CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ADELINA
By the fifth day the house has taken a side and it is not mine.
Nobody says anything. That is the genius of it. Not one person in this building has said a single word to me about my husband since the gravel on Saturday, and I have been living inside a campaign.
Monday, Bruna sets three places at the kitchen table.
There are two of us. There have been two of us since Saturday lunchtime. She lays a third setting at the end where he stands, which is not even a seat he sits in, and when I look at her she looks back at me with the flat unbothered face of a woman who has done nothing whatsoever.
"Bruna."
"What."
"There's three."
"Mm," says Bruna, and goes to the range.
Tuesday there are three again.
Wednesday I take the third one off myself and put it back in the cupboard before she comes down, and when I come in from the school run it is out again, on the table, with the napkin folded.
Nico starts on Tuesday.
He leaves a coat.
He comes out at six with a bag of pastries nobody asked for and stays two hours and is extremely funny about a woman he met at a wedding, and then he goes, and forty minutes later I find a man's coat over the back of the chair in the hall.
It is black. It is enormous. It is not Nico's coat, because Nico is six one and narrow and this thing would go round him twice, and there is a rosary in the left pocket that is not the good one, it is a plain wooden one with a knotted cord.
I stand in the hall holding it.
"Nico," I say, out loud, to nobody.
I put it in the cupboard under the stairs.
On Thursday it is back on the chair.
Thursday is also the crews.
They come on a Thursday now, which they did not before, and there are fourteen of them instead of eleven because the word has gone round, and I feed them, because I am not going to stop feeding people to make a point.
And every single one of them does it.
Vincent Nappi, on his way out, at the door, with his hat in his hand: "Give him my best, signora."
The boy of about twenty-two who thanked me the first Sunday: "Is he keeping all right?"
A man called Beppe who I have met once: "He works too hard, that one. Always has. You want to make him sit down."
Fourteen men, one at a time, in a doorway, each one of them absolutely certain they are being subtle, and not one of them coordinated with any of the others, which is somehow worse.
By the eleventh one I am chopping an onion very hard.
And then on Thursday night I find out about the phone call.
Matteo is in the bath and I am putting his things away and his school planner is open on the desk, and there is a number written on the inside back cover in pencil in his handwriting, with a little box drawn round it.
I look at it for a while.
Then I look at the call log on the house phone, which is a thing I have never done in my life, and there it is, Wednesday of last week, ten past nine at night, eleven minutes.
I sit down on my brother's bed.
Eleven minutes.
A nine year old got a phone number off Frankie by saying it was about school, and waited until I was in the bath, and called a man in an office above a nightclub, and talked to him for eleven minutes, and then came downstairs and said goodnight to me and did not mention it.
He has been managing me again.
He has been doing it since he could talk and I have never once caught him at it, and I sit on his bed with a planner in my hands and I do not know whether what I am feeling is anger and I am fairly sure it is not.
I put the planner back exactly where it was.
I do not say anything to him about it.
Which means, I suppose, that I have started doing it too.
On Thursday afternoon I go down to the orchid house.
I have been down there twice since he left.
Both times the padlock has been on and both times I have stood outside it with my hands in the pockets of a dead woman's coat and looked through the glass at forty-one pots under the lights, and both times I have gone back up the path without touching anything.
This time I notice something.
There is a hose coiled on a bracket on the outside wall. There is a water butt under the downpipe at the corner with a lid on it, and a galvanised can standing on the lid, upside down, draining.
Upside down.
Somebody filled that can and used it and emptied it and turned it over so it would dry, and then padlocked the door and walked back up the path, and nobody has been near this garden since Saturday lunchtime except me.
Except that the can is dry and the glass has been wiped on the inside of the south end where the algae comes, and the vents at the top are open two notches and they were shut on Monday.
I stand there in the cold for quite a long time.
Somebody has been coming.
He has been out of this house for five days, and somebody has been driving forty-one minutes in the dark to water forty-one plants in a shed at the bottom of a garden he is not currently allowed into, and going away again before six in the morning without going up to the house.
I go back up the path.
Bruna is at the boot room door with a basket on her hip.
"Bruna," I say. "Who's doing the greenhouse."
And Bruna Sabbatini looks at me with the flat unbothered face of a woman who has done nothing whatsoever, and says:
"Nobody goes in."
Friday at four o'clock a car comes up the drive.
