Chapter 8 The Keys
Marco went home at eleven. He said it every night the same way, from the gallery door with his jacket already on: the late arrival was in the book, the room was made up, the key was in the drawer.
Then he said good night in the direction of the desk and the door shut behind him, and the house was mine until the car came.
A week after the kitten, the car was from Malpensa.
Two guests, one night, a room on the second floor.
The flight had landed at ten. The arrivals sheet lay under the desk lamp with the time written in Marco’s hand, and under my own hand lay Chiara’s scrap, ten words for the day torn off the corner of a menu.
Il mestolo. La padella. Lo strofinaccio.
The ladle, the pan, the dish towel. I’d said them to the empty hall twice already.
Romeo slept on the desk at my elbow, all of him in the lamplight, with his tail laid over the little brass bell so nobody could ring it.
The gallery door opened at half past eleven. Not the bar door. The gallery, from the terrace side, and the walk was his before the lamp got to him.
“The car from the airport’s an hour out,” Alessandro said. “Traffic at the tunnel.” He set his phone on the desk. “I called the driver.”
He’d called the driver. I had the desk and the sheet and the number, and the heir had taken out his phone on the terrace and asked. I let that go by.
He didn’t sit. He stood on the guest side of the desk with his hands in his pockets, read the sheet upside down, looked at the lamp, looked at the cat. Then he pulled the chair around from the wall and sat.
Romeo opened one eye for him and shut it again.
He looked at the scrap under my fingers. He turned his head to read it and didn’t reach for it.
“Chiara’s teaching you the words for a kitchen.”
“She works in one.”
“You need the words for a desk.” He took a pen out of the cup and wrote three words under Chiara’s ten, in capitals, for somebody who couldn’t read his hand. La caparra. La ricevuta. La disdetta. “The deposit. The receipt. The cancellation. Say them.”
I said them.
“Caparra.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Romeo. “The a’s are open. You’re closing them. Caparra.”
“Caparra.”
“Better.”
“Pietro does that,” I said. “Corrects me without looking up. Like the pots are the ones who need to hear it.”
He grunted. Pietro’s exactly, out of that face and that linen, and I laughed.
Out loud, in a sleeping house, and my hand went over my mouth to hold the rest of it in.
My shoulders wouldn’t stop. He didn’t grin back like a man who’s landed one.
He watched it happen, as he’d watched the kitten make up its mind about his palm, and said nothing.
Then he got up and went behind the bar. He didn’t turn the big light on.
The grinder, then the hiss, then the grinder again.
He came back with two cups, one of them the small one, the ristretto, thick white china with a mouthful of coffee in the bottom and the brown foam on it standing up.
He set that one in front of me, on the arrivals sheet, right on the time in Marco’s hand.
“Not the pale water.”
“The coffee’s for guests,” I said.
“You’re not one.”
My words. From the forecourt, from the bottom of the steps with the jug still on the table behind me, in the same order and with the same stop at the end. He drank his own standing, in two swallows, and rinsed it, and came back to the chair.
I drank mine. It was bitter and hot and there was nothing pale about it, and it was gone in three swallows, and I wanted another and didn’t say so.
The car came at half past twelve. Headlights across the forecourt, and then the trunk lid going up.
A couple in their sixties, the wife in a traveling coat too warm for August with the collar turned up anyway, the husband with the passports out before he was through the door, like a man who’d been made to wait at desks.
Two suitcases and a garment bag. Romeo didn’t move for any of it.
I stood. Buonasera. Benvenuti. The husband gave me the surname and I found it on the sheet, and then he asked something with colazione in it and a time, and I had to go and get the words one at a time from wherever they were kept.
Breakfast. Seven to ten. On the terrace, or in the room if you’d rather.
Every sentence was a hallway I had to walk to the end of.
The wife nodded at each one. He signed. I gave him the key.
La ricevuta, I said, and slid the card across, and didn’t look at the man in the chair.
He wasn’t in the chair. He was standing at the foot of the stairs where a porter stands, with the two suitcases already in his hands and the garment bag over his shoulder.
Nobody had asked him. The husband looked at the linen shirt and followed him up.
A door shut on the second floor. Then the stairs again, one man, coming down at the pace of somebody who wasn’t due anywhere.
He sat back down.
“Why are you up,” I said.
“The tunnel’s always bad on a Sunday.” He turned his phone over, looked at nothing on it, turned it back. “Everybody comes home from the lake at once.”
That wasn’t what I’d asked. I let him have it and put the receipt book away.
We sat with the lamp between us, and the cat, and the sheet with a brown ring on the time.
Romeo shifted once in his sleep and his tail slid off the bell, and Alessandro reached over without looking and laid it back, and the cat let him.
He didn’t talk and neither did I, and the not talking went on a while.
At one he stood. “Katherine,” he said, and that was the whole good night. He went up, and his door shut.
I sat with the sheet. Two names, one room, a time in Marco’s hand with a ring of coffee around it.
Chiara’s ten words, and his three in capitals under them.
It came to me late, the way the meaning of a sentence comes when you’ve already left the room.
He hadn’t said it. Not over the coffee, not at the stairs. All night, and not one peperoncino.
I didn’t know what to do with that either. The ristretto cup stood empty on the arrivals sheet, and my hand had come back up over my mouth and was still there.
The heat didn’t break that week. It sat on the lake all day and came into the kitchen at night to sleep. By the time the last plates came back, Pietro had every window open and one burner still going under the stock, because a stock that’s started gets finished, heat or no heat.
