Chapter 13 Shadow
Alessandro
The first morning it didn’t take a coat, he had the top down before the coffee.
The workshop door was up on its chain and the tin roof was quiet for once, no rain on it, only a pigeon walking.
The car sat where he’d left it the night before.
He had left it nose to the wall. It was nose to the door now, pointed north, and the mechanic stood beside it with one hand on the driver’s door, holding it open the way you hold a door for a man you’re done with.
He hadn’t decided anything. He’d walked in with the keys in his fist and found it decided, by the car and by the mechanic, and he was the last one told.
“Where?” The mechanic kept his hand on the door.
“Como.”
“About time.”
He got in. The mechanic shut the door on him, not hard, and went back to his bench and picked up the thing he’d put down to hold a door. He didn’t wave.
The autostrada ran flat and gray out of the city, trucks in the right lane, the mountains standing up ahead with snow still on them.
Left elbow on the door. At the toll he paid without looking at the ticket.
Where the road came off the plain and started to climb, the air changed, and he waited for it to go cold on his arm the way it had every time since September.
It didn’t. It came over the skin warm. He kept the arm where it was.
The radio was a hand’s reach away and he left it.
Then the shore road, the lake on his right, low and flat and empty of everything but one ferry crossing far up.
The road did what it always did, wall and villa and a gap of water, wall and villa and a gap of water.
He drove it without driving it. The wind pulled his shirt off one shoulder and he let it.
The town with the market came up, and the stalls were out. Market day. He hadn’t counted the days to make it one, and there it was, awnings and crates halfway across the road, so he slowed to a walk because there was no other speed. People turned for the engine first. Then they turned for him.
The woman at the fruit stall had her sleeves pushed to the elbow and both hands in a crate.
Same hands. Brown, split across the knuckles, the ones that had put a peach in the child’s fist last September and closed on nothing when he’d tried to pay for it.
She looked at the car. She looked at him over it.
She said one word, across two stalls and a stack of empty crates.
“Finally.”
His grandmother had said it in the forecourt in July, with both hands on his face. Same word. He nodded to the woman. There was nothing on her stall to hand him, not in March, and she flicked her fingers at him twice, go on, go, and had her hands back in the crate before he’d got the car moving.
Past the town the road narrowed and the wall began, cracked where it had always been cracked.
The last bend. The wall came up close on the right, the cap stones loose in the same places, and over the top of it the olive.
In leaf. Pale at the tips where the new growth was.
He’d asked in July whether it still bore anything, and he’d been gone before it could tell him.
And then the gate. Both halves stood back against the stone, open, as they stood in the season when a car went in or out every ten minutes. Nothing was going in or out. It was open anyway. Somebody had opened it this morning, and somebody would have opened it every morning all winter, for nobody.
Guest parking was outside the gate. A strip of raked gravel under the wall, empty end to end. He’d been told where it was, once, last July, by somebody who’d set down a jug to come and say it.
The strip went by on his right. His foot stayed on the gas.
Kate
Rosa took her coffee on the terrace in any weather short of rain, and that morning she’d left the gloves inside.
The wicker was out with no cushions on it yet.
The wisteria on the white wall had knots along it now, small and gray, the kind you had to be told were going to be flowers.
She had the small pot on the table, and the camel coat open over the wool.
“Sit.”
I sat. She poured. The cup was hot through the china and I kept both hands on it.
“He’s in the courtyard.”
“I know where he is.”
“The shutter on the blue room.”
“Then he’s got work.”
She drank.
“Kiddo.”
“Not yet.”
She looked at the wisteria as she’d looked at the olive in November, deciding when, and left me to my cup.
Marco was at the desk when I came through the lobby, correct to the last button, the ledger squared to the edge of the wood and Romeo asleep on the far end of it.
“The signorino’s car is in its place, signora.”
Its place. He said it so it could be read either way later.
“Guest parking’s outside the gate.”
