CHAPTER SEVEN
Her Place Beside Him
On Monday morning I came down to breakfast and found Alessandra sitting in my chair.
Nobody had put her there. I understood that immediately, even as it hurt.
There had never been assigned seats at our breakfast table.
There had never needed to be. For seven years I had sat at Dante’s right hand, closest to the window, where the morning light came in over my shoulder and he could put his foot against mine under the table without looking up from his phone.
It was simply where I sat, the way the left side of the bed was simply mine.
Alessandra had come down early with Mia, tired, and sat where there was a chair.
Mia was at the far end of the table with Rosa, eating cereal with the grim focus of a child determined not to spill.
Luca had stopped by on his way into the city and was reading the sports pages at the other end.
Paolo was there too, because Elena had sent him over with a casserole dish she wanted returned, and he’d stayed for coffee.
Dante was talking to Alessandra about the new rotation for the east side doors. His head was bent toward her. Neither of them looked up when I came in.
I stood in the doorway for what felt like a long time and was probably three seconds.
I could have said something light. Good morning.
You’re in my seat, which would have been a joke, and everyone would have laughed, and she’d have moved.
Instead I found I couldn’t make my mouth do it.
I crossed the room and sat down in the empty chair across from them, beside Paolo, and nobody noticed at all.
“Morning, sweetheart,” Paolo said, and passed me the milk.
“Good morning.”
“How did you sleep?” Dante asked me, glancing over. He turned back to Alessandra before I’d finished saying fine.
Luca looked up from the paper. He looked at me, and then at the chair, and then at his brother, and I saw him understand.
He didn’t say anything. He went back to the box scores.
But a minute later he said loudly, to nobody in particular, “Vivienne, Ma’s asking if you’ll do the Easter menu again,” and everyone at the table turned toward me, including Dante, and I understood that Luca had done it on purpose, to give me somewhere to stand.
“Of course,” I said.
“She says nobody else does the lamb right.”
“She says that to my face?”
“No,” Luca said. “She says it to me. She’d die before she said it to you.”
Paolo laughed. Mia laughed because Paolo laughed. Dante smiled at me across the table, fond and distracted, and went back to discussing door codes with Alessandra, and the meal went on without my chair.
* * *
Alessandra found me in the upstairs hallway an hour later. She’d clearly been looking for me. Her face was pink.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think. I just sat down. Luca said something to me in the hall, and I didn’t know what he meant, and then I did.” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “That’s your seat. Of course it’s your seat. I sat there for twenty minutes.”
“It’s only a chair,” I said, and I smiled, and I meant it as kindness. “Really. Sit wherever you like.”
“No. Tomorrow I’ll...”
“Alessandra. It’s fine.” I touched her arm. “You were exhausted. Mia was up at four. Nobody’s keeping score.”
She looked at me for a long moment, as though checking whether that was true. Then she nodded and went back to the east wing.
Luca caught me in the driveway ten minutes later as I was getting into the car to go to the florist. He was leaning against his own car with his keys in his hand and his tie loose, clearly waiting.
“Lamb,” I said. “Really?”
“It was the first thing I could think of.” He pushed off the car. “My brother’s an idiot about some things, Viv.”
“He didn’t do anything. She sat down. That’s all.”
“I know that’s all. That’s my point. He didn’t do anything.” Luca looked back at the house. “When you came in, he didn’t even look up. I’ve watched him look up every time you walk into a room for seven years. It used to drive me crazy. Now he didn’t, and he doesn’t even know he didn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d thought I was the only one who’d noticed.
“I’m not trying to make trouble,” Luca said. “I just wanted you to know somebody saw it.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Make the lamb.” He grinned, and got into his car, and I stood in the drive for a moment after he’d gone, feeling steadier than I had at breakfast.
It wasn’t only a chair, and I knew it even as I told her it was.
She hadn’t taken anything. She hadn’t tried to.
But the whole table had simply rearranged itself around her without a single person noticing, including my husband, and nobody had rearranged anything for me in seven years except Luca, who’d had to do it with a question about lamb.
* * *
Elena came by on Wednesday afternoon with a parcel for Mia.
It was a doll, old-fashioned, with a porcelain face and a blue velvet dress gone soft with age. Elena knelt on the floor of the east wing sitting room, which I had never once seen her do, and held it out to Mia.
“This belonged to your mother,” she said. “She left it at my house when she was your age, and I kept it for her. I always thought she’d come back for it.”
Mia took it doubtfully. Alessandra, in the doorway, went very still.
“Elena,” she said. “You kept that?”
“Of course I kept it. I kept everything.” Elena rose, smoothing her skirt, and turned to me with a pleasant smile.
“Vivienne, you wouldn’t know, but Alessandra was here so often as a girl that we had a drawer for her things.
A whole drawer. Her hair ribbons, her swimsuit.
Paolo used to joke she lived here more than she lived at home. ”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“No. Well. Before your time.” She patted my arm on her way out. “It’s so nice to have the house full again.”
In seven years Elena had never kept anything of mine.
She’d never given me a drawer. I didn’t need a drawer.
I was a grown woman, and it was absurd to feel it the way I felt it.
But I stood in the east wing and watched Mia turn the old doll over in her hands, and I understood that Elena hadn’t come to give Mia a doll.
She’d come to tell me, in front of Alessandra, in the gentlest possible voice, that this house had belonged to someone else first.
* * *
I brought it up that night, carefully, while Dante was undressing and I was sitting on the bed with a folder of vendor invoices.
“Alessandra was sitting in my seat at breakfast.”
He was unbuttoning his cuff. “What seat?”
“At the table. Beside you.”
He paused and looked at me, and for a second he looked almost amused, as though I’d told him something charming. “Vivienne. It’s a chair. There’s no seating chart at breakfast.”
“There’s been one for seven years. You just never had to look at it.”
“I honestly don’t understand what you want me to do about where someone sits.
” He sat on the edge of the bed, giving me his full attention now, which somehow made it harder.
“Do you want me to ask her to move? Because she’ll be mortified.
She’s already mortified about everything.
She apologized to Ines yesterday for using too much hot water. ”
“No. I don’t want you to ask her anything.”
“Then what?”
I looked at him. I didn’t want him to do anything about the chair.
I wanted him to have noticed. I wanted him to have looked up when I came into the room, the way he’d looked up every morning for seven years, and seen that I was sitting somewhere else, and wondered why.
The chair was only the part I could point at.
“Forget it,” I said.
“Viv.”
“It’s fine. Really.” I turned back to the invoices.
He watched me a moment longer, and then he did what he always did when he couldn’t find the problem: he leaned over and kissed my temple, as if the kiss could stand in for the thing he didn’t understand.
He got into bed. After a while he put his hand on my back, the way he did most nights, and fell asleep with it there.
The next morning Alessandra came down to breakfast and sat at the far end of the table beside Mia, and I sat at Dante’s right hand, and he didn’t notice that either.
* * *