Chapter 5 Home
For three days Rosa wouldn’t let me touch anything. Meals came, and towels folded in thirds, and every one went on a tab I couldn’t pay. The second morning I reached for a plate. She was there first.
“You’re a guest. Guests rest.”
She went back to her coffee. I sat down.
So I rested. I slept late. Maddie and I sat in the shade of the lemon trees.
Pietro put plates in front of me and walked off, fish with the skin blistered, and I ate all of it.
Our room in the staff wing was plain and light, a bed and a cot, a window on the garden.
Every picture of Italy I’d ever saved, and me in it, washing Maddie’s underwear in the bathroom sink.
The trouble with rest is there’s nothing in it.
For four years I hadn’t had one empty hour: the house, Maddie, his shirts and the collars I went over twice, dinner at eight.
Now my hands had nothing, and Brandon walked into the empty hour and said all his sentences again.
On the third afternoon I came to on a terrace on the far side of the house, holding the rail, with no idea what I’d come for.
“I need work,” I told Rosa. “Anything. Washing, scrubbing, carrying. If I sit one more day I’m going to lose my mind.”
She looked at me over her glasses and let it sit. Then she nodded once, like a woman crossing off something written down three days ago.
“There’s work,” she said. “And you picked your day, kiddo. Just in time.”
Just in time was a wedding. An American one: a bride from the Chicago suburbs, a groom with money, fifty guests flown in, some in the villa’s rooms and the rest in hotels along the shore, and a planner with a name people knew, due in the morning of the wedding to run it, for a fee Rosa said once and didn’t repeat.
I’d asked for anything. That was what anything was.
Saturday morning the planner didn’t come.
A crash on the way to the villa. She was alive, in a hospital in Como, in no state to run anything, and by the time anybody had found her and learned she had nobody to hand the day to, the day had arrived by itself. Fifty guests and nobody in charge.
I was carrying a stack of towels upstairs when the sound came out of the bride’s room, and I looked in without knocking.
She stood in the middle of the rug in a lace robe, hair in curlers, the morning’s makeup down her face in two gray tracks.
She was very young. Her mother was at the window, wailing and shouting into her phone by turns, at the planner’s voicemail, the caterer, whoever picked up.
Two bridesmaids pushed water and tissues at her.
Downstairs the florists stood around crates of peonies, and the staff moved fast and got nowhere.
Their English was fine. What nobody could translate was a mother of the bride screaming at a voicemail.
I never did remember deciding. I set the towels on the dresser, got down in front of her and took her hands. They were ice.
“I’m Kate, I work here. We’re going to take this in order, okay? The wedding’s happening, and it’s going to be perfect. Item one, you stop crying, because past a certain point that face can’t be saved, and we’re about there.”
Maybe it was the voice, a grown woman’s, level, from home. Maybe it was the arithmetic: that face was five hundred euros at least, and I knew what things cost. She hiccupped once more and went quiet.
From there I did what I knew. I had maybe ten words of Italian, but I knew how to talk a frightened small person down off a ledge; the small person usually came up to my hip.
And I knew how to make order out of a mess, because that had been the job for four years: what he wanted, what Maddie needed, every dinner and birthday in between.
One more party. I asked her how she’d pictured the day, wrote it down as a numbered list, and went downstairs.
Downstairs the missing piece was a plan, and a plan only needs a pen.
I drew the seating chart on a sheet of paper: circles for tables, names, arrows, a little table for two up front.
For the florists I pointed: peonies on the tables, hydrangeas up at the arch, the extra out of sight.
Where pointing ran out, Chiara, the best English in the house, turned mine into Italian.
Anything disputed I carried to Rosa, who needed no translation and settled it with a nod or the other thing.
I got a kids’ menu for the three toddlers out of Pietro; he grunted at his pots, and it appeared.
What had been in the planner’s car I replaced from the house.
The arches were the last fight. Two enormous flower arches, and nobody on the lake could build them in half a day. I went back up to tell her.
