Chapter 12Caterina
Caterina
Massimo finds me in the corridor outside the blue room with a minute to spare and nothing in his hands.
That is the first thing. Massimo's hands always have something in them, a chip, a cup, a cuff to straighten. Now they hang at his sides and do nothing, and I have spent nine days learning to read this house, and I read that.
"He'll open with the olives," he says. "Give him the blight. Don't reach for the German buyer unless he prices it."
"You told me. Twice."
"I know."
That is the second thing. He knows he told me twice and he is saying it a third time, and the third time is not for me.
I have watched him hand a man his own death in the voice he would use to order coffee. The voice he is using now sits a half-step under that, sanded at the edge, and he does not hear it. I do. I have made a study of him the way he made a study of me, and the study is finished.
"Massimo."
He looks at me.
"I've got it."
His jaw works once. The smallest motion. The kind a man makes swallowing a word instead of saying it.
I file it. The first thing of his I have caught that he did not hand me on purpose.
I put my hand on the door.
The blue sitting room is the color Chiara said it would be, a bruise three days into healing, and I clock the exits before I clock him.
Two doors. One window behind the desk, latch sitting wrong against the sash.
Fireplace lit. Two armchairs, one closer to the hearth than the other, low walnut table between.
He is pouring before I have crossed the rug.
Amaro. Single glass. He sets it on the table in front of his own chair, not mine, and gestures at the chair across the rug. Not the one beside him. The far one.
"Sit."
I sit. Ankle crossed, not knee. I leave my hands on the arms of the chair where he can see them and where I do not have to think about them, which is the same thing.
He takes his own chair. He does not lift the Amaro. The glass sits between us like a third person who hasn't been introduced yet.
"You had a long flight."
"From Rome. Not so long."
"Direct."
"Through Milan."
"Milan." A small smile, a small nod, the small everything of a man who has all morning. "And the olives this year."
So we are doing the olives.
He spends fifteen minutes on them. Not the way a man asks about a girl's family. The way a man pulls a thread to see what comes apart.
The blight in '04, which I give him with the right yield numbers because Massimo drilled them into me at the boathouse table on Wednesday night with a pencil and a scrap of receipt.
The German buyer in '06, which I give him because he opens that question with the price per hectare, which is money, and Massimo said pick the blight if he opens with money but he is not opening with money, he is opening with the buyer who got told no.
I adjust. I give him the cousin. The cousin at Easter '09. The wine on the cloth, the Calabrian sister-in-law's mother, the apology Gemma's father did not make and was not asked to.
He smiles at the cloth. He likes the cloth.
His thumb moves against the glass. Slow. Up and down the same inch.
Fourth question. He asks me about the saint's day at the Agrigento grove, the one with the procession through the lower terraces, and I have this one, Massimo gave me this one twice, San Calogero, the first Sunday in July, the priest who would not bless the press without a donation to the orphanage in Sciacca.
I open my mouth on Calogero and the half-beat catches me on Sciacca. The width of a breath.
The kind of half-beat a woman who grew up on the story would not have, because for her the orphanage is where her aunt's friend's son lived and not a noun she has to fetch from a different shelf.
His thumb stops.
It stops mid-stroke, knuckle still bent, like a needle lifting off a record.
He does not look up at me. He looks at the glass.
He lets his thumb sit there not moving for the count it takes me to finish the sentence about the orphanage and the donation, and the sentence finishes correctly and the thumb still does not move, and that is when I know he has logged it.
He waits for me to know.
He sets the glass down. Not on the coaster. On the wood.
"Your father's firm," he says.
"My father."
"Amato Construction. Two-one-four-five-three Astoria Boulevard West, Astoria, registered '94, renewed '04, due '24."
He does not say Steinway Street, which is the street any New Yorker would say. He says the registered address from the state filing, which is the address a man says who has been reading the state filing.
I do not move my hands off the arms of the chair.
"A peace marriage," he says. He is looking at my hands now, openly, the way another man would look at a face. "Is only peaceful when both families understand what peace costs."
"Costs."
"What it costs. Yes."
He waits. The fire pops once. The strip of cold air from the window at his back lifts the edge of a paper on the desk and sets it down again.
I look at him.
