23. Santino
— ? —
Santino
The old Santino would have handled this quietly.
I know this because I spent the whole flight to Wisteria two months ago cataloging every version of myself I’d burned to the ground.
The old Santino would have made a few cold phone calls from a hotel in Milan, settled it behind closed doors, kept the family name clean, and come home to an empty house wondering why winning felt like losing.
The old Santino was a fucking idiot.
My mother has spent her whole life counting on that instinct, that we hide our ugliness, that we handle things where no one can watch. So I’m going to do the one thing she’ll never forgive.
I’m going to make her answer for it in front of everyone whose opinion she’s ever cared about.
It takes two days and every favor I’ve been saving for a decade.
The Wisteria Inn has exactly eighteen rooms. I book every one of them my mother and Allegra aren’t already sleeping in.
The owner, a woman named Doris who wears reading glasses on a beaded chain and calls everyone “sugar,” looks at my credit card like I’ve handed her a live snake.
“You want all of them,” she says slowly. “For one night.”
“Two nights. And I need your breakfast room tomorrow morning. Early. Private.”
“Sugar, the breakfast room has a community-events corkboard and carpet from 1987.”
“Perfect.”
She squints at me. “You’re that fella who’s been working Hattie’s orchard. The one Mel married.”
“Yes.”
“The one who screwed it all up.”
“Also yes.”
Doris considers this. Then she takes my card. “Breakfast starts at six. Coffee’s strong and the biscuits are fresh. Don’t you dare bring any drama into my establishment.”
I don’t have the heart to tell her what’s coming.
***
They come the next morning, a caravan of black SUVs from the airstrip forty minutes out, where three chartered jets sit on the tarmac of a town that has never seen one, rolling up the county road with the aunts and uncles and cousins, the family friends, the godparents, the whole old Milan set my mother has spent forty years performing for.
It cost me a sum I didn’t bother to count to put them all in the air on two days’ notice.
Worth every cent. Everyone whose good opinion is the actual currency of her life.
Chiara made every call herself, because Chiara can talk anyone into anything when she’s motivated by spite toward our mother.
And me, standing at the edge of it all in jeans and work boots, because I’ll never dress up for Vittoria Bianchi again.
My father is the last off his plane. He looks at me across twenty feet of Texas dust, and his face gives me nothing, it never has, not once in thirty-two years.
He’s wearing a charcoal suit and his silver cufflinks and the expression of a man who has been summoned to his own execution without knowing who holds the blade.
“Santino.” He stops in front of me. “This is irregular.”
“So is buying the mortgage on a seventy-year-old widow’s farm to threaten your grandchildren.”
His eyes flicker. It might be surprise. It might be the closest thing to shame Massimo Bianchi has ever felt.
“I did not know about the mortgage,” he says quietly.
“But you knew about everything else.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. Two years ago, when Mel vanished, when I tore apart two continents looking for her, when I told him what his wife had done, he looked at me from behind his desk and called my marriage a business arrangement. He let his wife lie. He let me break.
It should be harder to look at him. But he called me, two days ago, before his wife could land, warned me, told me to do this where he could see it. So I did. That’s the only reason he’s standing on this tarmac instead of reading about it in the papers.
“You called,” I say. It isn’t quite forgiveness. It isn’t quite anything. “So you get to stand in the room this time, instead of hiding in your study while it happens.”
His face moves. He inclines his head, once.
“Tomorrow morning,” I tell him. “The inn. Six o’clock. Don’t be late.”
***
I spend the night in Doris’s best room, a hand-stitched quilt with ducks on it, a bathroom so small I have to turn sideways to reach the shower, on the phone with Chiara while Mel puts the twins to bed at the farmhouse.
“She’s going to lose her mind,” Chiara says, and there’s vicious satisfaction in her voice. “Walking down for breakfast in her robe and seeing every face she’s ever tried to impress. Oh, Santi. I wish I could see it.”
“You could be here.”
“No. This is yours. Yours and Mel’s.” She pauses. “You’re sure about saying it out loud? In front of all of them?”
“I promised her no more hidden truths.”
“That’s not the same as standing in front of everyone who raised you and admitting you failed your wife.”
