CHAPTER ELEVEN
SALVATORE
Bruna has cooked for twenty-two people and there are five of us.
There is no wedding.
There is a kitchen table with five people at it and a chapel behind the house with four warm seats in it, and my brother is on his third glass and Matteo Silvestri is sitting on a cushion because the chair is too low, and Bruna will not sit down.
"Bruna. Sit down."
"Mangia."
"Sit down and eat."
She sits for ninety seconds and then gets up to get something nobody asked for.
Tommaso stays for twenty minutes and then he stands and puts his hand on the back of my chair, which is the only affectionate thing he has ever done to me, and says he has to get back because his youngest has a thing in the morning, and he shakes Adelina's hand.
"Congratulations, signora."
"Thank you."
"If anything happens and you can't reach him," he says, "you reach me. Any hour. There is no hour that is a bad hour."
"Okay."
"I mean that in a very specific way."
"Tommaso," I say.
He nods at me once and goes.
I do not know how to be at this table.
That is the truth and I have no better way to put it.
I have sat at tables with men who were going to try to kill me before dessert and I have been entirely comfortable.
I am sitting in my own kitchen with a nine year old and my brother and a woman who raised me, and every forty seconds I am checking where the doors are.
Nico is doing all the work.
He does it without appearing to. He has got Matteo going about the moon, and now they are arguing about whether you could hear anything on the moon, and Nico is losing on purpose and badly.
"There's no air," Matteo says.
"There's some air."
"There's no air."
"There's a little air, Matteo. There's a bit."
"There is zero air." My wife's brother puts his fork down. "There is less air on the moon than there is in a lightbulb. That's a fact. Look it up."
"I'm not looking it up, I'm enjoying this."
"That's because you're wrong."
Adelina laughs.
It is the first time I have heard it. It comes out of her before she can get in front of it and it is not a polite laugh, it is a real one, a short loud one, and she puts her hand up over her mouth immediately, and the chip in her front tooth is there for about half a second before the hand gets to it.
Then she takes the hand down. On purpose. Slowly.
And she keeps it down.
Nobody sees her do it except me. Bruna is at the stove. My brother is being wrong about the moon. It takes maybe two seconds, a woman lowering her own hand from her face at a kitchen table, and I will be carrying it around for the rest of my life.
At twenty past ten the boy goes out like a light, mid-sentence, sitting up.
Nico notices first and stops talking. Bruna comes over and stands looking at him with a dishcloth in her hand and says something soft that I have not heard her say in twenty-four years.
Adelina gets up.
She goes round the table and she puts one arm behind his back and one under his knees and she takes the weight, and I watch a woman who is five foot two pick up a nine year old boy out of a dining chair, and she gets him about four inches off it.
She is going to do it. That is the thing. She is going to get him up those stairs if it takes her eleven minutes and two stops, because she has been doing it since she was fourteen and it has never once occurred to her that there is another way it could go.
I am out of my chair before I have decided anything.
"Let me."
She looks up at me with her brother half off a chair and her arms full.
"I've got him."
"I know you've got him."
"I do this every night."
"I know," I say. "Let me."
And there is a moment there, about a second and a half, where my wife looks at me over the top of her brother's head and I can see her running the whole thing, the cost of it, what it means to hand somebody a child, whether this is the beginning of something being taken away from her.
Then she lets go.
She steps back and lets me take him, and I get an arm under him and stand up, and he weighs about sixty pounds and he does not wake, and his head goes onto my shoulder the way a head does when it has done this before with somebody else.
"East stairs," she says. "He can't do the front ones, they're too."
"I know which stairs."
I carry him up.
It takes forty seconds. There is a rail on that staircase and I do not use it. At the top I turn sideways through the door and put him on the bed and she comes in behind me and does the rest of it, the shoes, the covers, the thing with the pillow, and neither of us says a word.
She puts one inhaler on the nightstand where he can reach it and the other in the drawer.
Then she stands there looking at him for a moment.
"He's heavy now," she says.
"Yes."
"He wasn't."
I take her along the corridor at half past ten, because there is nothing else left to do.
The east wing is three rooms and a bathroom and a corridor of its own.
Bruna has had it open for a week. There are new towels.
There is a chair by the window and a lamp and a rug that was in my mother's room and has been in a cupboard since 2003, and I do not know who moved it and I am not going to ask.
I stand in the doorway.
I do not go in.
"This is yours," I say. "The whole corridor. Your brother's through the door at the end and the back stairs go down to the kitchen. Nobody comes up here. The men don't come past the landing, they know that, and if one of them ever does I want to hear about it the same day."
She stands in the middle of the room in the dress.