He stood at it with his back to the room.
Chiara sat on the end of the counter with a pencil and her scrap of paper, feet on a crate, ten words for me in a column.
Maddie had given up around the second dessert order and slept on two chairs pushed together under the window, Romeo across her feet like a fur stole nobody had asked for. I washed.
Alessandro dried. Nobody had handed him a towel.
He’d come in for water, looked at the stack in the sink and the one pair of hands going at it, taken a towel off the rail, and now he stood at my elbow and put each thing where it lived without asking where that was.
He’d known this kitchen since before he could see over the counter.
“Ten,” Chiara said. “Kitchen words tonight. You wash, I read, you say them back.”
Colander, ladle, the skin on a fish. Salt, which I already had, and burnt. I said each one back over the water and she ticked them, and Pietro’s shoulders told me which vowels I’d missed.
“Peperoncino,” Chiara said. “It means—”
“I know what it means.”
I didn’t. A man leaning on a red car had handed me the word in the forecourt two weeks ago, and I hadn’t looked it up, on purpose, because looking it up would have been giving it something.
Chiara’s pencil hung over the paper. Alessandro dried a wineglass, held it up to the light, and dried the stem again.
The back of his neck was having a wonderful time.
Chiara ticked it off with her angelic face and went on to the next one.
Pietro said one sentence to his pots, in Italian, about the heat and the Milanese who wanted soup in it.
Then he cut the tail off the last fish, the piece with the black edge, put it on a small chipped plate and shoved the plate down the counter without turning around. It stopped in front of Alessandro.
He ate it standing, with his fingers, the towel over his shoulder.
“That plate’s been mine since I was six,” he said. “Whatever came out wrong. The burnt edge, the piece that fell apart in the pan. This fish has never once gone out to a guest with the edge on, and he’s never thrown the edge away either.”
Pietro grunted. In Pietro that was a whole speech, and Alessandro heard all of it and went on eating.
I rinsed a pan. There’d been a six-burner range in Lincoln Park that nobody but me ever lit.
“He liked the risotto on Fridays, at eight, and quiet while he ate it,” I said. “I learned it from a video, afternoons, with Maddie on my hip, until it came out how he liked it. And while it rested I ironed his shirt for the morning and went over the collar twice, so it wouldn’t curl.”
He put the pan away.
“Pietro taught me where to stand, left of the stove, half a step back, so a pan can’t get you,” he said. “And nobody in this kitchen has ever asked me to be anything.”
I didn’t ask what his parents had asked him to be, and he didn’t ask who the collar had been for. Chiara looked from one of us to the other, folded her scrap in half, put it in my apron pocket, and went home.
“Alex.”
Maddie, from the chairs, eyes shut, one word, and gone again under it. Romeo lifted his head at one of the two names he answered to.
Alessandro folded the towel in thirds and hung it on the rail.
He went to the chairs and picked up the cat first, the whole loose weight of him, so I could get my arms under Maddie without a cat coming along.
She was heavier asleep than awake. She got a fist in my shirt and her face into my neck and didn’t wake.
We took the back stairs, the narrow ones, him ahead with the cat and the light switch, me behind with my daughter, the stone still warm through my flats. Nobody said anything. Below us Pietro’s stock went on, and his windows shut one at a time.
At the staff-wing door he stopped and turned. He put Romeo into the crook of my arm, over Maddie’s legs, so I stood there with both of them and no hand for the door. He opened it for me. He didn’t come in.
His steps went back down the stone, one flight, then the next, and I stood in the doorway with the cat in my arms and listened until the kitchen door took them.
By the end of August I was carrying half the household, and I couldn’t have told you which morning that started.
Rosa could. One morning she called me into the office and pushed the keys across the desk.
The heavy ring on the bronze pear, the set nobody but Rosa had ever carried.
It hit the wood with a sound like dropped change.
“The house is yours to run,” she said. “Manager. Papers later. The staff hears it today.”
She said it the way she’d tell me eight were coming Thursday.
The old cold came first, under the breastbone, and my hand backed off the desk. “Rosa, I can’t. I’ve been here two months—”
“Stop asking everybody’s permission to be who you are.
” Her dry palm came down over my hand, the one ring cool on my knuckle.
“Thirty years I’ve had girls in this office.
Some do the shift and go home. With some the house fills up again like it used to, and the guests come back.
You’re the second kind, kiddo. Ask the guests. ”
I walked out with the keys on my belt. The weight at my hip was like a piece of me handed back.
Rosa told the staff that afternoon at reception, the gallery door standing open.
Chiara screamed and hung off my neck. Marco, who had threatened me with the police at that same desk in June, waited her out, then congratulated me the way you pay a parking ticket.
Then, to Rosa, in Italian, as a point of order: a foreigner over the staff, a woman who in June was still washing the floors. He didn’t get to the end of it.
“I washed them well,” I said. Then, in Italian: “I pavimenti li lavavo bene.” A summer’s worth of vocabulary, and I didn’t stumble. “I’ll run this house no worse. Bring me anything about the work. The grudges you can keep.”
He stopped. Behind me somebody grunted, approving. Alessandro stood in the gallery doorway, shoulder on the frame, and filled it.
Marco decided to go. At the threshold he turned, correct to the last button.
“As you say, signora. Only the signorino will tire of playing owner by autumn and be off to his races, as always. And everything goes back to how it was.”
He left. I waited for Alessandro to laugh it off. The smile came, but it cost him, and he stayed quiet a long time. Longer than I wanted.