CHAPTER TWELVE
ADELINA
On the first morning of my marriage I am awake at ten past five and there is nothing to do.
That is not a figure of speech. There is nothing. There is no shift, there is no school run for another two hours, there is no wash because somebody has taken it, there is no floor to do because a woman comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, and there is no register to count because there is no register.
I lie in a bed the size of my old kitchen and stare at a ceiling rose.
At twenty past five I get up.
At half past five I have made the bed so tightly you could bounce a coin on it, which is not a thing I have ever done in my life, and I stand looking at it and understand that I have just spent ten minutes doing a thing that will be undone tonight by me, for me, in a room nobody will ever come into.
At quarter to six I go down the back stairs.
The kitchen at quarter to six is the best room I have ever been in.
There is one light on over the 1962 stove and the rest of it is grey, and it smells like a hundred years of other people's dinners, and there is a window over the sink that faces east and the sky out of it is doing the thing it does in October when the frost is coming.
Nobody is in it.
I stand in the middle of it with my hands at my sides.
And then I do what I always do, which is that I find the need.
There is a bowl of eggs going off on the shelf.
There is bread from yesterday that will be a brick by tonight.
There is a crate of tomatoes by the back door that somebody has left too near the boiler and half of them have gone, and the other half have about a day in them, and there is a bag of onions under the sink with a sprouting one in the middle that is taking the rest down with it.
I take my cardigan off.
By seven o'clock I have done the tomatoes.
Bruna comes in at ten past seven and stops dead in her own doorway.
I have four pans going. I have the bread cut and drying in the oven on the lowest rack, and I have a bowl of eggs beaten with the parsley from the pot on the sill, and I have the onions down to the two I could save and the rest of them on the compost, and the crate is washed and upside down by the door.
We look at each other.
"Buongiorno," I say.
Bruna looks at the stove.
She walks the length of the kitchen very slowly and she lifts the lid on the pan at the back and she looks into it, and she puts the lid back on, and she does not say a word.
Then she takes her coat off and hangs it on the door, and she gets a knife out of the drawer, and she stands next to me at the board and starts doing the parsley without being asked.
That is it. That is the whole negotiation.
We do not speak for forty minutes and it is the least lonely I have been since my mother died.
At twenty to eight, eleven men arrive.
Nobody tells me. I hear the cars and then I hear the boot room door and then the kitchen fills up with men in coats, and they are not what I pictured, they are men from my neighbourhood, they are the men who come into Da Gio on a Thursday, they have bad knees and reading glasses and one of them is on the phone to his wife about a dentist.
They stop when they see me.
All eleven of them, in a doorway, with their hats basically in their hands.
"Signora."
"Signora Marchetti."
"Sorry, signora, we come in the back, it's."
"It's fine," I say.
And then, because nobody moves, and because there is a silence in my kitchen and I cannot stand a silence in a kitchen:
"Have you eaten?"
Here is what nobody tells you about eleven made men.
They eat like fourteen year old boys. And every last one of them is frightened of upsetting somebody.
Eleven men sit down at that table because I tell them to, in an order which is obviously an order although nobody explains it to me, and the one with the reading glasses, who is called Sal but not that Sal, gets up three times to help carry and is told to sit down twice.
I put the eggs down the middle. The bread. The tomatoes with the last of the basil.
"This is from last night?" says one of them.
"Some of it's from last night."
"It's better than last night."
"Vinnie," says another one.
"I'm saying it's better."
"His wife's a beautiful cook," Sal-not-that-Sal tells me, confidentially, with his hand up at the side of his mouth. "Beautiful. Terrible with eggs."
They are gone by twenty past eight.
They do not leave a single plate on the table.
All eleven of them take their own plate to the sink, which I know for a fact none of them do at home, and the last one out is a boy of about twenty-two who stops in the door and turns round and says, "Thank you, signora," so seriously that I have to go and look in a cupboard for a while.
By nine I have started on the pantry.
Nobody asked me to. There is a walk-in pantry off the kitchen with a marble shelf and a door that does not shut properly, and there are things in it from before I was born. There is a jar of something at the back with a date on the lid in pencil that says 2004.
Bruna finds me on a stepladder.
"What are you doing."
"There's a jar back here from 2004."
"Leave it."
"Bruna, there's a jar."
"That is his mother's," she says, and takes it off me, and puts it back on the shelf, and moves two other things in front of it.
I come down off the ladder.
"Okay," I say.
"You cannot do that in this house."
"Do what?"
