Chapter 12 The Empty Chair
Christmas Eve we ate in Pietro’s kitchen, because the dining room had been under sheets since October and five people weren’t worth taking them off for.
Rosa came down in pearls anyway. Pearls, a gray wool dress in place of the linen, the one ring, for a table with a knife scar down the middle of it and a stove ticking at her back.
She looked at the stove and then at Pietro, and Pietro turned around and went back to being insulted by the fish.
He’d been cooking for five since noon and had told each of us, one at a time, that five wasn’t a number.
Eighty he could cook for. Five he had to think about.
Chiara put the bread in a basket and got her hand waved off the pan.
Maddie sat on the bench with the wooden flute from the market, and the terms had been agreed on the stairs: she could play until the fish came out of the oven, and not after.
Romeo was under the table where the heat came off the oven door, and where anything that fell was his by law.
Rosa set the table herself. In six months I’d watched her run a full house without picking up a fork, and now she took the plates out of the dresser one at a time and laid them down like dealing cards.
I stood there holding the napkins and let her, because you didn’t take a thing out of Rosa’s hands.
Six plates. Six glasses. I put down five napkins and stood at the end of the bench with the last one in my hand, and then I folded it in thirds like the rest and set it down, because the plate was already there.
Nobody said six. Pietro looked at the last plate and looked back at his pan. Chiara counted the glasses with her eyes and stopped at the one on the end and didn’t finish the count.
Maddie climbed onto the bench and rested her chin on the wood.
“Whose chair is that?”
“Nobody’s yet,” Rosa said.
“Then Romeo can have it.”
Rosa gave that the look she gave a booking, and nodded once. Maddie got down and hauled the cat out from under the table by the middle and put him on the sixth chair. He stood on the seat and looked at the plate, and at Pietro’s back, and lay down. Nobody moved him.
Her children had called from Milan at noon and were done by ten past, Rosa said, turning the ring once, and that was all the table got about them.
Then my phone went in my pocket, and the number was Berwyn.
My mother’s break, ten minutes on the clock at the Jewel, the middle of a workday for her and dark on the lake for us.
I took it out into the hall. That was Rosa’s rule for phones.
She’d never said it out loud, she got up and went, and you learned.
The hall was cold, stone underfoot, one lamp on at the desk at the far end and no cat on the wood under it for once.
“Hi, Mom. Merry Christmas.”
“No, Mom. No.”
“He isn’t.”
“I have a job.”
“Yes, a real one. At a hotel.”
Hotel. I didn’t say manager. Manager needed the desk under it and the keys Rosa had pushed across the wood at me, and none of that fit down a phone line into a break room in Berwyn. Hotel she could hear. Hotel she’d already made up her mind about.
“She’s good. She’s really good, Mom. She said buon Natale to the cat this morning.”
Honey, my mother said. It had been honey since I was born, honey through the wedding and the four years after it, and it was honey now, and I held the phone an inch off my ear for it.
“I can’t come home for it, Mom. Not this year.”
She asked why. She had six minutes left and she spent one of them on why.
I looked at the lamp on the desk and said something about the covers on the furniture and a house you can’t leave in winter, and she let me.
The real reason was in my hand. The same phone rang once a week with a Chicago number on it and a different voice, and nobody in the kitchen behind me knew that, and nobody in Berwyn was going to.
“Merry Christmas, Mom. Yeah. Eat something on your break.”
I stood in the hall a minute with the phone against my sternum. Then I went back in with my face where it belonged.
Rosa’s phone went while Pietro was lifting the fish out of the oven. Everybody heard it. It was by her plate and she let it ring once, then picked it up and went out into the same hall, and the door swung to behind her and didn’t catch.
“Buon Natale, Alex.”
Then Italian. Low, and not long. I couldn’t have said what, and I didn’t try.
Maddie had the flute at her mouth and stopped, because she knew that name.
She looked at me, and I shook my head, and she put the flute down on the bench without being told, which she never did.
Pietro slid the fish onto the board. Chiara brought the bread over and set it exactly in the middle.
