CHAPTER SIX
SALVATORE
At two forty in the morning Frankie calls the house phone, which he is only permitted to do for one of four reasons.
"There's a car at the gate."
"Whose."
"I don't know, boss. Honda. Staten Island plate, it's a lease, it comes back to a Michael Greco in Dongan Hills." A pause. "It's a girl driving."
I am already standing.
"Is she out of the car."
"She's out of the car. She's been out of the car about a minute and a half." Another pause, and I can hear Frankie deciding whether to say the next part. "She pressed the buzzer once and then she stopped and now she's just standing there in the rain looking at the wall."
"Open it."
"Boss."
"Open the gate, Frankie."
I have run this in my head a number of times.
Here is how it was supposed to go. Tomorrow, which is now today, Tommaso goes to Seventy-Fourth Street at ten in the morning with the deed and a folder and he explains it to her in a kitchen, calmly, with the paperwork in front of her, and he answers her questions, and he is very good at that, he has two daughters and a way of explaining that makes a thing sound survivable.
Then she has eight days.
Then I meet her at a chapel.
That is the entire plan and it took four days to build and it has a great many merits, and the principal one is that she and I do not have to be in a room together until it is already true.
She has been at my gate for six minutes and the plan is gone.
I go down to the front hall and Bruna is already there, at three in the morning, in a dressing gown, with her arms folded.
"Who is it," she says. In Italian, which means she is not asking.
"Go back to bed."
"Who is it."
"It's my wife," I say.
Bruna looks at me and does not say anything for a while.
Then she turns around and goes toward the kitchen, and she says something under her breath about the state of this house, and she puts the big light on over the stove, which she has not done at three in the morning since my mother was alive.
She comes up the drive on foot.
There is three hundred yards of drive and a car behind her with its lights on and Frankie leaning out of it saying something, and she is walking, in the rain, in a coat that is not for this, with her arms down by her sides.
She does not look at the house.
She looks at the garden.
The drive comes up past the east wall and the roses are still going, because they always go into November out here, and she slows down, and for about four steps my wife looks at my mother's roses in the dark in the rain, and then she remembers where she is and she stops looking at them and comes on.
She is soaked to the skin by the time she gets to the step.
Mascara or something under her eyes. Hair flat. She is holding her own keys in her fist the way you are taught to, which tells me she has been taught, which tells me somebody taught her, and I do not much enjoy that thought.
"Adelina."
"Is there somewhere we can talk," she says.
I take her into the study because it is the only room on that floor with a door.
Bruna gets there first. There is a fire going that was not going twenty minutes ago, and a towel over the back of the chair, and a plate on the desk with bread on it and a piece of the frittata from Sunday and two of the round biscuits she makes for nobody, because nobody in this house eats them.
Adelina looks at the plate.
"Mangia," Bruna says, and goes out.
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat it anyway," I say. "She'll come back."
"I'm really not."
"She will come back, and she will stand there."
Adelina picks up a biscuit. She looks at it. She puts it down.
Then she picks it up again and eats it standing in the middle of my study in a wet coat, because she is cold and she has not eaten since about two in the afternoon, and I know that because of the way she goes at the second one.
I do not say anything about the coat.
I want to. There is a thing in my chest about the coat that I am going to examine later at some length.
"Sit down by the fire."
"I'll drip on it."
"Adelina."
She sits down by the fire.
"Nine days," she says.
"Eight."
"Paola said nine."
"Your sister counted today. Today's finished."
"Right." She has both hands around the arm of the chair. "Okay. So I'm going to say some things, and I'd like you to let me get to the end of them, because I've been saying them in a car for an hour and if you stop me I'll lose it."
"Go on."
"Matteo comes with me."
I wait.
"He comes with me," she says again, louder, because I have not said anything and she has built this whole thing expecting a fight.
"He is nine, he has asthma, he does not sleep in a house where he does not know where I am, and there is no version of any of this where he goes back to my father. He comes with me or there's no."
"Yes."
She stops.
"What?"
"Yes," I say. "The room at the top of the east stairs is his.
It's already done. He has his own bathroom and there's a door onto the back stairs so he can get down to the kitchen without going past anybody, and there's a boy your age at the gate called Frankie who will drive him to school on Seventy-Ninth until you decide whether you want him somewhere else. "
She sits very still.
"You already did it," she says.
"It was done Thursday night."
"Before you."
"Yes."
"So you." She stops. She starts again. "So if I hadn't come tonight, and Paola hadn't told me, I'd have found out on the day. I'd have walked into a house and there'd be a room."