“I told him.”
“And?”
“He said to ask the manager.”
I left Marco to his ledger and went through the door to the kitchen.
The linen room was across the courtyard from the lobby. Out the side door, forty steps on the stones, in. Since June I’d done it a hundred times a week with my arms full. I went through the kitchen instead.
Pietro had the stock on and three pots going.
He looked up when I came in the wrong door, looked at the keys on my belt, then at the door I was heading for, the one to the gallery, which nobody used to get to the linen room because it went round three sides of the house.
He said nothing to his pots, and he had an opinion for his pots on everything.
The gallery was still cold, the lake-side windows steamed along the bottom edge. The keys knocked at my hip the whole length of it.
The linen-room window gave onto the courtyard.
He had the blue room’s shutter off its hinges and up on two crates, the plane in his hand, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he was working the long edge in slow passes, the shaving coming up pale and curling off the blade. He didn’t look up at the window. He looked at the wood.
That shutter didn’t need fixing. It had dried and warped in August and he’d planed it once and left before it was hung, and in October I’d had a man from town finish it, two days’ work and three days’ bill, and I’d gone round every shutter in the house before the storms and it had shut true.
He’d have known that from the hinges the second he lifted it.
He went on planing. He could make that shutter last till May if he wanted, and it looked like he wanted.
There were the sheets to count. The winter count, everything out of the cupboards and onto the table and back, hems checked, the ones for mending in a pile by the door. I counted. Every so often the plane stopped, and I had the next stack in my hands before it started again.
Maddie was at Chiara’s sister’s until one.
That gave me until one to decide what I’d let her do when Chiara brought her back, whether she went out the side door or came up the stairs to me first, and I folded and counted, and by one I had a number for the pillowcases, forty-one, three to mend, and nothing else.
At one the gate went. Chiara had her by the hand as far as the corner of the house, and then she didn’t.
Maddie ran. Straight across the stones, her bag off one shoulder and bouncing, the way she’d run for the red car all last summer, at a man with his back to her and a plane in his hand.
I stood at the window with a pillowcase in my hands and didn’t call her back.
Alessandro
The plank didn’t need finding. It was the last one on the dock, the one that ran out over the end piling, and he’d had his knees on it in August with his arm around somebody’s middle and his other hand braced on the post. A boat’s wake had come up over the edge and soaked the both of them, and a kitten had hung on to the piling a hand above the lake.
He put his heel on it now. It went down under his weight and came back up slow, the way old wood does when it has already decided.
He got the bar under the near end and leaned.
Two of the nails had rusted to nothing and came out as red dust. The third had been holding the whole board on its own for longer than anyone had asked it to, and it screamed the length of itself coming out.
The plank came away in one piece. Gray on top, sun-gray, the color a dock is supposed to be.
Underneath it was the color of wet bread, and his thumb went into it.
He laid it on the boards behind him and looked down through the gap.
April water, low and clear over the stones, going green and then black at the foot of the piling.
The piling had a line on it where the lake stood in summer.
A hand above the line was where the cat had run out of piling.
He looked at the line for longer than a man needs to look at a piling.
Then he pulled the new board off the sawhorse and laid it in the gap.
He’d cut it that morning up at the boathouse, and it sat proud by the width of a fingernail. He’d take that down after.
Gravel on the path. Marco came down it in the jacket he wore at the desk, with the day’s list on its board against his chest, and he stopped where the gravel stopped and the boards started, as if the dock were a room he hadn’t been shown into. His shoes were the ones for the lobby floor.
“Signorino.” He said it to the back of Alessandro’s head. “You’re still here.”
“Write it on your list.”
Marco didn’t answer that. He looked at the old plank lying gray on the boards.
He looked past it at the gap, and at the water in the gap, and stayed on the water a second longer than the water asked for.
Then he said the boathouse wasn’t on the list. He said it as a point of order, which was how he said everything.
“It is now.”