CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ADELINA
It rains for nine hours on the fifteenth of November and nothing happens all day.
That is not a complaint. I want to put the date down because I have been back to that Saturday about four hundred times since, the way you go back to a photograph, and because there is nothing in it.
Nobody says anything important. Nobody decides anything.
It is a wet Saturday in a big cold house and it is the happiest day of my entire life and I did not know that at the time and there was no way to know it.
There is a leak in the back corridor.
That is how it starts. The gutter over the boot room has gone at the joint and by nine in the morning there is water coming down the inside of the wall by the second window, and Bruna puts a roasting pan under it, the big one, the one for the porchetta, and it makes a noise like a clock.
"That pan's for cooking," I say.
"It is for the water."
"Bruna, it's a nine hundred dollar pan."
"Then the water will be very comfortable," says Bruna.
Matteo is bored by half past ten.
He has done the moon. He has done the encyclopaedia Nico gave him, which is from 1988 and is wrong about fifteen things that he has listed. He has stood at four different windows.
By sixteen he is lying on his back on the hall floor with his feet up on the bottom stair, which is a thing he does, saying, "It's raining," at approximately ninety second intervals to whoever goes past.
"It's raining."
"I know."
"It is raining."
"Matteo."
"I'm not complaining," my brother says to the ceiling. "I'm reporting."
Nico arrives at noon with three bottles and a cake.
The cake is because it is Saint Albert's day, which nobody in this house has ever celebrated and which Nico has looked up on his phone in the car, and he puts it on the kitchen table and announces that Bruna's saint's day is in fact in September and that he is aware of this, and that today we are celebrating a German bishop from 1280 about whom he knows nothing.
Bruna hits him with a dish towel.
He has clearly been waiting for this for about eleven years. He takes the towel off her and hits himself with it twice more, and she says a very long sentence in Sicilian, and he eats a piece of the cake standing up before anybody else has had any.
"Sal in?" he says, with his mouth full.
"He's in the study."
"On a Saturday?"
"He's always in the study."
And Nico Marchetti picks up the whole cake, plate and all, and walks out of the kitchen with it.
We play scopa from one o'clock until twenty past four.
I have not played scopa since I was about fifteen. My mother taught me at that table on Seventy-Fourth Street and she cheated, openly, constantly, as a teaching method, and I have not thought about that in nine years.
Nico deals.
Matteo does not know the rules and learns them in about four minutes, which annoys everybody.
Bruna plays two hands, wins both, and returns to the range with the expression of a woman who has proved something.
And Salvatore, who came out of the study because his brother put a cake on his desk and sat on it, plays scopa very badly for three and a half hours.
He is terrible.
That is the thing I am not prepared for. He is genuinely, catastrophically bad at it, he holds his cards too close and he cannot hide anything and he takes about four times as long as anybody else, and Matteo beats him nine times in a row and is completely merciless about it.
"You did it again."
"I know what I did."
"You did the thing where you take the seven and then you've got nothing."
"Matteo."
"Everybody knows about the seven," my brother says.
At about half past two Frankie comes in to say something to Salvatore about a car and gets dealt into the fourth hand instead and cannot get out of it.
He plays in his coat for forty minutes.
At three Tommaso arrives because he is supposed to be collecting something, and Nico takes his coat off him in the hall, and by ten past he is at the end of the table with his glasses on the top of his head explaining a rule to Matteo with enormous patience and total inaccuracy.
"That's not the rule," Matteo says.
"It is in my family."
"That's not a real thing."
"Everything is a real thing if enough people do it," says Tommaso Greco, "and in my house there are three women who do it, so it is now the rule."
And then Salvatore laughs.
Here is exactly how it happens, because I have been over it.
Matteo has won again. He has won the ninth one and he has got a system now where he does not say anything, he just lays the last card down and then folds his hands and waits, and Salvatore looks at the table for about four seconds and says:
"I'm being hustled by a nine year old."
"You're being beaten," says Matteo.
"Those are the same thing."
"They're not, because hustled means I'm making you lose. You're doing it on your own."
And my husband looks at the cards and then at my brother, and his shoulders go once, and then he laughs.
Out loud. Properly. A short one, three of them, deep, completely unguarded, with his head back.
The house stops.
I am not exaggerating that and I am not making it prettier than it was. Nico's hand goes still halfway to the bottle. Frankie, who has been in this family since he was nineteen, actually turns round in his chair. Tommaso Greco takes his glasses off the top of his head and holds them.
Bruna, at the range, puts down a spoon.
Nobody says anything about it. That is the part. Not one of them says a single word, because there is no version of saying it that does not end it, and every person in that kitchen knows it inside half a second.
Matteo deals again.
Nico picks the bottle back up.
Tommaso puts his glasses on the top of his head and says something wrong about a rule, and the roasting pan in the back corridor goes on doing its clock noise, and the rain keeps going, and that is the whole of it.
Four laughs.