"Yes."
"That's a horrible thing to do to a person," she says.
And I do not have anything to say to that, because she is right, and because I have spent four days building a plan that is entirely composed of things I did not want to have to say to her face.
"What else," I say.
She does it in order. She has a list. She has clearly written the list at some point on the parkway because she keeps touching her coat pocket.
Gio. The restaurant, the licence, the loan he took in 2018, and anyone who might come and see him about Thursday night.
Granted, and more than granted, and when I tell her that Gio broke thirty years of neutrality in front of six men to say one sentence about her, she stops talking for long enough that I have to look at the fire.
The house on Seventy-Fourth stays in Matteo's name. Granted. It already is.
Her wages. She wants to keep working.
"No."
"That one's not negotiable."
"It's the only one that isn't going to happen."
"I have shifts, I have a Sunday brunch I picked up, I have."
"Adelina. There were six men in that room on Thursday and by Saturday there were two hundred men in this city who know your name, and on Sunday there'll be two thousand.
" I keep my voice where it is. "You cannot stand behind a bar on Eighteenth Avenue at midnight.
Not this year. Ask me for something else and I will give you it. "
She looks at the fire for a while.
"Then the money," she says. "Whatever a wife gets, or an allowance, or whatever the word is. I want it to be mine. Not a card of yours. Mine, in an account with my name, and I don't want to be asked about it."
"Done."
"You don't want to know what for."
"No."
"It's for my uncle," she says anyway, immediately, because she cannot help herself. "He's going to lose the Thursday and Friday covers over this and he won't take it if it comes from you."
"I know he won't."
The door opens.
Bruna comes in with a bowl of soup on a tray and sets it on the little table at Adelina's elbow, and takes the plate with two biscuits missing off the desk, and looks at it, and looks at Adelina, and puts it back down on the little table as well.
Then she goes to the chair and picks up the towel that Adelina has not used, and she stands there holding it.
Adelina looks at me.
"I told you she'd come back," I say.
"Is she going to."
"She is going to stand there."
My wife sits forward in a wet coat and lets a seventy-one year old woman dry the ends of her hair with a towel in the middle of my study at ten past three in the morning, because there is no version of the next four minutes in which that does not happen, and both of them appear to have worked this out immediately and without discussion.
Bruna says something to her in Sicilian.
"I don't have any Italian," Adelina says. "I'm sorry. My mother did. Nobody kept it up."
Bruna says it again, slower, exactly as incomprehensibly.
"She says the coat is wrong," I say.
"It's a coat."
"She says it's wrong."
"It's the coat I have."
Bruna puts the towel over the back of the chair, and says one more thing on her way to the door, and this one I do not translate.
"What was that one," Adelina says.
"Eat the soup."
It was not that one.
She has got to the end of the list.
She sits there in a wet coat in front of my fire with her hands open in her lap and nothing left to ask for, and this is the part I have not prepared for, because I did not know she was going to get here.
"Can I ask you something," she says.
"You can ask."
"Would you have taken him?"
The fire moves.
"My brother," she says. "If I'd said no. If I'd got in the car tonight and gone the other way, and in eight days there was no wedding. Would you have taken Matteo instead?"
There are four answers to that and three of them are better than the truth.
No. That is the best one. It is also the one that makes everything that comes after it a negotiation with a man who says comfortable things.
"I would have taken the house off your father," I say, "and given it to your brother, and paid for the inhalers, and put a man on your street, and none of you would ever have known any of it. And then in about a year somebody at that table would have asked me why I was doing it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
"Would you have taken him."
"No," I say. "But that's not because of anything in me.
That's because of what he is. He's nine.
He'd have been a lever, and a lever gets used, and I don't have anywhere to put a nine year old where he doesn't get used.
" I look at her. "You are also a lever, Adelina.
I want to be extremely clear about that before you say yes to anything.
The difference is that you're one I can put behind a wall. "
She takes that. She actually takes it. She sits there and turns it over and does not flinch away from it, and that is the moment, if anybody ever asks me, that is the exact moment.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
"Then yes. Obviously yes, I said yes in the car, I said yes on Thursday night before I knew who you."
"There's one condition on my side."
She stops.
"One," I say. "There's only ever going to be one, and it doesn't change, and if you break it I won't punish you, I'll just stop being able to keep you safe, so believe me when I say it's not a threat, it's arithmetic."
"Say it."
"You don't ask me what I do."
The rain goes across the window.
"Ever," I say.