Chapter 16 Sir
Monday Brandon came down to breakfast at nine, which was late for the terrace and early for him.
The linen shirt hadn’t met an iron. It had come out of a suitcase and gone onto him, and the fold lines ran across his chest in a grid.
Four years I’d stood at a board every night with a spray bottle so that never happened.
Somebody in Chicago had stopped doing it, or he’d stopped asking.
Julie had her sunglasses on already and kept them on at the table.
Behind them the lake was doing its blue, the deep flat one it did before ten, and neither of them turned around for it.
They took the table by the rail. Three other tables were full, a family with a stroller and two old men with one newspaper between them, and Chiara had all of them. I stood at the gallery door with the reservations book open, the whole terrace in front of me, and looked busy.
Pietro’s eggs came the way they came every morning, soft, the yolk going into the toast. Brandon looked at them and laid his fork down beside the plate.
“No. Take these back.” He didn’t look up at Chiara.
“I said scrambled. Dry. This is what they do over here, they hear what they want and bring what they’ve got, and then somehow it’s on you for not being clear.
Tell him dry. And real coffee, not this.
” He pushed the cup an inch with one finger.
A cappuccino, the foam still standing on it.
Chiara took the plate. She looked at me over it, and I tipped my head at the bar. Whatever Pietro had to say about dry eggs, he could say it to his pans.
She brought him the ristretto, the small thick white cup with a mouthful in the bottom, the one Alex had asked for on his first day in the yard, and there was nothing of mine in it.
It was the bar’s coffee. Anybody at Camelia who asked for real coffee got that cup.
He drank it in one swallow and set it down and had nothing to say about it, and from Brandon nothing was the review.
He snapped his fingers for the water.
Chiara was in the kitchen with the eggs and Marco was at the desk, so it was me or nobody, and I’d rather it was me. I took the jug off the side table and came over and poured. His glass, then hers, and not a drop on the cloth. A year of jugs will teach you where the lip stops.
“Katie.” He watched the water go in. “Still got the touch.”
“The ferry leaves at ten past, sir. If you want the town.”
“We don’t want the town,” Julie said, to the lake.
I set the jug down inside his reach and turned for the door, and Romeo was on the terrace wall.
He’d been there a while, paws folded under, eyes half shut against the sun, a fat orange cat with an opinion.
Brandon flicked his napkin at him. A snap of linen, the kind you give a fly.
Romeo opened his eyes the rest of the way and looked at him.
It was the look he gave everybody who wasn’t Maddie or Alex, the one that took you in and filed you under nothing in particular. He didn’t move an inch of himself.
“Cat’s got an attitude.”
“He came with the house.”
I went back to the door and the book. The eggs came out dry, and he ate them, and Julie pulled a roll apart and ate the middle and left the crust on the cloth.
Marco was at my elbow before the plates were cleared, hands behind his back as he stood at the desk. He spoke to the terrace, not to me.
“Signora. The gentleman in the Bella Vista asked whether the desk girl was always this slow. I told him the desk girl was the best on the lake.”
“Marco.”
“As you say, signora.”
He went back to the desk. In the storm, over Signor Ferretti’s shoulder, he’d given me a nod against his will, and from Marco I’d taken it for the whole distance. It had been a quarter turn. This was the other three quarters, said to Brandon instead of to me, and reported to the terrace.
They got up when the table was done. He left the napkin on the plate.
At the gallery door, going in, he stopped beside me and let his eyes go down me and back up, the way he’d checked a car he was thinking of buying.
Then he said it to Julie, in the voice he used for staff, which was the voice he used for everything.
“Forgot how she looks in the morning.”
“Bran,” Julie said.
The family with the stroller got it too, and the two old men, who’d both gone quiet behind the one newspaper. I put it where I put things and wrote the eggs on the kitchen sheet. Scrambled, dry, Bella Vista, and underlined it, so Pietro would have something to be insulted by.
My phone was going on the desk when I got to the office and shut the door. Chiara’s sister’s number.
“Mom.” Four years old and already the voice of a woman with a complaint. “Romeo’s not here.”
“No, baby. He’s minding the desk.”