I have been married to that man for three weeks.
At about four o'clock the gutter gives up completely.
You can hear it go. There is a noise at the back of the house like somebody emptying a bucket down a stairwell, and Bruna says something short, and Salvatore puts his cards face down on the table and says, "Right."
"Don't," I say.
"It's a bracket."
"It's raining and it's dark and you are not going up a ladder."
"Adelina, it's a bracket and two screws."
And then, in a voice of enormous authority, from the floor by the stove where he has been lying for nine minutes:
"He'll fall off," says Matteo.
Nobody moves for a second.
"I won't fall off," Salvatore says.
"Everybody thinks that."
He goes up the ladder.
Of course he goes up the ladder. He goes out in the rain in a jacket of Frankie's with a screwdriver, and Nico holds the bottom of the ladder and does a running commentary that is entirely designed to make him laugh and does not work, and Matteo stands in the boot room doorway in his socks with his hands over his mouth.
I stand behind my brother with my hand on his shoulder.
It takes eleven minutes and it is completely undramatic. A man on a ladder in the rain puts two screws in a bracket and comes down again and hands the screwdriver to his brother.
And on the way past me, soaked through, he says, out of the side of his mouth, entirely deadpan:
"Tell the boy I didn't fall off."
"Tell him yourself."
"He'll believe you," Salvatore says.
The pan in the back corridor stops making the clock noise at twenty past four.
Bruna comes and looks at it. She looks at the wall. She takes the roasting pan away and dries the floor with a cloth from her shoulder and takes the cloth away too, and the corridor is just a corridor again.
And for the whole of the rest of that day there is nothing for anybody to fix.
I have never in my life been in a house where there was nothing to fix.
At five Bruna serves the thing she has been doing all day and nobody asked for and there are seven of us at the table.
Frankie tries to leave twice.
Tommaso calls his wife and tells her he is going to be late and I hear him say no, nothing, it's fine, it's a card game, and then I hear him say, quieter, no, he's here, and then, quieter still, no. Like a person.
Matteo falls asleep at the table at ten past seven, sitting up, mid-sentence, which he does.
And Salvatore gets up without a word and picks him up and takes him up the east stairs, and I follow with the inhaler, and we do the shoes and the covers and the pillow, and neither of us speaks, and it is the fourth time we have done it and we are already a machine about it.
On the landing he stops.
"Adelina."
"Yeah."
"Thank you for today."
"I didn't do anything today."
"No," he says. "That's what I'm thanking you for."
Here is the thing that happens at half past nine and that I am going to have to be honest about.
Everybody goes. Nico takes Tommaso's car keys off him and drives him to the station because of the three bottles, which is the single most responsible thing Nico Marchetti has ever done and which he is unbearable about. Frankie goes back to the gate.
Bruna washes up and refuses help and goes to bed.
And I stand in a kitchen at half past nine on a Saturday in November with a roasting pan going in the back corridor and a cake with four pieces gone out of it under a cloth, and I put my hands down on the counter on either side of me.
And I understand that I am happy.
Not content. Not managing. Not fine.
Happy, in a house I was sold into, with a man whose name is on a lane schedule dated my seventeenth birthday, and my brother is asleep upstairs with a machine by the bed that cost more than my mother's funeral, and I have not counted anything since twenty o'clock this morning.
I have not counted anything since eleven o'clock this morning.
I stand at that counter and try to work out when I last went a whole day without counting something and I cannot find one. Not in nine years. Not one single day.
And the thing that comes up through the floor of me is not joy.
It is terror.
Because I know exactly what this is. I have seen it before, once, in a house on Seventy-Fourth Street when I was fourteen years old and my mother was eight months pregnant and my father had been off the drink for six weeks and we all sat down and ate a meal together on a Tuesday for no reason.
Nine days later she was dead.
That is not superstition. I know it is not superstition. But I stand in that kitchen with my hands on the counter and my heart going and I think, very clearly, in my mother's voice:
Don't get used to it.
I go out.
I do not put a coat on and I should have, and it has eased off to the kind of rain that gets you wetter than the real kind, and I go down through the garden in the dark, past the pear tree, because I need to be somewhere with nobody in it.
The heater line is glowing at the bottom of the garden.
And the padlock is hanging open on the hasp.
I stand in front of that door for a long time.
It is not an accident this time. That is what I know, standing there with the rain in my hair.
He did not forget it on a Friday because Tommaso called.
He has been in this house all day, he played cards for three and a half hours, and at some point between five and nine o'clock a man walked down this path in the rain and took a padlock off a door and left it hanging, and went back up to the house, and did not say one word to me about it.
He has left it open.
I put my hand on the door and go in.
Forty-one plants under the lights. The clay pot with the wire round it on the wood at the end where she put it.
And on the shelf over the bench, where I have looked through the glass a hundred times and never once made out what it was, there is a school exercise book with a red cover, and it is the only thing in that entire building that is not a plant.