Chapter 9 Who Do You Believe
The first week as manager wore me down more than two months of cleaning. Now everything was mine: the butcher’s bill, the wage sheets, the complaints, the breakfast somebody wanted at ten-forty exactly, and Marco, who read every paper I signed twice, hoping for a mistake.
The hardest part was the language. Vocabulary at night, questions to Chiara, mistakes in front of suppliers and the flush that came with them. Pietro corrected my vowels over his pots without looking up. By the middle of September I was haggling on the phone without hunting for a word.
And one thing no degree taught. An elderly couple from Milan had room seven, and the wife was crying because they’d been promised the lake and their window gave onto the courtyard.
Marco spread his hands. No view rooms free, a booking was a booking.
The Bella Vista was vacating by evening.
I moved them into it, and for the wait I sent up a tray of local cheeses and a note in my own handwriting.
That evening the old woman stopped me in the corridor, took my elbow in both hands and squeezed.
Marco watched from the desk with his lips pressed flat.
By the end of the week even Marco, to the wall past my shoulder, said the good reviews had doubled since July.
From Marco that was a proposal of marriage.
Pietro complained to the whole kitchen that I spoiled the guests, and every morning set the best peach aside for “her old folks.” The house was becoming mine, slowly and for real.
What didn’t change was Brandon. What changed was his tone, now that I wasn’t a wife stranded with sixty euros.
First an envelope, downtown Chicago letterhead, a case number: a petition for dissolution of marriage, Cook County, Illinois, the house and the accounts divided down the page, and between the lines of the lawyer’s cover letter, the plain suggestion that a child’s place was at home, with her father.
Not a word about custody on paper. That he saved for the phone.
He called himself, and the syrup was gone.
A judge would hear about a mother who took his daughter out of the country and wouldn’t bring her back.
In Italy I wasn’t a mom, I was a woman who’d kidnapped a kid.
And what was I now, a hanger-on in somebody else’s country.
“Come home while I’m still asking nicely, Katie.
” I said nothing. When he stopped talking, I hung up.
I told nobody. Not Rosa, and Alessandro least of all.
I carried it around all day, and at night I did the math on what a lawyer costs and whether a lawyer would change one word of it.
Those same weeks Alessandro stopped acting like a guest in his own house.
He stayed when he could have gone. He sat with me at the desk in the dead hours, Romeo asleep between us, and mostly we didn’t talk.
He drove Maddie for gelato. He fixed the things Marco’s list never got to.
Maddie laughed out loud around him, the laugh that never came out in our correct life in Lincoln Park.
It was good and it was unbearable. The closer the two of us got to him, the louder Marco’s autumn got in my head.
The wage sheets went to the bank in town on Wednesdays, by one, when the bank shut for the afternoon.
Marco had carried them for as long as anybody could remember.
That Wednesday Marco had a check-in at noon he wasn’t going to hand to anyone, and he told me so at half past eleven with the folder held out in front of him like something that might drip.
“By one, signora. After one, it’s next week.”
I took the folder. Then I stood in the lobby doing the arithmetic on ferries, and how far the landing was from the square, and what one o’clock meant to a bank that said one.
Alessandro was in the gallery doorway with the car keys already in his hand. Not tossing them. Holding them.
“You drive, or I drive, or Marco misses the check-in.”
“I’m not driving that.”
“Then I am.”
Through the open door the red car sat on its forbidden spot at the foot of the steps, and Maddie was going over the side of it into the back seat, one sandal off, with Chiara’s hands going up behind her.
She was in before I’d said yes. She sat in the middle of the red leather with her hands folded in her lap like a guest at church, and looked straight ahead, in case anybody had ideas about taking her out again.
I got in with the folder on my knees.
The bank was on the square, behind a door that buzzed you in one person at a time, and inside it was cool and marble and smelled like paper.
Alessandro didn’t come in. He sat down on the steps outside with Maddie in the one strip of shade, elbow on his knee, his back to the glass, and got himself out of the way of it.
Two people ahead of me. I read the folder through twice. Marco’s typed sheets, the totals, the column where the bank put its stamp, and on the front page the line where the manager signed, with a second line ruled under it for the owner.
The clerk was a woman my mother’s age with reading glasses on a chain and a cardigan in that heat, because a bank is cold in every country. She took the folder, turned the pages with one finger, and looked at me over the glasses.
“The manager. That’s you?” She said it in Italian, one word at a time, the way you speak to a child or a foreigner, and there was nothing unkind in it.
“Sì. Sono io.”
She turned the front sheet toward me and set her pen on the line.
Then she tapped the line under it, and I got as far as opening my mouth to say the owner was at the villa and I could come back tomorrow.
She’d already looked at her screen. She flicked the pen at the second line as if brushing a crumb off it.
“Only the one. The one’s enough.”
I signed. My name, on the line that said the manager, in my own hand, and the hand was steady, which I hadn’t counted on. She stamped the sheet twice, tore off the copy and slid it back across the marble, and behind me a man cleared his throat, because it was twenty to one and the bank said one.
The second line stayed empty. The stamp had caught the corner of it.
Outside the heat came up off the square like a hand. Maddie saw the folder first.
