the house quiets down as people have found their separate corners.
The baby sleeps with his mouth open. Mr. Caruso is gone.
The cookie tin is open and half-full. Mama sits on the couch with her shoes off and her feet curled under her like a girl.
She looks at me like she is measuring how much I will break if she says something unkind.
She must decide I am breakable. She presses her lips together and says nothing.
“Come,” Zia says to her. “Lie down.”
“I can’t sleep in this house,” Mama whispers. She is honest enough not to dress it up.
“So don’t,” Zia says, and it is decided.
We get her into Zia’s car with the seats permanently smelling like pine from the air freshener she insists on, even though her children have begged her to throw them out. Mama leans her head against the window like a kid. Everyone else files out after them.
Once they’re all gone, I go back into the house and close the door behind me, and the quiet that follows is substantial.
I wander because I can. The rooms are familiar and strange because they’re mine now. The hallway light is a soft yellow, the ottoman the same one I used to climb on to reach the high shelf.
In the bedroom, Nonna’s scarf lies over the back of the chair like she just took it off.
In the closet, her dresses hang, the navy one for church, the print for events.
The dresser smells like lavender; she kept little pouches in the drawers and scolded me for crushing them when I was hunting for a clean shirt.
I sit on the edge of the bed where I used to nap after school while she prepped dinner. The bed gives under me with a familiar sigh. I hold the key in my palm and feel the shallow tooth bite into my skin.
On the nightstand, there’s a framed photo of me at graduation with my ridiculous hat and my giant grin, and Nonna’s mouth wide.
Under the photo, a thin paperback with the spine cracked: Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking.
She pretended to scoff at celebrity chefs, but she dog-eared the recipes anyway.
In the living room, I stretch out on the couch. The plastic-free upholstery is cool under my cheek. I am so tired my bones feel like hollow pasta that will break if you look at it. I hold her letter on my chest. I close my eyes.
I tell myself I am only here for the funeral.
I repeat it until the words go thin and make no sense at all.
I listen to the house breathe. Somewhere, a pipe ticks.
I sleep like a person fouled by grief, heavy and hard and full of dreams where my apron strings are tied too tight and I can’t get my hands clean.
In the morning, I will go to the restaurant before anyone else does. I will open the front door, stand in the doorway, and listen to Regalia tell me what it needs. I will pour coffee for the first person who knocks, even if it is only the bread guy who never knocks, just yells.
The key in my pocket burns against my hip. I turn over on the couch and tuck the letter under my pillow the way I used to tuck notes to saints under my mattress. I imagine the fig tree outside opening its leaves to the dawn. I imagine the sauce pot waiting, empty but expectant.
I imagine my life in Italy and my life here like two burners on low, steady, waiting for me to turn the knobs.
I sleep.