CHAPTER SEVEN
ADELINA
I tell my brother on Saturday morning in a house that belongs to him.
That is the part I cannot get my head round.
I am standing in the kitchen on Seventy-Fourth Street making eggs at ten past nine, and the kitchen belongs to Matteo Silvestri, age nine, and so does the boiler cupboard with the bread bag in it, and so does the radiator cover with the ring on it from the Amaro bottle.
He is at the table with the crusts off his toast in a pile.
He has been separating crusts since he was four and he does it like a surgeon and nothing I have ever tried has worked on it.
"So," I say.
"So."
"I have to tell you something and I'm going to tell it to you straight, and then you can ask me anything and I'll answer it."
Matteo puts his knife down.
He is nine. He should look worried. What he does instead is push his plate about two inches away from himself and fold his hands, which is a thing he has got from somewhere and I have never been able to find out where.
"Is it about the two," he says.
"Sort of."
"Okay."
"I'm getting married," I say. "Next Saturday. To a man called Salvatore Marchetti. And we're both going to go and live at his house, you and me, out on Long Island, and you'll have your own room and your own bathroom, and there's a man called Frankie who's going to drive you to school."
The refrigerator does its thing where it shudders.
My brother looks at the table for about eight seconds.
"Is Dad coming," he says.
"No."
And he says, "Good."
I have to put my hands on the counter.
He does not notice. He has already moved on. He has picked his knife back up and he is going at another crust, and he says good, flat, the way you would say it about the weather, and it goes through me in a place I did not know was there.
Because I have done this.
I have spent nine years making sure he was fed and warm and had a coat that fit and a card at the clinic, and in all that time I never once said a word against our father, not one, I have defended him at that table with my own mouth, and my brother has sat there with his crusts and drawn his own conclusions and kept them to himself.
He is nine and he has been managing me.
"Matteo."
"What?"
"You're allowed to be upset about Dad."
"I'm not upset about Dad." He scrapes the butter to the edges. "Can I ask the questions now?"
Here are my brother's questions, in the order he asks them.
"Is it a big house?"
"I think so. It was dark."
"How many bathrooms?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know how many bathrooms?"
"Matteo, I was there for about an hour and it was three in the morning."
"That's a long time to be in a house and not know how many bathrooms," he says, and writes something. He has got a pencil from somewhere. He is writing on the back of an envelope. "What school."
"The same school."
"Same school."
"The same one. Same teacher, same everything, and Frankie drives you, and I will be there at the gate at three the way I am now."
He writes that down.
"Is he nice," Matteo says.
And this is the one I have been dreading since the parkway.
I could lie. It would take nothing. He is nine and he is asking a yes or no question and the answer yes would cost me one second and would buy him about six days of not thinking about it, and I have bought him six days in worse ways than that before.
I cannot do it.
Physically. My mouth will not.
"I don't know yet," I say.
Matteo puts the pencil down.
"Okay," he says. "That's good."
"How is that good?"
"Because you'd have said yes if you were making it up," he says, "and then I'd have had to work out how bad it was on my own."
We go through the house.
That is his idea. He wants to know what is coming and what is staying and whether the house stays ours, and when I tell him the house is his, actually his, with his name on a piece of paper in a lawyer's office, he stops on the stairs and sits down on the fourth step from the bottom.
"Mine," he says.
"Yours. Until you're twenty-five you can't sell it, and Zio Gio's the one who has to sign things, but it's yours."
"So Dad can't."
"No."
"He can't put it on the thing," my brother says. "The thing where you put the house on it and then you get money for it and then you have to give the money back."
I sit down on the step below him.
"Where did you hear about that," I say.
"He did it before. Twice." Matteo shrugs with one shoulder. "He does it on the phone in the hall and he does the voice."
"What voice."
"The one where he laughs first."
I am going to be thinking about that for the rest of my life.
We pack his room in an hour and a half. He is unsentimental in a way that horrifies me.
The moon book goes. The rock from Coney Island goes.
A drawing he did of our mother from a photograph when he was six, which he has had taped inside his wardrobe door since before he could spell, goes into the box first and he does not comment on it and neither do I.
