Chapter 13 #3
The Caruso pattern, unspoken, in three glances around a table.
Donatella did not make a joke.
My sister, who had never in twenty-nine years passed up an opportunity for a joke, looked at me across the table and did not reach for her wine and did not touch our mother’s ring.
“Marco,” she said.
Just my name.
It was the softest thing anyone had said in the room since I’d walked in.
“We need to meet her,” she said. “Not as the Don’s daughter. Just as who she is. As the person you love.”
Santo’s head snapped around.
“Now?” he said. “Donatella, you have been sitting at this table for the last twenty minutes. You just heard what I said. Arturo is about to take the Valenti meeting and you want to do a Sunday dinner?”
“Especially now,” Donatella said.
Her voice did not rise. She had gone into her strategic register, which was not her brother’s strategic register but was not less sharp for being softer. She had run the same numbers Santo had run and she had arrived somewhere else.
“Santo, if your read is right, this thing detonates by Friday. Maybe Monday at the latest. Either Marco walks away from her before then — which he is not going to do, look at his face — or we let her see who she’s actually getting into.
Not just him. All of us. The table. Rosa’s ragù.
The silver. Gemma. Cora. The whole Caruso show.
” Donatella turned the ring on her finger.
“Because if Palermo says no, she is going to need somewhere to stand that is not her father’s house.
And she is going to need to decide, before Palermo decides, whether the place to stand is with us.
She can’t decide that on the basis of him alone. She has to see the family.”
Santo stared at her for a long moment.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Yes,” Donatella said.
“Fine.”
Dante, who had been quiet again, laid his hands flat on top of the newspaper. “Sunday,” he said. “Dinner. Full table. Gemma. Cora. Rosa cooks.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he echoed.
Santo did not speak again for a beat. He pushed his espresso cup to the center of the table. Pushed the empty water glass next to it. The two pieces lined up, which was his way, at the end of a hard conversation, of resetting the room without apologizing for what he had said in it.
I stood to leave.
“Marco.”
Santo looked serious.
“If Arturo takes the Valenti meeting,” Santo said, “and this goes the way I think it’s going to go. You need to be ready. To have her inside your walls. When her family is on the other side of the line.”
I nodded.
“Yeah,” I said.
He nodded back. Once.
I walked out through the kitchen.
Rosa was plating at the pass. She looked up. Whatever she saw on my face made her set the plate down and raise her eyebrows at me the way she had raised her eyebrows at me when I was nine and had come into her kitchen after getting into a fight with Santo over a Game Boy.
“Tesoro.”
“I’m okay, Rosa.”
“Mmm.” She was not buying it. She reached into the warmer and came out with a foil package roughly the size of a book. “Here. For home. It’s the short rib, you eat it tonight or tomorrow, not Friday, capito?”
“I got it.”
I took the foil package. Kissed her temple. Went out through the alley door.
The green Mercedes wagon was parked where I’d left it.
The late afternoon was turning the alley brick gold at the top edge and grey at the bottom, and the rosary on the rearview swung once when I pulled the door shut and then hung still.
I drove north on Halsted at the speed of a man who had no interest in arriving fast. The city was doing its evening thing—office workers on the sidewalks, the CTA running full, a food truck on the corner of Madison selling tamales to a line seven deep — and I drove through it with the short rib package on the passenger seat and my hand on the wheel and my brother’s two words still sitting behind my sternum.
I parked in the residents’ garage. Took the private elevator up. The short rib in one hand. My keys in the other.
The apartment smelled like coffee.
She was at the kitchen table.
My cardigan on her shoulders—the grey one, the one I kept over the back of the chair in the office and which she had apparently adopted in the four hours I had been gone. Hair loose. No pencil-twist today.
She had been working.
Of course she had. She had sent the report last night.
The report was gone. Palermo was deciding.
And she was at my kitchen table in my cardigan with files open, because she could not stop being herself even for one afternoon, because stopping being herself was the thing she had spent her whole life learning to do and was now, finally, learning not to.
She looked up when I came in. Her face did the small open thing.
“How did it go.”
“Later,” I said.
I set the short rib on the counter. Walked to the table.
Put both hands flat on the wood on either side of her file—the grain cool under my palms the way the dining room grain had been cool under my palms an hour ago, but different, because this wood was mine—and I bent and kissed the crown of her head.
She smelled like my shampoo.
I stayed there. Mouth on her hair. Eyes closed.
“Sunday,” I said.
“Sunday?“
“My family wants to meet you.”
“But they alread—”
“Not the envoy,” I said. “You.”
She went very still under my mouth.
I lifted my head. Sat down in the chair next to her.
“I’m the Scordato envoy. They—“
“Sera. I told them about you. About us. About what’s happening.”
“What? They’ll think I’m an idiot. A traitor! They’re going to hate me.”
I shook my head.
“They’re going to love you,” I said. “Baby girl. They already do. Because I do.”
The sentence left my mouth before I could re-route it.
The word sat between us.
Her hand went still under mine.
She did not say it back.
She did not look away either. Her eyes were wide and dark and the wet in them did not spill, because the wet in her eyes never spilled, and she looked at me the way she had looked at me across the breakfast of frittata and water and stacked contracts, which was the look of a woman holding very still inside a thing she could not yet name.
Then she stood.
My hand, which had been holding hers, came up with her. She turned it in her fingers—palm up, then palm down, then palm up again, the small private inventory—and she closed her fingers around mine.
She did not say anything.
She drew me up out of the chair.
She led me down the hallway. Past the kitchen where the short rib cooled on the counter. Past the locked door of the toy room with the brass key still in the shallow dish. Past the office where my cardigan’s empty chair waited. To the bedroom door. Her hand on the handle. Her eyes on mine.
She had not said it back.
She did not need to.
She opened the door.