CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ADELINA
We do eleven minutes of the Staten Island Expressway without either of us saying anything.
I have my coat on my knees and my shoes off and my feet up on the edge of the seat, which is not how a wife travels back from Todt Hill, and he has not said one word about it.
At the bridge I say:
"What's the gown."
The car does not do anything. He does not look at me and he does not change speed and both his hands stay where they are.
"What gown," he says.
"Salvatore."
"Say what he said."
"He said, you had it, yes, the little gown, and I said I didn't, and he said, ah, well, he'll give it to you." I turn my head and look at him. "So. What's the gown."
He tells me at the toll.
He tells me the whole thing in about ninety seconds with the traffic slowing down and the light going yellow on the dash, and he does not soften one word of it, which I have noticed he never does, which I am starting to understand is the only kindness he knows how to do.
A box. Brown paper. String tied by somebody who knows how.
A christening gown from 1961, Sicilian, cutwork, made by nuns at a place called Monreale, that has had his mother in it and then his wife and then his son.
And a card.
"Say the card."
"Adelina."
"Say the card, Salvatore."
"For the first one," he says. "With the Council's blessing. We will want to see him."
I sit in a car on a bridge with my shoes off.
"When," I say.
"The morning of the wedding. Half past eight."
"Half past eight."
"Two men brought it. One of them was his nephew."
"So you had that in your hands," I say, "two hours before you stood in a chapel and married me."
"Yes."
"And you told Tommaso to put it in a safe and tell me it was glass."
He does not answer that.
He does not answer it because it is exactly what he did and there is no version of it he can say out loud that sounds like anything other than what it is, and I watch a man take a toll receipt out of a machine with two fingers and put it in the door pocket.
"I'm not angry about the gown," I say.
"You're allowed to be."
"I'm not, though. I've been trying to be for four minutes and I can't get there." I put my feet down. "Because I've worked out what it was."
"Adelina."
"It's a receipt," I say. "That's what it is. They sent you a receipt for something they haven't collected yet."
And Salvatore Marchetti, who does not react to anything, takes one hand off the wheel and puts it over his mouth for about two seconds, and then puts it back.
"There's more," I say.
"I know there's more."
"How do you know there's more?"
"Because he had you at that table on your own for eleven minutes," he says, "and Vincenzo Barone does not spend eleven minutes on a person to tell them about a gown."
So I tell him.
I do it properly, in order, the way he does things. That I was not to worry about the business. That there are men who bring it home and it ruins a house and he never will. That the house was happy once and Rosaria made an amatriciana in 1997 and would not sit down.
That there will be sixty people standing on our lawn for it and that he would like a photograph.
And then the last one.
"He said, and when we call him, you will let him go."
The car changes lanes.
It changes lanes in a completely normal way and then it keeps going at sixty-one miles an hour in the middle lane, and my husband says, in a voice I have never heard out of him:
"Say it again."
"Salvatore."
"Say it again exactly."
"And when we call him, you will let him go."
He puts the indicator on.
He comes off at the next exit, which is not our exit, and goes round a roundabout and into the parking lot of a diner that is shut on a Sunday, and he stops the car across three spaces and turns the engine off.
"Say the rest," he says.
"That's the."
"There's a rest. He will have told you what happens if you don't."
And I look at my hands in my lap.
"He said you don't come back," I say.
It is very quiet in a parking lot outside a shut diner on the Staten Island Expressway at ten past five on a Sunday in November.
Salvatore sits with both hands on the top of the wheel.
"Okay," he says, eventually.
"Is it bad?"
"Yes."
"How bad, on a."
"Adelina, I am not going to give you a number," he says, "because if I give you a number you will sit with it, and I have watched you do arithmetic on a kitchen counter and I know exactly what you do with a number at three in the morning."
"Then give me a word."
He is quiet for a moment.
"When," he says.
"What?"
"He said when we call him. Not if." He takes his hands off the wheel.
"Vincenzo Barone has spoken to me in if since I was seventeen years old.
That is the whole arrangement, and it has one word in it, and the word is if.
And on a Sunday afternoon at his own table he said when to a twenty-three year old girl he had known for four hours, holding both of her hands, and he did it because he wanted it carried out of that house and put in front of me. "
"So he wanted me to tell you."
"He knew you would."
"That's."
"That's kindness, actually," Salvatore says. "That is the closest thing to a warning that man has given anybody in forty years, and he had to use my wife to do it, and he will not do it twice."