Out in the hall the words ran three or four sentences and stopped, and the door opened, and Rosa came back in and sat down and put the phone back where it had been.
Nobody asked. Chiara opened her mouth and shut it, and I passed Rosa the bread.
Pietro carved standing, the knife going in along the spine without looking for it.
A whole fish, braised, the skin blistered dark and the flesh coming away white.
He put a piece on Rosa’s plate first and Maddie’s second, and the sixth plate got nothing, and then he grunted at his own fish, which in that kitchen was grace.
We ate. It was very good, and nobody said so, because at Pietro’s table you didn’t.
The flute was supposed to be over. Maddie picked it up anyway with fish still on her plate and blew the two notes she owned, and then a third that wasn’t one.
Pietro didn’t turn around. Rosa cut her fish into squares.
Chiara hummed under it, a note off. Nobody stopped her, and I didn’t either, and the two notes went around the kitchen and out into the cold hall and came back.
Romeo slept through all of it, on the chair nobody had set for him.
Alessandro
The rain on the tin roof had one note and held it.
It had held it since eight, when he’d rolled the car in, and the shop had the smell every shop on the edge of Milan had in February, wet concrete and old oil.
Under the roll-up door the water had come in as far as it liked and stopped in a line.
The shop belonged to a friend who wasn’t there.
The mechanic who was had looked at the red car, then at the jacket, and pointed at the jack.
The jacket hung on a nail now with somebody else’s coveralls, and nobody had said anything about that either.
Now the car sat with its nose in the air, and the front wheel stood against the wall where he’d rolled it. He was on his back on a flattened box with the cold coming up through the cardboard, and the lower caliper bolt was the kind that wanted the long wrench and both hands.
From the bench, without turning around, the mechanic said there were men in this city a person could pay to do that.
“I know.”
He’d known when he drove in. He’d known when he asked for a corner and not a bay.
The mechanic had given him the box and gone back to somebody’s van, a white one with the panel off and its guts on a sheet.
Every so often he turned the radio up, so a man with a car like that could work on his own brakes in private.
He was gray at the temples and chewed the end of a pencil while he worked.
He’d given the car one long look when it came in and none since.
The bolt gave. He set it on the concrete where his hand would find it and went for the top one, and his hand was on the top one before he’d chosen it.
Then the pins. Then the worn pads, out, and the wrench back on the floor between each, handle toward him, the same place every time.
Nobody had told him the order. Nobody had ever told him the order.
Every summer of his childhood he’d handed things up in a yard on the lake to a hand that came down for them, and the hand had come down in this order, and now his did.
He lay under the car and watched them do it.
The phone went on the bench. He lay through two rings of it with grease to the wrist. Then he came out on his elbows and stood and looked at the screen.
Nonna. He took the rag off the fender and wiped his hands first, the palms and then between the fingers, and did it again, and it took the time it took. He picked up on the sixth ring.
“The American still says the oil’s bitter,” Rosa said. No hello. She didn’t ask where he was. She’d never asked him where he was, not in Monaco, not anywhere, and she didn’t now.
“It’s the sweetest on the lake.”
“I told her that. She’s got a year to learn better.” A cup went down on a saucer at her end. The terrace, then, in February, in a coat. “We had a storm off the mountains in January. The north corner did what it does.”
His eyes shut on their own. “How bad.”
“The American had the bucket under it before the plaster knew.”
He looked at the car with its wheel off. “I’d have re-laid that corner years ago if anybody had let me.”
“Nobody’s stopping you.”
The rain kept its note. The mechanic had the radio down now.
“It’s February, Alex.”
“I know what month it is.”
“Do you.”
The line went to nothing. Rosa always hung up first. She’d hung up first on him his whole life, and he’d never gotten there ahead of her.
He stood there with the wrench. He hadn’t put it down to answer. It had been in his other hand the whole call, and there was a mark of it across his palm.
“Your grandmother?” The mechanic still had his head in the van.
“My grandmother.”
“She sounds like she owns the place.”
“She does.”