I look at the Amaro he poured for himself and not for me. I look at the chair he put me in, which is the chair across the rug, which is the chair a man puts a woman in when he wants her at a distance he can study. I look at his thumb, back on the glass now, moving again, slower.
I lean forward.
Not far. Two inches. Enough that the firelight changes on my face and he sees it change.
"The Amatos sent their best," I say. "Not their most obedient."
His eyes come up off my hands.
"If the cost of peace is that I sit in a chair across a rug from a man who would like to watch my hands shake, I would like to know the cost is worth the flight."
A beat.
"From Rome."
"From Rome."
He laughs.
Short. One bark of it. Surprised the way a man is surprised when a door he expected to stick opens clean.
The laugh of a man who has not been surprised in a long time and has forgotten what his face does when he is.
It is the worst sound I have heard in this house and it is also, for one second, a real sound, which is worse.
It stops as fast as it started. He picks up the Amaro. He drinks. He does not pour me one.
"Sit a little longer," he says.
"Another minute."
"Another minute."
He talks about the wedding flowers. He talks about whether the priest from Oyster Bay is preferable to the priest from Glen Cove.
He talks about a cousin in Palermo who will not fly.
I answer in the right places. My hands stay on the arms of the chair.
The half-beat on Sciacca is a small animal in the room with us now and we are both pretending not to look at it and we both know exactly where it is sitting.
After the minute he stands.
I stand when he stands. I do not cross my legs at the knee on the way up because I have not crossed them at the knee at any point in the last forty minutes and the muscle memory is set.
He walks me to the door himself, which is a courtesy and not a courtesy, and I let him put his hand at my elbow for the three steps to the threshold because pulling away from it would be the answer to a question he has not asked yet.
At the door I turn back. The way a guest turns back to say a polite thing about the room. I look past him at the chair he was sitting in.
The window is behind it. The latch hangs off the sash on the lake side, the brass tongue not seated, and a folded receipt is wedged in the gap to hold the sash up off the sill.
White paper. CVS receipt, by the strip down the middle. Long. Half-curled from the cold.
The air coming through is the Sound, the November Sound, with the iron in it.
I file the latch. I file the receipt. I file the inch of gap.
"Thank you," I say.
"Welcome to the family."
I do not say anything to that.
I go.
The corridor is empty. The carpet does not give me away.
The stairs do not creak under flats if you keep to the wall side, which I keep to.
I press my thumbnail into my left palm once on the landing, hard enough to leave the half-moon, because the hand needs something to do that is not what it wants to do, which is shake.
He is on the upstairs landing.
Not pacing. Not against the wall. Just standing, in the middle of the runner, hands in his pockets, the way a man stands in a hallway he owns.
He has not been standing there long because his coat is still on and the shoulders are still cold-set.
He has been outside. He came up the back stair while I was coming up the front.
I do not stop walking until I am close enough to speak under my breath.
"Window behind his chair," I say. "Latch is broken. Sash propped up on a folded receipt. CVS, by the strip. Half an inch of gap. Cold air coming through off the Sound. The receipt's been there a while; the paper's curled."
He does not answer.
"He poured himself an Amaro and not me. He put me in the far chair.
He spent fifteen minutes on the olives and he caught me on Sciacca by half a beat.
Then he gave me my father's firm by the registered Astoria address.
He looked at my hands for that part. I gave him the line about the Amatos and he laughed once. Real. He cut it off."
I give it to him in the order I logged it, which is not the order it happened in, but he does not stop me to reorder.
"And the latch," I say again, because the latch is the thing.
He goes still.
Not the still of a man listening. The still of a man who has stopped listening because he is doing something else with what he just heard.
His hands stay in his pockets. His eyes stay on a point on the wall past my shoulder that I do not turn around to look at, because I know what is on that wall, which is nothing, which is the point.
He is placing something. I have watched him do it twice now and I know the shape of it.
He is putting a piece of a thing I cannot see onto a map I have not been shown, and the piece fits, and his face does not change to tell me it fits, and that is how I know.
I wait.
The hall clock at the end of the runner ticks. Once. Twice.
"Caterina."
"Yeah."
"Go to your room. Stay."
"How long."
He does not say.