CHAPTER FIVE
ADELINA
My sister's kitchen is the colour of a bandage.
Everything in it. The cabinets, the counter, the tile that goes two thirds of the way up the wall and then stops, the blinds, the little basket of fake lemons on the island that I once made the mistake of picking one of.
Paola calls it greige and she said the word to me four separate times the summer they did it.
There is a photograph of our mother on the windowsill above the sink.
It is the only one in the house and it is a bad one.
Renata Silvestri at somebody's confirmation in 2011, half turned away, caught mid-word, her hand up.
I have three better ones in a drawer on Seventy-Fourth Street and I have never once offered them, and I could not tell you why, and I think about it every time I stand at this sink.
It is quarter past nine on Friday night.
"He's not here," Paola says.
"His car's outside."
"He went for a walk."
"It's forty degrees and he doesn't walk."
"Then he's in the basement." She is putting things in the dishwasher in an order that is not an order. "Do you want a drink? I've got that thing Michael's sister brought."
"Where's Matteo."
"With the boys. They're watching something."
"Is it the one with the."
"It's fine, Adelina."
And there it is. My own sentence, handed back to me, by the one person in the world who has ever been able to do it.
I sit down at my sister's island on one of my sister's stools.
Paola is four years older than me. She looks like our mother, which is a thing she has known since she was nine and has never been allowed to forget by a single person in this family, and she got married at twenty-two in a church on Hylan Boulevard with two hundred people in it and our father cried at the top table.
He did not cry. He put his face in a napkin for a bit and then he told a story.
"So say it," I tell her.
"Say what."
"Whatever it is you've been holding since I came in."
Paola shuts the dishwasher with her hip.
And she turns around and she looks at me and I watch her decide to be kind, and I watch the decision lose.
"You're getting married," she says.
Here is what I do.
Nothing.
I sit on a stool in a beige kitchen with my hands around a glass of water I did not ask for, and I look at my sister, and the only thing that happens anywhere in my body is that I stop hearing the television in the other room.
"Say that again," I say.
"Don't do the thing."
"What thing."
"The calm thing. The thing where you go quiet and reasonable and then three days later you've fixed everything and everybody has to thank you.
" Paola pulls the other stool out and sits on it sideways.
"You're getting married. To Salvatore Marchetti.
It's done, Dad signed it last night, there's a priest already, it's a week Saturday. "
"A week Saturday."
"Nine days."
"Nine days."
"You're doing it again," she says.
I put the glass down.
"Why," I say.
"Why what?"
"Why me."
And my sister does the thing she does, which is that she gives you the whole truth, all of it, with nothing held back, because the whole truth is the most efficient way to hurt somebody.
"Because he asked for you," she says. "By name. He turned down the house and he turned down Zio Gio's place and then Dad offered him me."
The refrigerator hums.
"He offered him you," I say.
"He offered him me. I'm married, I've got two kids, and my own father stood up in that back room and put me on the table in front of six men, and the man said no.
" She is not crying. Paola does not cry, she gets very bright around the eyes and very precise with her hands.
"He said no twice. And then Dad sat there like a moron and thought about it and offered him Matteo. "
"He what."
"Matteo. Our brother. Nine."
I am standing. I do not remember standing.
"And Marchetti said no to that too," Paola says, "and then he said your name, and apparently the whole room stopped, and that's the story, that's the entire story, and the part you want to ask me next is the part I've been sitting on all day so go ahead. Ask me."
"Ask you what."
"Ask me how long he's known who you were."
The clock on my sister's oven has run eleven minutes fast since 2021, because nobody in this house has ever worked out how to change it.
I watch it go from 9:31 to 9:32.
"He's paid the house off," Paola says. "Did Dad tell you that? Both mortgages, the second one too, the Howard Beach one. Gone. Cleared last night."
"That's."
"And he signed it over. To Matteo. Not to Dad, not to me, to a nine year old, held in trust till he's twenty-five, with Zio Gio as the trustee.
" She laughs and it is a terrible sound.
"So Matteo owns a house on Seventy-Fourth Street.
Free and clear. My son shares a room with his brother in a basement I paid for myself, and Matteo Silvestri owns a house. "
"Paola."
"I'm not saying I want it."
"That's exactly what you're saying."
"I'm saying it's interesting," my sister says, "what a man buys."
I go to the sink.
There is no reason to go to the sink. There is nothing in it. I stand there with my back to her and my hands on the edge of it and I look at the bad photograph of my mother on the windowsill, caught mid-word, one hand up.
"Four years," Paola says behind me. "That's what Dad said. He's known about the money for four years and he never came, not once, and then last week he comes, and he comes himself, and he sits in your section."
"Stop."
"You had a rose on your birthday."
"Paola."
"Every year since you were seventeen. You told me it was Danny Petrosino." She lets that sit for exactly as long as she needs to. "And I said somebody's been watching you, and you laughed at me, Adelina. You laughed."