"Throw things out." Bruna picks up the cloth. "There is nothing in this house that is not somebody's. You want a cupboard, I will give you a cupboard. Ask me first. Every time."
"All right."
"Every time."
"I said all right," I say, and then, because I cannot leave a thing alone and never have been able to, "You speak English."
Bruna folds the cloth.
"When I want to," she says.
At half past ten I take Matteo to the orchid house.
Not in. Just to. He has been circling it since Monday the way he circles anything with a lock on it, and this morning he comes and stands in the kitchen doorway with his jacket already on and says, "The greenhouse," which is not a question, and I dry my hands.
We walk down past the pear tree.
"It's got a padlock," he says.
"I know."
"Brass. It's new. Look at the screws, they're new as well, the wood's old and the screws are new." He crouches down at the hasp with his hands on his knees and does not touch it. "So it got locked recently."
"Or it gets unlocked a lot and the old one wore out."
Matteo considers this.
"That's better," he says, with real professional respect.
We stand and look through the glass. The grow lights are on, the same as Monday.
There is a thermometer hanging from the frame on a wire and I can read it from here, and it says sixty-six, which means the heater is running, which means somebody is paying an oil bill every single week of the year to keep forty pots of something alive in a shed at the bottom of a garden.
"Who's in charge of it," Matteo says.
"Nobody goes in."
"Somebody goes in." He points at the floor inside, at the brick path under the staging, where the dust has been walked off it in a line. "There's a path."
I look at my brother.
"Do me a favour," I say. "Don't say that in front of anybody."
"Why."
"Because it's theirs. And we're new."
Matteo thinks about that all the way back up the path, and at the boot room door he says, "Okay," and takes his shoes off without being told, which he has never done in his life.
At noon somebody puts a tray down beside me and it is Nico, and he is wearing sunglasses indoors.
"How bad is it," I say.
"It's a nine."
"You were fine last night."
"Last night was a different man. Last night was an optimist." He gets a glass of water and drinks it in one go with his eyes shut. "Giglio. I have to ask you something and I want you to know I asked Bruna first and she threw a lemon at me."
"Go on."
"Did you actually cook for the entire Sunday crew."
"They were standing there."
"They were standing there," Nico repeats.
"Nobody had eaten."
"They had eaten. They always eat. They stop at the place on Glen Cove Road and they eat there, every single week, for nine years, and this morning ten grown men texted my brother's consigliere separately to say that the signora.
" He stops. He takes the sunglasses off.
"Adelina. There are men in this organisation who have not been fed by a woman in that kitchen since 2002. "
I put the cloth down.
"Nico."
"Yeah."
"Is that a problem?"
"It is the opposite of a problem," he says. "It is such completely the opposite of a problem that I need you to understand what you've done, because you're going to do it again tomorrow and you should do it on purpose."
He comes in at seven that evening.
I do not hear the car. I have my hands in a sink and the extractor going and the radio on the shelf doing the thing it does at seven, and when I turn round he is standing just inside the boot room door with his coat still on.
The kitchen is full.
Not of men. Of food. I have done far too much, I have done enough for twenty people because I cannot scale down, it is the one thing nobody ever managed to teach me, and there is a pan of something on every ring and bread on the rail and the whole room is orange with it.
Matteo is at the table doing homework with his feet swinging.
Bruna is at the far end with her glasses on doing the silver, which she does on a Sunday, and which she has not looked up from.
Salvatore stands in the doorway of his own kitchen.
He does not come in for about four seconds.
And I watch a man count the exits in a room he has lived in for thirty-five years, and find them, and stand there anyway.
"Hi," I say.
"Hello."
"There's a lot. I'm sorry. I did a lot."
"It's fine."
"Sit down, I'll."
"I'm not staying."
He crosses the kitchen and takes a plate off the stack, and he does it himself, and he puts food on it standing up with his coat on, and then he stands at the counter by the window with his back half to the room and eats it there.
Nobody says anything about it.
Bruna does not look up. Matteo asks him what four sevens is and he says twenty-eight without turning round and Matteo says twenty-eight in a voice of deep suspicion and goes back to it.
He is there for eleven minutes.
He eats the whole plate, and he puts it in the sink, and on the way past he stops behind my chair, and I feel him stop, and I do not turn round.
"The tomatoes were going," he says.
"They had a day in them."
"They'd have been thrown out Tuesday."
"I know. That's why I did them."
He stands there for another second.
Then he says, "Goodnight, Adelina," and goes out through the hall, and I hear the study door, and that is my husband, who owns twelve acres and a wall, who ate his dinner standing up at a counter in his coat because there were three other people in the room.