CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ADELINA
There is plastic on the furniture in the front room and there is a chair at the table with nobody in it.
Not a spare chair. A set place. Cloth napkin, water glass, the whole thing, on the right hand side of the old man, and a woman called Angela comes round with the antipasto and puts some on that plate as well, and then takes the plate away untouched at the end of the course.
Nobody looks at it.
Nine people at a table and one of them has been dead for two years and there is not one thing in this room I am allowed to notice.
So I do not notice it.
I have worked Sunday service on Eighteenth Avenue since I was seventeen. You do not notice the man crying in the bathroom, you do not notice the wedding ring going into a pocket at table nine, and you absolutely do not notice a place laid for Signora Barone.
I put my napkin in my lap.
Salvatore is five seats away on the diagonal, and he does not look at me once for the first forty minutes, and I understand about halfway through the soup that it is costing him something to manage that.
Teresa D'Amico is kind to me.
She is kind to me for an hour and ten minutes and she is extremely good at it and I love every single second of it, and I know exactly what she is doing, and we both know that we both know, and it makes it better and not worse.
"Your mother," she says. "Renata."
"Yes."
"I knew a Renata Impellitteri in Bath Beach."
"That was her cousin."
"There." She puts her hand on the table. "Everybody is somebody's cousin." She drinks a very small amount of wine. "And she died when you were fourteen."
"She did."
"And you have a brother who is nine."
"Matteo."
"So," Teresa D'Amico says, and does not finish the sentence, and does not need to, because the whole table has now been told that I raised a baby from fourteen without one word of it coming out of my mouth.
I have never in my life been so efficiently handled.
"You're very good at this," I say.
And Teresa D'Amico, who is sixty-three and has sat at that table for eleven years and buried a husband to get the seat, looks at me for a second and then laughs, properly, out loud, into her napkin.
"Oh," she says. "Oh, I like you."
"You'd have liked me anyway."
"Yes," she says, "but now I've said it in front of them."
Nunzio Ferraro talks for the whole of the second course.
He talks about a building in Mount Vernon and a permit and a man called Sonny, and the entire time he is talking he is looking at the old man at the head of the table, and he laughs at the ends of his own sentences to give Vincenzo somewhere to join in.
And then he turns it on me.
"Marchetti's wife," he says, down the table. "I knew your father."
The room does something.
It is small. If you have not worked a room you would miss it. Rocco Agnelli, who has not looked at me once in an hour and ten minutes, looks at me. Teresa D'Amico's hand goes still on the stem of her glass.
Five seats away on the diagonal, my husband does not move at all, and that is the loudest thing that happens.
"You did," I say.
"Cosimo. Good man. Terrible luck."
"He's had some, yes."
"I'm only saying, these things, a family, it's not the daughter's."
And he is enjoying it, and he wants me to say something about my father at Vincenzo Barone's table, in front of everybody, so that whatever I say can be carried out of this house and repeated.
So I put my fork down.
"Don Ferraro," I say, "my father took four million dollars and change that was not his, over six years, and he put it on my uncle's table on a Thursday night and then he offered them my sister, and then he offered them my brother, who is nine."
Nobody breathes.
"I'm not going to sit at this table and be defended," I say. "It's nice of you. But I served your Thursdays for six years and I know you don't mean it."
There is about one second of nothing.
Then Teresa D'Amico picks up her glass and says, "Well," to nobody, and Rocco Agnelli laughs, a short surprised bark, and puts his hand over his mouth, and the woman called Angela comes in with the meat, and it is over.
Nunzio Ferraro does not look at me again.
Elio Castellano, on my left, who has not said one word for the whole of that exchange, leans back very slightly in his chair.
"Adelina," he says.
That is all. Just the name, quietly, to the table generally, in the tone of a man putting something down carefully on a shelf.
Elio Castellano is exactly what my husband said he would be.
He is forty-one and he is funny and he asks me about the restaurant and he listens to the answers, and he is the only person at that table who asks me a question that is not about my mother, my brother, or my husband.
He asks me what the worst shift I ever worked was.
And I tell him, because it is a genuinely good story, it is the Mother's Day in 2023 when the walk-in went down at eight in the morning, and by the end of it he is laughing and Teresa is leaning in to hear and Rocco Agnelli has put his knife down.
"And what did you do?" Castellano says.
"Called my cousin who has a fish place on Bay Parkway and bought all his ice."
"All of it?"
"All of it. Nine bags. I put it in the tub in the upstairs bathroom and we ran the whole service out of a bathtub."
He puts a hand down on the cloth and laughs.
And I will say this, because it matters later. I liked him.
I liked him for about ninety minutes at that table.