“Is it a holiday for him too?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Can I come home Thursday?”
“Friday.”
I had a reason. It was Thursday, and there wasn’t a word of it that would go down a phone line to a four-year-old.
“Why Friday?”
Alessandro
The storm had taken its time saying what it had done.
The awning over the dining terrace held through the Ferrettis’ night and the rain, and then on Sunday morning a gust off the lake lifted the canvas once, like shaking out a sheet, and the bracket at the house end came off the wall with two of its four bolts still in it.
He put the ladder up Monday after lunch, when the tables were cleared and the terrace had gone over to the wasps.
The house had one ladder. The old holes were finished. He’d drilled new ones a hand to the left, and the stone dust was down both forearms and in the folds of his rolled sleeves. Two bolts in. Two to go. Between bolts the wrench rode in his back pocket.
One table below him hadn’t been cleared, because somebody was still at it.
The polished man from the Bella Vista sat with his chair pushed back, in a linen shirt nobody had ironed, and his phone lay face-down on the white cloth by his hand.
Every so often the hand went to it and rested there and came away.
From the top of a ladder a man was mostly the top of his head, and this one hadn’t looked up yet.
“Hey. Ladder guy.”
He set the third bolt in its hole and got the wrench on it.
“You speak English?”
“Some.”
“The girl at the desk.” The man didn’t raise his voice. There was nobody on the terrace to hear him but the help. “The American. Katie.”
“I know who.”
“She’s my wife.”
The man said wife and left it on the cloth beside the phone, and looked up the ladder to see where it went. The wrench went a quarter turn and stopped. Then it went again. The man below had seen the stop, and he’d been watching for it, and he sat back an inch, a man whose coffee had arrived.
He turned his glass by the stem. There was nothing in it.
“I’ll tell you something, ladder guy, since you’re up there anyway.
She always did have a knack for this. Keeping a place nice for a man.
Dinner on the table, the shirts done, the whole thing.
She’s got it, and look. Look at this place.
” The hand came off the glass and went around the terrace, the cloths, the brass rail along the water, the lake going blue behind it, as if he’d called down that morning and ordered the lot and it had come up on a tray.
“That’s her. Some women know how to make a man comfortable and some don’t, and you can’t teach it. ”
He worked the bolt. He’d said a thing like it himself once, in this yard, beside his car, to a woman holding a jug. Grandma’s taste in servants. He’d thought it was funny, and she hadn’t, and a year later the word was up a ladder with him and he was the one holding it.
“Bran. Leave the help alone.”
That came from the far end of the terrace, past where the canvas reached, where the woman lay on a lounger with her sunglasses on and one knee up. She hadn’t lifted her head to say it.
“We’re talking.” But he stood, and his hand came out of his pocket with money, and he went through it one bill at a time with his thumb, reading each one, like cash counted into a driver’s palm. He took one out. He folded it once more and set it on the third step of the ladder, and patted it there.
“For the trouble.”
Under the cloth the phone lit, a square of light through the linen, and he had it against his ear before it could ring twice, and was through the door into the gallery before he said a word into it.
The fourth bolt went in. He ran the wrench around until it stopped and a quarter turn past, then took the bracket in both hands and hung his weight off it, and it held. He took hold of the canvas and pulled, and the awning took that too.
Wife. He’d stood in the dining room doorway last night and watched her cross that floor to the man three times.
The third time he’d snapped his fingers, and she’d gone to the snap.
A year he’d waited for her to have a word for what she wanted.
The man had one, and he’d said it to a stranger on a Monday afternoon without dropping his voice, and it had sat on the cloth as if the cloth were his.
The desk was thirty steps away, through the gallery and across the hall. He could go and ask her what the word was worth. He had a bracket to check and a ladder to bring down, and a man could believe the worst of anybody with a wrench in his hand and never once have to put it down.
He came down and took the long step from the fourth rung to the second, and left the ladder where it stood.
Marco could put the bill on the Bella Vista’s account with the rest. He wiped his hands down his trousers and went in the other way, along the water.
Behind him the terrace had the wasps at the one uncleared table, and the ladder against the wall, and on its third step the folded bill.
Kate