“Yes it is.” I rub my eyes. The clock reads 2:47 a.m. “They all saw me ignore her, Chiara. For years. They watched me let our mother carve her up at that dinner table and said nothing, and I said nothing, and they all decided that was fine. If I’m going to be a better man, they should have to watch that part too. ”
My sister is quiet for a moment. Then: “She’s lucky. Mel. She doesn’t know how lucky she is.”
“I’m the lucky one.”
“God, you’re disgusting. I love it. Ruin our mother for me.”
“With pleasure.”
***
6 a.m.
The breakfast room of the Wisteria Inn smells like coffee and fresh biscuits and the particular mustiness of carpet that has survived four decades of spilled orange juice.
The community-events corkboard features a flyer for a church bake sale and a missing-cat poster that’s been there so long the paper has yellowed.
The whole family sits at pushed-together tables, coffee cups in hand, aunts and uncles and cousins, my godfather, the friends my mother has hosted and flattered and needed for forty years, all of them crammed under a corkboard advertising the Annual Chili Cook-Off, looking as out of place as swans in a barn.
My father sits at the head of the longest table, hands folded, face carved from granite.
And Mel stands beside me in jeans and a soft blue sweater, her red hair braided back, looking like she belongs here, because she does. This is her town. These are her terms.
“They’re coming down,” Doris announces from the doorway, arms crossed. “Asked for room service and I told them breakfast was in the common room, same as everyone else. Didn’t mention the everyone else.”
The door swings open.
My mother enters first, silk robe over matching pajamas, hair loose around her shoulders. She’s reaching for her phone, not looking up, and she gets three steps into the room before she freezes.
Allegra walks into her back.
“Vittoria, what-”
And then Allegra sees it too.
Every person whose respect my mother has ever hoarded, the entire audience she performs for, the only mirror she’s ever looked into, seated at plastic-covered tables in a Texas diner, staring at the two of them in a silence like a closing door.
“Please,” I say. “Sit. There are some things this family is going to hear.”
***
“This is absurd.” My mother recovers first, she always does. Her spine straightens, her chin lifts, her voice finds that particular register of aristocratic disdain that used to make me feel six inches tall. “Whatever theatrical nonsense this is, Santino, it’s beneath all of us. I demand-”
“You’re not in a position to demand anything.” I pull out a chair. “Sit down.”
“I will not-”
“Sit. Down.”
The room is very quiet. My mother looks at my father, waiting for him to intervene, to restore order, to do what he’s always done and choose the Bianchi name over everything else.
Massimo Bianchi says nothing.
Slowly, like a woman approaching her own gallows, my mother sits.
Allegra follows. Her face is pale, her hands clasped in her lap, and she keeps glancing between me and Mel with a look that keeps changing. Calculation, maybe. Fear. The beginning of desperation.
“Two years ago,” I begin, and my voice is steady in a way I don’t feel, “my wife was handed divorce papers with my signature on them. I never signed them. I never wanted a divorce. My mother forged my name to drive Mel out of my life.”
I hold the papers up so the whole room can see them. Beside them, my real signature. Even from across the tables, the difference is plain enough to hear the intake of breath ripple down the row.
My mother’s face stays perfectly composed.
“She was shown photographs,” I go on. “Photographs of an affair that never happened - me and Allegra, together, in places we were never together, at our lake in Tuscany, a place only this family knew mattered to us. Doctored. Staged. Made to look real enough to break a pregnant woman’s heart.”
Someone mutters in Italian, and it sounds a lot like holy shit.
“And three weeks ago,” I say, “when Mel finally built a life free of all of us, my mother quietly bought the roof over her head. The mortgage on this farm. So she’d have one more way to threaten my wife and my children.”
“That’s a lie,” my mother says flatly. “I had nothing to do with-”
“It’s your name, Mother. Buried under other names, but yours. It always is.” I let that sit. “You taught me how to hide money. You should have remembered I was paying attention.”
For the first time, her composure cracks.
“This is a spectacle,” she hisses. “A grubby little American spectacle, and I will not sit here and-”
“You will be silent.” My father’s voice cuts through the room like a blade. “You will sit there and you will be silent, Vittoria, or I will put you out on that road myself.”
The silence that follows is absolute.
I’ve never heard my father speak to my mother that way. None of us have. Their marriage has always been a performance of unity, two people who share a name and a fortune and nothing else, maintaining the fiction of partnership for the sake of the Bianchi legacy.
The fiction is crumbling.