He was the best company in that room by a mile and he did not once look at my hands to work out where I was from, and if you had asked me at four o'clock which of those nine people I would want to sit next to again, I would have said Elio Castellano without thinking about it.
That is the whole trick.
That is what my husband could not explain to me in a kitchen on a Friday and could not explain to me in a car on a service road, because there are no words for it, because he was pleasant is not a warning, and I had to sit there and have a lovely time to understand it.
He looks at me once.
It is during the meat, and I am halfway through the bathtub story, and I look up the table on the diagonal for no reason at all.
He is not eating.
He has a fork in his left hand and he has not put anything on it, and he is sitting with his back to the wall, the way he sits in every room he has ever been in, and he is looking at me and he has clearly been looking at me for some time.
And his face does nothing.
That is the whole of it. There is no expression on it whatsoever, there is nothing anybody at that table could describe afterwards, and I have been married to that man for two weeks and I have seen that face do nothing about four hundred times.
I have never seen it do nothing like that.
It is the look of a man watching a house on fire from a long way off, with his hands in his pockets, because there is nothing he can do about it and he has decided not to run.
Rocco Agnelli laughs at something.
And my husband puts the fork down and turns to Teresa D'Amico and says something about a building in Mount Vernon, and that is it, that is all of it, about two and a half seconds on the diagonal over a plate of veal.
I go back to the bathtub.
I get the end of the story right and I get the laugh, and Elio Castellano puts his hand down on the cloth, and nobody in that room has any idea that anything has happened at all.
Something has happened.
I could not tell you what. I sit in a house on Todt Hill with a fork in my hand and I know, in a place under the arithmetic, that I have just seen the thing he would not say in the car.
At half past three Vincenzo Barone asks me to come and sit with him.
Everybody else goes into the front room with the plastic on the furniture. Salvatore goes with them and does not look at me and I feel him not looking at me the whole way down the hall.
The old man does not get up from the table.
He puts his hand out and I take it, and he takes my other one as well, and he holds both of them in both of his on the cloth, and his hands are freezing, and he is smaller than the man in the photographs on the sideboard by about a third.
"Sit," he says. "There."
I sit.
"You did a good thing to Nunzio," he says.
"I was rude."
"You were not rude. You were accurate, which is much worse, and he will be awake about it at two in the morning.
" His thumb moves on the back of my hand.
"Now. I am going to tell you some things, and I am going to tell them to you kindly, and I want you to hear the kindness because it is real. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good girl."
Here is what Vincenzo Barone tells me, holding both my hands, at half past three on a Sunday afternoon.
That I am not to worry about the business. That there are men who bring it home and it ruins a house, and that Salvatore will never bring it home, because he does not have anywhere in him to bring it to.
That the house at Oyster Bay was a very happy house once. That he was in it in 1997 and Rosaria Marchetti made an amatriciana and would not sit down.
That he sent me a gown.
"You had it, yes? The little gown."
"I didn't."
"Ah," says Vincenzo Barone. "Ah, well. He'll give it to you."
That he would like to be alive for it.
That the child will be baptised at the chapel behind the house, which has not had a baptism in it since Nico Marchetti in 2000, and that when it happens there will be sixty people on that lawn and he wants a photograph.
And then, in the same voice, with the same hands, without any change at all:
"And when we call him, you will let him go."
The clock somewhere behind me does the thing clocks do.
"He is ours," the old man says. "He has been ours since he was seventeen and he will be ours until it is finished, and there will be nights he does not come home, and mornings he comes home with something on him, and one day there will be a week, and you will not ask.
You are a sensible girl and I can see that you have already worked out that you do not ask. "
"Don Barone."
"You let him go," he says, "and he comes back, and that is a marriage in this thing. That is the whole of it. My Carmela did it for fifty-one years and she is at that table today."
I look down at our three hands on the cloth.
"And if I don't?" I say.
Vincenzo Barone pats the back of my hand twice.
"Then he doesn't come back," he says, "and that would be a terrible shame, because he is the only one of them I ever loved."
Elio Castellano walks me to the car at twenty past four.
He does it easily, with his hands in his pockets, talking about the ice in the bathtub, and at the door he opens it for me, and my husband is already behind the wheel with the engine running and both hands up on top of it.
"It was a pleasure," Castellano says. "Genuinely. I laughed twice, which at that table is a year's worth."
"Thank you for the glasses."
"Murano," he says. "Don't use them, they're useless, everything spills."
And then, as I get in, pleasantly, with his hand still on the top of the door:
"Adelina Marchetti."
He says it once.
Then he says it again, quieter, to himself, and shuts the door.