“Did you win?”
“I signed a paper.”
“Did you win, though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
Alessandro stood up. He looked at the folder under my arm and not at my face, and didn’t ask a thing. He put his sunglasses on.
“The bank closes at one,” he said. “The gelato place doesn’t.”
He’d left the car pointing toward the villa. He turned it the other way.
He drove up out of the town and down into another one, and then off the shore road into streets that got narrower until the mirrors nearly brushed the walls, and parked with two wheels up on a step, which I’d stopped remarking on.
The place had no sign, or none I could read.
A word had been painted over the door so long ago that only the loops of it were left.
A shopfront the width of a garage door, one glass case, three flavors in steel tubs, and an old man behind the glass in a white shirt buttoned to the neck.
He looked at Alessandro and nodded once, as you nod at somebody who was in yesterday.
Three flavors. Maddie went up on her toes with both palms flat on the glass, breathed on it, and pointed at the white one.
Alessandro ordered. A small one for the little lady, in a cup, not a cone, because of the car.
Two of the lemon. Was the lemon today’s.
It was, from this morning. The old man’s hands did the rest without hurry, the paddle into the tub and the tub back under the glass, a paper napkin folded under each.
Alessandro paid out of his pocket, coins, and the old man swept them into the drawer without counting them.
We were in the lane behind the shop, in the shade, Maddie already wearing hers, before it caught up with me. He’d said every bit of that in Italian. I hadn’t reached for one word. I’d stood there and understood it, like a person who lived here.
The lemon was sour enough to make my jaw ache, and I ate it standing against a warm wall, which is a way I had never eaten anything in Lincoln Park.
“Why won’t you say the name of this place?”
He was watching the old man wipe down his paddle through the glass. “Named places get found.”
He took a bite of his cone, an actual bite, like a kid, and chewed it. Then, lightly, in the voice he’d used the first day to order a ristretto:
“First time you’ve signed something that was yours?”
“The ferry timetable changes on the first,” I said. “Marco needs to put the new one out at the desk. Half the house is still walking around with the summer one.”
He looked at me over the cone. Then he nodded, as if I’d answered him, and let it lie there.
Maddie made it about as far as the shore road.
She went over sideways against the door with the empty cup still in her fist and the last of the white one drying on her chin.
The car went quiet then, the quiet a car only gets with a sleeping child in it, the engine under us and the lake sliding by on the right, gray-blue and full of light.
I kept my eyes on the windshield.
“The bank wanted a second signature,” I said. “There was a line for it. She didn’t need it.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t turn his head. He drove, one hand on the wheel, elbow on the door, and what he didn’t say was exactly the size of what I had, and not a word bigger.
The folder was on my knees with the copy in it. I didn’t open it. Under my name the second line was ruled and empty, with the corner of a stamp across it, and I could see it with my eyes on the road. Behind us Maddie slept with her mouth open.
One evening at the end of that week I found him not in the bar and not behind the wheel but in the courtyard, bent over a shutter that had dried and warped, a hand plane in his fist. Sleeves rolled to the elbow.
A pale curl of wood stuck to his cheekbone, hair down on his forehead.
Of everything I’d seen him do, this fit Rosa’s playboy least.
I meant to walk past. I stopped instead, arms crossed, and watched the thin ribbon come up off the blade.
“I didn’t know heirs could work with their hands.”
He didn’t look up. He ran a palm down the wood, checking it. “You figured a steering wheel was the only thing I knew how to turn?”
“That’s roughly how you were described to me.”
“My grandmother enjoys drama.” He looked up then, and the mockery wasn’t there.
“Grandpa taught me this. Every summer of my childhood, at his elbow. He was the one person who didn’t expect a trick out of me.
Never once called me the prodigal grandson.
He just handed me a hammer.” The plane stopped.
“He’s been gone a long time. Two summers ago I came for a week and looked around.
Nonna on her own, the roof going. I left anyway.
This time I couldn’t drop it and drive off the way my parents did.
Even if everybody’s just waiting for me to finally go. ”
Maddie came tearing out of the house, barefoot on the warm stones, Romeo under one arm and the wooden horse in pieces in her other fist.
“Alex. You have to fix my horse too. You’re already fixing.”
He set the plane down, sat her on the upturned crate beside him, and put the pieces in her palms. Then he showed her how the legs went into the body, patient and serious about it, as if nothing in the world mattered more.
His big hand steered her small fingers. Something I’d kept on a short rope all summer pulled, hard, and the rope gave a little.
The horse stood. Maddie ran off with it to find Chiara, and the courtyard went very quiet. He straightened up and stepped in close, and with his thumb he took a shaving off my cheek. One quick touch, and I hadn’t even known it was there. My breathing lost its place. He didn’t step back.
“Kate,” he said.
He’d never called me that. Not Katherine, not the pepper.
“What if I don’t leave.”
That scared me more than anything he’d said all summer. Flirting I could return. This had no peperoncino in it and no tease, nothing for me to bat away. I’d spent the summer making sure nobody fooled me twice. I’d forgotten how you go about believing anybody.
“I don’t know,” I said. And I left first, across the stones, before a different answer could come out of me.