I do not tell him about Castellano for another nine minutes.
I am not proud of the nine minutes. I sit in a parking lot and I turn it over and I try to work out whether it is a thing at all, whether it is anything, whether a man saying my married name twice at a car door is something you bring to your husband or something you are being ridiculous about.
That is what it does. That is the actual mechanism of it.
It makes you the one deciding not to mention it.
"He said my name twice," I say.
"Who did."
"Castellano. At the car. He said Adelina Marchetti, and then he said it again, quieter, and then he shut the door."
And Salvatore, who did not move when Nunzio Ferraro said my father's name across a table in front of nine people, goes completely still.
"Say that again."
"You keep saying that."
"Say it again, Adelina."
"He said my name. Twice. The second time was to himself."
My husband looks out of the windscreen at a shut diner for a long moment.
Then he says, "Put your shoes on," and starts the engine, and drives us home at a completely legal speed, and does not say another word for forty minutes.
At the house he carries my coat in and hangs it up and says goodnight to me in the hall.
Goodnight.
In the hall, at half past six in the evening, with his own coat still on.
"Salvatore."
"I've got two calls to make."
"It's Sunday."
"Yes," he says, and goes into the study, and shuts the door with both hands so it does not bang.
I go up at half nine.
I lie on top of a bed in a dark room with my hands on my stomach and I do the thing, the counting thing, and I get to sixty and start again and get to sixty and start again.
Matteo gets home from Paola's at eight and goes straight to bed.
At midnight I get up and go along the corridor and down the nine doors, and his room is dark and the bed has not been touched, and the pillow is exactly the way Bruna left it on Thursday.
I go back down the front stairs in bare feet.
The study light is on under the door.
And on the gravel outside, nose out, engine running, a man behind the wheel, is Tommaso Greco's car, and there is a second one behind it that I do not know, and somebody is standing at the bottom of the front steps in the cold, not moving, with his hands one on top of the other.
I stand in my own hall at midnight on a Sunday in a nightdress.
And through the study door, very quietly, in a voice with absolutely nothing in it at all, I hear my husband say:
"Then we do it Tuesday."
I do not open the door.
I go out the front one instead, in bare feet, in a nightdress, onto a stone step in November, which is the single stupidest thing I have ever done and which I would do again.
The man at the bottom of the steps turns round.
He is about fifty and he is wearing a coat and a scarf and he has his hands one on top of the other in front of him, and when he sees who it is he goes about four shades paler and takes his hat off.
"Signora."
"It's freezing."
"Yes, signora."
"Are you going to be out here all night?"
"Yes, signora."
"Have you eaten?"
And the poor man looks at the gravel, and looks at the house, and looks at the gravel again, and says, "I had something at six," which is not an answer, and which I know is not an answer because I have been asking men that question in doorways for six years.
"What's your name."
"Beppe."
"Beppe, come round the kitchen door in ten minutes and don't argue with me about it," I say, "because I'm going to be awake anyway."
Tommaso comes out at twenty past twelve.
He comes down the steps putting his coat on and he sees me sitting on the low wall by the boot room in a coat over a nightdress with a mug in my hands, and he stops dead on the second step.
Then he comes down the rest of them and stands about six feet away and folds his hands.
"Signora."
"Tommaso."
"You should be asleep."
"So should you. You've got a thing in the morning with your daughter."
He looks at me.
"How do you know that," he says.
"You said it at my wedding dinner. You said your youngest had a thing in the morning and that's why you were leaving at nine." I drink the tea. "It's in November, you said it was a term thing."
Tommaso Greco stands on my gravel at twenty past midnight.
And then, slowly, he takes his glasses off.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said anything."
"You take those off when you're about to tell somebody something bad. Bruna told me in week one." My hands are not completely steady on the mug. "Just tell me one thing and then put them back on and go home to your daughter."
"Ask me."
"Is he going to be all right on Tuesday?"
And Tommaso Greco, who has two girls and a minivan and who has never once in his life said a sentence he did not mean to say, stands there with his glasses in his hand for what feels like a very long time.
"That is not the question," he says.
"Then what's the question."
"The question is what he is going to be on Wednesday," Tommaso says, "and whether there will be anybody in that house who can look at it."
He puts his glasses back on.
"Goodnight, signora."
"Tommaso."
"Beppe is coming round your kitchen door in about four minutes," he says, "and if he tells me you fed him I will pretend to be very angry about it."