"Okay," she says.
"On the table there is a phone."
"I have a phone."
"That phone on the table," I say, "has one number in it, and it is not mine, it is Tommaso's, and it rings four places at once. If you ever have a reason to use it, use it and then put it down and get in a room with a door."
"Why isn't it yours."
"Because I might be somewhere I can't answer."
She looks at the phone on the table for a second.
"Okay."
"Your money is done. The account is in your name, it's at a place in Glen Cove, there's a card coming Tuesday. Nobody sees the statements, including me, including Tommaso."
"Okay."
"When you go out, Frankie drives you. That is not a restriction, it is how it has to be for a while. And if you want to go somewhere nobody hears about, tell him that, and he takes you, and he does not tell me. That is a real thing. I have already told him."
Adelina turns round.
"Is there a list," she says.
"What?"
"Is there a list? Of the rules. Because there's a lot of them and I've had a long day and I'm going to forget one and then I'm going to be in trouble for forgetting it, so if there's a piece of paper, I'd like the piece of paper."
I look at her.
"There's no list."
"Then say the last one."
"There isn't a."
"There's a last one," she says. "There's always a last one. Just say it, please, I'd rather have it now than at two in the morning."
I have a box in my pocket.
I have had it in my pocket since seven o'clock this morning and I have taken it out twice, once in the study and once in the car on the way back from nowhere, and I take it out now and hold it in my hand and do not open it.
"This was my mother's," I say.
She does not move.
"I'm not asking you to wear it. You've got one on already and it does the job and I'm not going to stand here and."
"Can I see it."
I open the box.
It is thin and it is gold and it is not worth anything, that is the first thing anybody says about it, it is a nineteen dollar ring from a shop on Graham Avenue in 1989 and my father bought a better one in 1997 and she never put it on. She wore this one. She wore this one in the ground.
Bruna took it off her in the hospital and gave it to me in a paper bag when I was eight years old and I have had it since.
Adelina looks at it for a long time.
"Put your hand out," she says.
"What?"
"Your hand. Out. Flat."
I put my hand out.
And my wife takes the ring out of the box and puts it in the middle of my palm and closes my fingers over it with both of hers, exactly the way a sixty year old man in Bensonhurst closed her fingers over a napkin last Saturday, and she holds them shut.
"Not tonight," she says.
"Adelina."
"Not on the day my father sold me. Not on the day with the four chairs and the nine minutes." Her hands are very warm. "You keep it. And if there's ever a day that isn't this one, you can ask me again, and I'll probably say yes, and it'll mean what it's supposed to mean."
She lets go.
"That's fair," I say.
"I know it's fair."
At midnight she comes down to the study.
I have been in there since eleven not doing anything. There is a fire and I have not put anything on it and it has gone down to the red, and I have a glass I have not touched, and I am sitting behind my father's desk in the dark like a man in a bank.
She has not changed.
She is still in the dress and she has taken her shoes off and she has a cardigan over the top of it that must be Bruna's, and she comes in and shuts the door and stands with her back against it.
"You didn't say the last rule," she says.
"There isn't one."
"Salvatore."
It is the first time she has said my name.
I have to put the glass down.
"Ask me what you came down here to ask me," I say.
She takes a breath.
"What happens if I say no."
"No to what."
"You know what." Her chin comes up. "Tonight. Ever. Any of it. What happens if I lock that door at the end of the corridor and I never open it, and I live in your house and eat at your table and wear your name for the rest of my life and you never once get anything out of it. What happens then."
The fire moves.
"Nothing," I say.
"Nothing."
"Nothing happens. You live here. The money's yours.
The boy's safe. Your uncle keeps his licence and your father stays where he is.
" I keep my hands on the arms of the chair.
"And in about four years you'll go to a lawyer in Garden City and he'll tell you that a marriage that has never been consummated can be annulled, and you'll get it done inside nine months, and you'll be twenty-seven and you'll have a clean name and money of your own, and I will not contest one line of it. "
She stares at me.
"That's not."
"That's the answer."
"Nobody would do that."
"I would."
"Why."
"Because that isn't a question you get," I say.
And there it is. The wrong sentence, out of my mouth, in my own study, at midnight.
Her father said it to her in a room with the television on and she told me it made her feel like a child, and she told me that in the front hall of this house on Monday when she thought I was not listening, and I have just put it on her myself.
Her face closes.
"Right," she says.
"Adelina."
"No, that's fine. That's a really good answer, actually. Thank you." She opens the door. "Goodnight, Salvatore."
And she goes.
There are nine doors between my study and the top of the east stairs.
I sit in the dark and listen to her go through them.