“Nobody’s going to miss an arch,” I told her. “They’ll miss you, if you walk out there with that face.”
She looked at me a long second. Then the tissues went down on the dresser.
Rosa stayed out of it. She stood at the end of the terrace with her arms folded and watched every move I made, and never said a word. I turned around once and she was there, and I kept going.
It worked. The terrace was peonies end to end.
The candles were in glass, so the wind off the lake couldn’t get at them.
There was a corner of cushions for the kids, so the little ones weren’t hanging off their mothers’ dresses, and in every shaded corner a jug of cold water with lemon in it, which in that heat people went to before the champagne.
Late, when the band had been playing for hours, the bride came looking for me among the staff.
She hugged me, face wet again, and pushed an envelope into my hand. I pushed it back.
“You saved the biggest day of my life,” she said. “Take it, silly.”
I took it.
It was the first money I had ever earned myself.
Maddie had run the kids’ corner all evening, the oldest there, handing out Pietro’s cookies to the three little ones with the gravity of a bank teller, one each, no seconds.
She fell asleep in the cushions with the band still going.
I carried her up. She was heavy and warm and there was cookie in her hair, and she hadn’t been that happy in months, and not because Daddy had bought her something.
For no reason at all. Neither had I. I’d gone the whole day without once thinking about my husband.
It was only after, in the dark, with Maddie breathing on the cot, that it got in. All day I hadn’t let myself think it once: that bride was me, four years ago. Young and happy and dumb enough to think it was for always.
I cried until the window went gray.
Brandon called Sunday morning.
“Katie. Have we made a decision about coming home, or are we still thinking?”
His meeting voice, the one for whoever was late.
I stood at the window with the envelope on the sill and listened.
Yesterday, in the middle of a stranger’s wedding coming apart, I’d been more alive, and more use to somebody, than in four years beside him.
There was nothing at the other end of his sentence to go back to.
He didn’t want me home. He wanted to hear it break, and enjoy it. He didn’t ask about Maddie.
“I asked you a question.”
“Maddie’s fine,” I said, and hung up.
Rosa sent for me in the afternoon, to her own sitting room, window open, and started with no preamble.
“I’ve had this house thirty years,” she said.
“And about as long looking for somebody I could hand it to without standing behind them counting the forks. Staff come and go. What I’ve been looking for is the one person this place turns into home for.
A life’s work, not a summer. My children don’t want a hotel.
My grandson gets the villa when I’m gone, and he doesn’t want to run it.
” She looked me up and down over her glasses.
“I’m not offering you floors to wash. It’s more than that.
Stay, for real. The papers can be sorted; I’ve known the man at the questura since he was in diapers.
The language takes care of itself. I’ll teach you everything I know about this place, the guests, the business, the service.
Not a maid, sweetheart. The lady of the house, in time.
I’m not getting younger, and I won’t hand Camelia to strangers.
What’s waiting for you at home? You told me yourself.
No money, no roof, no work. Here you’d have all three.
And that little girl grows up here, in all this, instead of being passed around like small change between divorced parents.
I’m not offering you a job. I’m offering you a life. ”
I couldn’t answer. Outside the window a guest from last night was laughing on the terrace.
In the yard Maddie was giving Chiara instructions.
In my pocket, one corner against my hip, the envelope from yesterday.
What she’d put on the table wasn’t a handout, or a corner to sleep in out of pity. A future. Mine, if I picked it up.
“I can’t stay,” I said, and the tears came with it, the kind you don’t get a say in, because I was lying to her and to myself. “I don’t know anybody here. I don’t have any money, I don’t have papers, I won’t be able to do it, I’ve never, I can’t even. Who would want me. My own husband doesn’t.”
The rest wasn’t words. Rosa leaned across and put her arms around me, hard.
“You’re not alone anymore, kiddo,” she said into my hair. “I’m going to fight for you. And we’re going to make that stronzo pay. You’ll see.”