I hear it from the kitchen and I know the engine, and both my hands go down on the counter and I stand there with my head down for about four seconds.
Then I keep doing what I am doing, which is a chicken.
He comes in through the boot room.
"Adelina."
"Hi."
"Is the boy home?"
"He's at Paola's until Sunday. She's got the boys doing a thing." I do not turn round. "There's a plate for you. There has been a plate for you every night since Saturday, it's Bruna, take it up with Bruna."
Behind me, nothing.
I turn round.
He looks terrible.
That is the first thing and I hate that it is the first thing. He has not shaved in a way that is not deliberate, and the suit is the one from Saturday and it has been slept in, and he is standing in my kitchen doorway with his hat basically in his hands like one of his own capos.
"I'm not staying," he says.
"Okay."
"I came to ask you something and then I'm going back to the club."
"Ask it."
And my husband, who has never asked a human being for anything in his life, who informs, who tells, who says get in the car, Adelina, puts both hands in his coat pockets and says:
"Vincenzo Barone has invited us to lunch on Sunday at his house on Staten Island. There will be nine people at the table. I would like you to come with me. Will you?"
The extractor goes.
"That's a question," I say.
"Yes."
"You asked me a question."
"Yes."
"An actual question. With the little mark at the end."
"Adelina."
"No, I'm." I put the knife down. "Give me a second."
I have had five days to prepare for a man coming back into this house, and every single version of it I built involved him walking in and telling me something, and I had six answers ready and they are all completely useless.
"What happens if I say no," I say.
"Then I go on my own and say you're unwell."
"And?"
"And that's a lie, and they'll know it's a lie, and it tells them something."
"What does it tell them?"
"That you're a thing I hide," he says.
Here is what I do.
I say yes.
I say it in the worst possible way, with the knife in my hand and my chin up, and I say it specifically to hurt him, because I have been in a house for five days with a third place setting and a coat on a chair and fourteen men in a doorway asking after him, and there is a shoebox on a chair upstairs that I have not been able to put back under the bed, and I want, for one second, to be the one holding something.
"Fine," I say. "I'll come. I'll put a dress on and I'll sit at their table and I'll be very charming, and then we'll come home and you'll go back to the club and I'll go upstairs, because none of it means anything, does it. It's a room. You need a wife in a room."
He does not move.
"So yes," I say. "You can have the room."
And I wait.
I want him to shout. I have wanted him to shout since Saturday. I want one thing out of that man that is not level and reasonable and eight feet away, and I have set it up perfectly, I have handed him the single most insulting version of my own consent and put it on a plate in his own kitchen.
Salvatore takes his hands out of his pockets.
"Thank you," he says.
It goes through me like something cold.
"Don't."
"You asked me what happens if you say no and I told you the truth, and then you said yes, and I am not going to pretend that isn't a thing you did for me.
" He picks his coat up off the chair, the black one, the one that has been migrating around this house since Tuesday.
"One o'clock Sunday. Frankie'll bring the car at eleven. "
"Salvatore."
"There's a thing I should say before Sunday and I'd rather say it standing here than in a car." He has the coat over his arm. "Elio Castellano asked for you to be seated next to him."
"Who's Elio Castellano?"
"Castellano family. Youngest at the table. Forty-one." He says it entirely flatly. "He is extremely pleasant, and he will ask you about the restaurant and he will be genuinely interested in the answers, and you will like him."
"But."
"There's no but," he says. "That's the whole thing. That is exactly the problem and I have no way of showing you it, and you are going to sit next to him for two hours and enjoy it and I am going to have to sit at the other end of that table and watch."
I stand in a kitchen with a knife on the board.
"Then why isn't there a but," I say.
"Because I've got nothing," Salvatore says. "Nothing at all. He sent us glasses."
And he goes, and I hear the front door, and then the gravel, and I go and stand at the counter in the place where he stands, and it is only about four minutes later that I understand what actually happened in that room.
He came back to ask.
He could have sent Tommaso. He could have sent a message. He has not been in this house in five days and he drove out here at four in the afternoon, unshaven, in the suit he got married in, to stand in a doorway and put the little mark on the end of a sentence.
And then he thanked me for the worst thing I have ever said to anybody.
I pick the knife back up.
Bruna, at the range, without turning round, says one word in Sicilian.
"I know," I say.