I hear a door somewhere at the back of the house.
Downstairs, under my feet, through beige carpet and plywood and forty years of bad decisions, somebody is moving around in a finished basement, and it is not the boys, because the boys are eleven feet away arguing about the remote.
My father is in this house.
My father has been in this house the entire time.
He has heard my car pull up and he has heard me come in and he has heard his oldest daughter tell his youngest daughter that he sold her, and he has stayed down there, in a basement with a bathroom, the way he stayed in a parking lot in March when I was fourteen and a nurse was putting a baby into my arms.
That is the moment.
Not the rose. Not the nine days. Not my sister's face.
A man moving around under a floor.
The basement door is in the hall, between the closet and the thermostat.
I go and stand in front of it.
There is a light on down there. You can see it under the bottom of the door, a strip of it, yellow, and every so often the strip breaks where he crosses in front of the lamp, and then it comes back.
I put my hand on the handle.
I have a whole speech. I have had it since I was about sixteen and I have added to it since, the way you add to a room you are not using.
It has the parking lot in it. It has the sixty dollars out of the drawer in it.
It has the year of the Lincoln in it, and the night he came home at four in the morning and woke Matteo up to show him a watch.
And at the end of the speech there is one line, and the line is:
I have never once asked you for anything.
Which is not even true. I asked him for braces when I was twelve.
The strip of light breaks and comes back.
And I stand there with my hand on the handle of my sister's basement door and I understand, with no drama at all, the way you understand that a pan is hot, that if I open this door my father will tell me a story.
He will tell it well. He will have my mother in it somewhere.
There will be a part where he is the one who has been hurt, and a part where he did it all for us, and by the end of it I will be the one apologising, because I have done this before, I have done it twenty or twelve times, and it has never once ended any other way.
I take my hand off the handle.
That is the last conversation I do not have with my father before everything else happens, and for a long time afterwards I will wish I had been braver at that door, and then later I will stop wishing it.
The den has three boys in it and one lamp.
Paola's two are on the couch, nine and seven, in a heap like something that has been dropped.
My brother is on the floor with his back against the ottoman and his legs straight out in front of him, which is how he sits when he cannot get comfortable breathing, and I clock it from the door and he clocks me clocking it.
"I'm fine," he says, to the television.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
I sit down on the floor next to him, which takes me below the sightline of the other two, so as far as they are concerned I am not in the room.
"You're staying here tonight," I say.
"With Dad?"
"With Paola. Dad's downstairs."
Matteo does not say anything for a second.
"Are you staying," he says.
"I have to go and see somebody."
"Who."
"A man about the house."
Which is true, and is the first time in my life I have used the truth as a way of not saying something, and I am not proud of how easily it comes.
He looks at me sideways. He has our mother's face and none of her colouring and when he is working something out he goes perfectly still, and he is perfectly still now, for about four seconds, with the television going.
"It's about the two," he says.
"What?"
"The inhalers. It's about the two." He picks at the carpet. "Nobody buys two."
"Matteo."
"I'm just saying I know it's about the two," he says, and goes back to the television, and does not look at me again, and lets me put my hand flat on the top of his head for a second on my way past.
"I need your keys," I say.
"What?"
"Your car keys. Mine's got a light out and it's forty minutes on the parkway and I'm not doing it in that."
Paola stands up.
"It's half nine at night."
"I know what time it is."
"Adelina. Where are you going."
"To ask him."
"Ask who?" And then she gets it, and her face changes, and for one second I can see the girl who used to let me sleep in her bed when the shouting went past midnight. "No. No. Absolutely not. You don't go to those people, you don't go to their houses, they come to you, that's the whole."
"Where does he live."
"I'm not telling you that."
"Paola."
"I am not."
I hold my hand out.
And my sister stands in her beige kitchen in her own house with her husband asleep upstairs and her children arguing in the next room, and she looks at me for a long moment, and whatever it is she sees, it is not what she expected to see, and it frightens her.
She takes the keys off the hook by the door.
"Oyster Bay," she says. "There's a wall. You'll know it, there's nothing else out there." She puts them in my hand and does not let go of them straight away. "Adelina."
"What."
"You look really good, by the way," she says. "Tired."
I take the keys.
At the door I stop, because I have to say it and if I do not say it now I will say it in the car for forty minutes instead.
"Don't let him take Matteo home tonight," I say. "He'll want to. He'll say school. Don't."
"He's his father."
"Paola."
My sister looks past me into the hall where the coats are, and she thinks about it, and I can see the exact shape of the thing she is weighing, which is whether being on my side once costs her anything.
"Fine," she says.
"Thank you."
"He can sleep on the sectional." She folds her arms. "It's leather. It's not a punishment."
I get in a car that is not mine and I drive east with the heater on my feet and the radio off, and it is one in the morning when I come off the parkway, and there is nothing out there, and she is right.
You do know it when you see it.
There is a wall.