The lamp stays. The bedding stays.
"It's not a good lamp," he says.
At the end he stands in the doorway and looks at the room with his hands in his pockets, and I watch him from the landing, and he takes his time about it.
"Addie."
"Yeah."
"Are you doing this because of me?"
The landing is four feet wide. There is a boiler cupboard behind me with six years of stolen paper in it. There is a window at the end that swells in the rain and only opens if you hit it in the corner with the flat of your hand.
"No," I say.
And my brother looks at me, at the landing, in his own house, with two inhalers balanced one in each pocket, and he does the thing where he goes perfectly still.
"That's the first time you've ever lied to me," he says.
My own room takes eleven minutes.
I have thought about that since. Nine years in a room and eleven minutes to take everything out of it that I want, and most of that is the winter coats.
Clothes. The photographs of my mother, all three, the good ones, out of the drawer.
My mother's recipe book, which is not a book, it is a supermarket notepad with a rubber band round it and a takeout menu wedged inside it at the page for the Easter bread.
A tin with my documents in it. Matteo's clinic letters.
Then I get down on the floor and reach under the bed.
The shoebox is at the back, against the wall, behind the winter blankets. It is a size seven Skechers box with the picture of the shoe still on the end, and it has been under that bed since I was seventeen.
I sit on the floor with it on my knees for a while.
Seven roses, flat, in the phone book, with a page between each one so they do not take the colour off each other.
I did that on purpose the first year and then I kept doing it, and I have turned them over twice a year for six years, and I have never once told a living soul except Paola, who I told by accident, and who got it wrong, and who was right.
Somebody's been watching you.
Here is what I know now that I did not know on Wednesday.
That there is a man out on Long Island who has been aware of me for years, in a way that has never once had a shape I could see, and who on Thursday night sat in my uncle's back room and turned down a house and a business and my sister and my little brother, and said my name instead.
Here is what any reasonable person would do with a shoebox full of roses.
I take the lid off. I look at them. I put the lid back on.
And I put it in the bottom of the bag with the winter coats on top of it, and I carry it out to the car myself, and I do not let Matteo take that one, because it is heavier than it looks and because I do not want to have to explain it, and I want to be absolutely honest here:
I never once consider leaving it behind.
Not for a second. Not for half of one.
We drive to Da Gio at two so I can tell my uncle.
I do not have to tell my uncle. My uncle has known since Thursday at nine forty and has been carrying it around for two days and has not called me once, which is the most Gio thing that has ever happened.
The place is shut between lunch and dinner. He lets us in the side.
Matteo goes and sits in booth four with the moon book because booth four is where Matteo sits, and my uncle and I stand at the end of the bar by the phone, and neither of us says anything for a while.
"Eleven stools," I say.
Gio picks up the cloth.
"He told you that."
"Why would you say that to him. Of all the things. Out of everything you know about me, why would you."
"Because I wanted him to know there was somebody in it," my uncle says.
He puts the cloth down again without using it.
"They sit in my back room and they talk about your father's house and your father's car and what is owed and what it is worth, and in three hundred years of that, nobody has ever once said a thing about the person.
So I said a thing about the person." He shrugs.
"It was the smallest thing I know about you. I picked the smallest one on purpose."
"Zio."
"And your father sat there," Gio says, "and he did not say one single word."
At the door he stops me with a hand on my arm.
He has a paper napkin in his other hand, folded around something small, and he has clearly been carrying it since Thursday too.
"This was your grandmother's and then it was your mother's," he says. "Your father pawned it in 2019. I got it back in 2021 and I never told him and I never told you, because if you'd known it was in my safe you'd have made me sell it for the light bill."
I do not take it.
"Adelina."
"I can't."
"You are getting married in six days."
"I can't take that from you."
"It was never mine." He puts it in my hand and folds my fingers over it, hard, with both of his, the way he used to do with a twenty when I was fifteen.
"Listen to me. That man is going to put something on your finger next Saturday that costs more than this building.
You wear that on the other hand. Every day. "
"Why."
My uncle looks out at the lot where a Buick sat on Wednesday night with a man in it who would not come inside.
"So there's one thing on you," he says, "that nobody bought."