CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SALVATORE
I do the orchids on a Friday night because nobody is in the garden on a Friday night.
Tonight there is a child in a bedsheet somewhere in my house with three pieces of candy in a pillowcase.
Tonight I left the lock hanging open at nine o'clock because Tommaso called about Ferraro and I went back up to the house and took it in the study, and it was forty minutes, and I came back down at twenty past fourteen.
So it is my fault. I want that on the record before anything else.
I left it open.
The house is twenty by twelve.
There are forty-one plants in it. I know that number the way I know the money.
Twenty-nine are Cattleya, which is what she bought, because they were cheap in 1994 and because they smell of something at night and nothing at all in the day.
Nine are Dendrobium, which she was bad at.
Two are a Bulbophyllum that smells like a dead animal for four days a year and that my father hated, which is the whole reason she kept it.
And one is not on any list.
It sits on its own on the end of the staging in a clay pot with a wire round it, and it came out of a suitcase from Trapani in 1999, split off a plant in her aunt's kitchen, and it has flowered six times in twenty-seven years.
Twice for her.
Four times for me.
I water with rainwater out of the butt at the back and I bring it in the night before so it is not cold, because cold water on the roots of a Cattleya in November will set it back four months, and there is a note about that in the book in her handwriting from 1996.
The book lives on the shelf over the bench.
It is a school exercise book and the first forty pages are hers, and they are mostly dates and a lot of underlining and one page where she has drawn the staging and numbered the pots and then crossed the whole thing out, and the rest of it, from page forty-one, is mine.
Twenty-four years of mine.
Nobody has ever read it. I write in it the way a man talks to himself in a car.
At twenty-five to twelve the door opens behind me.
I am on the second run of the bench with a can in my hand and I do not turn round, because there are four men at that gate and a wall and a dog run on the north side, and if somebody has got down this path then turning round is not the thing that saves me.
I put the can down and step to the right of the bench so the door is in front of me.
And it is my wife.
She is wearing my mother's coat.
I have been threatened with a gun eleven times and I have never once had the reaction I have standing in a glasshouse at twenty-five to midnight looking at Adelina Silvestri in a wet-road-coloured wool coat with the collar up.
Bruna.
Bruna has been in that cupboard.
"I'm sorry," Adelina says. "The lock was."
"I know."
"I wasn't going to go in. I want you to know that I stood out there for about four minutes not going in, and then I saw somebody moving and I thought." She stops. "I thought it was somebody who shouldn't be here."
"So you came in."
"I came in."
"Into a locked building at midnight," I say, "because you thought there was a stranger in it."
"Yes."
"What was the plan, Adelina."
"There wasn't a plan."
"No," I say. "There never is."
She does not leave.
That is the thing. There is a door behind her and she is standing in it and I have said nothing that invites her further in, and any reasonable person would take the four steps back up the path and be extremely relieved about it.
She shuts the door behind her instead.
"It's warm," she says.
"Sixty-six."
"All year?"
"All year."
She looks down the bench. She does it the way she looks at everything, which is fast and then slow, and she gets to the end and comes back, and she stops on the clay pot with the wire round it.
"That one's different."
"Yes."
"It's in a different pot, it's on its own, and everything else is on the wire tray and that one's on the wood." She looks at me. "Why?"
There is no possible reason to answer that question.
"Because the tray's for the ones that get bottom heat," I say, "and that one came out of a kitchen in Trapani in a suitcase in 1999 and it has never once been happy anywhere I've put it, and it flowers when it feels like it, so it sits where she put it."
Adelina does not move.
"Say that again," she says.
"Which part."
"The last part."
"It sits where she put it."
And then my wife, who has not asked me one question in seventeen days, who stood in a kitchen with flour on her hands and refused to ask me the only question that mattered because a weak man aimed it at her, says:
"You come down here every week."
"Yes."
"On your own."
"Yes."
"At midnight, with the padlock on, so nobody knows."
"Yes."
"Salvatore." Her voice does something. "There are fifteen men on this property who would stand behind a door for an hour and a half for my brother and not one of them knows that you do this?"
"No."
"Why."
I put my hands on the edge of the bench.
Here is the truth and I am not going to say it out loud, so I will put it here.
Because a man who does this is a man who can be hurt.
Because the orchid house is the only place on twelve acres where there is nothing between me and 2002, and because I have spent twenty-four years making absolutely certain that there is nothing anywhere on this earth that anybody can take from me, and this shed is the only failure, and it is forty-one plants and a school exercise book.
"Because it's mine," I say.
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the only one that's true."
She takes the four steps.
I do not hear her do it, because there is a heater and it is running and the glass ticks when it cools, and she crosses the brick path and she stops about eighteen inches away from me with her hands in the pockets of my mother's coat.
"Can I ask you a question that isn't about what you do," she says.
"You can ask."
"Was she like you."
Nobody has asked me a question about my mother since I was eleven years old.
That is not an exaggeration and it is not self-pity and I have counted. Bruna does not speak about her. My father did not. Nico cannot, because he was two years old. Father Dominic did once, in 2009, and I got up and left the room, and he never did it again.
Twenty-four years.
"No," I say.
"No?"
"She talked constantly." The heater ticks.
"About everything. She could not be in a room and not be talking, and she was very funny and she was not kind, she was not a kind woman, she was sharp and she took people apart at a table and everybody wanted to be near her.
And she wrote things down in a book about a shed.
And she was hopeless with the Dendrobium, she kept them too wet and she knew she kept them too wet and she did it anyway for nine years. "
I stop.
"Keep going," Adelina says.
"That's all of it."
"That is not all of it."
"That's all of it I have," I say, "and I have not said any of that out loud since I was eleven years old, and I would like to put the can down now."
She takes her hands out of her pockets.
And she reaches up and she puts one of them flat on the side of my face, over the scar under the jaw, and she is five foot two and she has to go up onto her toes to do it, and she does not say a word.
There is no version of me that survives that.
I put my hand round the back of her neck under the collar of my mother's coat, and I bend down, and I kiss my wife properly for the first time.
It is not the chapel.
She makes a sound in the back of her throat about a second in and her hands go into the front of my shirt and she pulls, and I have got her up against the brick edge of the staging with one hand in her hair and the other one on her waist over the wool, and the can goes off the bench and onto the brick and neither of us moves.
She is saying something against my mouth.
She is saying my name, and then she is saying please, and she is not asking for anything in particular, she is saying it the way you say it when there is nothing else in your head, and I have my hand at the top of her thigh through a coat that has been in a cupboard since 2003.
And then I stop.
I stop with my forehead against hers and both hands flat on the staging on either side of her, and I stand there in a glasshouse at midnight breathing like a man who has run somewhere.
"No," I say.
"Salvatore."
"No."
"Don't do that. Don't you." She has both hands in my shirt. "Don't you dare do the thing where you decide."
"Listen to me."
"I don't want to listen to you."
"I told you that if you said no, nothing happens," I say. "I said it in my study at midnight with the fire down and you did not believe one word of it, and you were right not to, because everything anybody has ever given you has had a price on the back of it."
She goes still.
"And if I take this tonight," I say, "then that was the price, and you will never be sure again, not once, not for the rest of your life."
"That's not."
"So no. Not tonight. Not like this, with a coat and a shed and a thing I said about my mother."
I take my hands off the bench.
"Go to bed, Adelina."
She stands there for about four seconds.
Then she picks the watering can up off the brick path, because she is who she is, and she puts it on the bench, and she walks out and does not shut the door behind her.
I stay in that glasshouse until twenty past two.
I do not do the orchids.