34. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Tuscany
Zia Carmela gets out of the car in full black with her handbag over her forearm, and her heels go straight into the dirt.
She doesn’t look down at them. That’s the whole woman, in one movement. She’s come to a working vineyard in September in shoes that were never going to survive the walk from the car, and she’ll stand in the mud with her chin up for as long as it takes rather than admit she chose wrong.
Everyone stops working. Nobody is subtle about it. Matteo turns his cap around in his hands and doesn’t move away, and I love him for it.
I put down my shears and start up the row, because this is my mother’s land and I’m not going to be found at the bottom of a hill.
But she isn’t looking at me.
She is looking past my shoulder, at her daughter, and I understand about four seconds too late that she hasn’t driven two hours from Florence for me at all.
“Euridice,” she says. “Get in the car.”
Euridice sets her crate down on the ground very carefully, the way you put down something breakable when your hands aren’t steady.
“No.”
“I’m not going to stand here in front of these people.”
“Then don’t stand there.”
Carmela’s mouth goes thin. She turns her head and takes in the rows, the crates, the sorting table, Simon standing at the end of it with his arms folded, Anthony coming up from the crush pad with his sleeves rolled and stopping dead ten meters off when he sees who it is.
She looks at Anthony for a long moment. Then she decides he isn’t worth the trouble today, which tells me exactly how much trouble she’s come here to make.
“Six weeks,” she says to Euridice. “Six weeks you’ve been out here on this hill. Do you know what I’ve been telling people?”
“I know exactly what you’ve been telling people.”
“That you are visiting. That you are helping your cousin through a difficult time.” She adjusts the bag on her arm.
“I have been protecting you. Nobody at that table knows you have not spoken to me since the courthouse, and nobody needs to know, because you are going to get in this car and come home with me and we are going to let it be true.”
And I stand in the middle of my own vineyard with purple hands and do a piece of arithmetic I should have done months ago.
The courthouse was six weeks ago. But Euridice took me in the night my father was arrested.
She gave me her spare room and she never once asked for it back.
She put the letter in my lap in the car and made me read it.
She stood on those steps and watched her own mother swing, and she stayed.
She has not spent one day on the right side of her family since the morning I lost mine.
Five months. Five months of Euridice giving me her couch and her car and her wine and telling me to stop living in the middle, and not once, not one single time, has she said the words my mother isn’t speaking to me.
I never asked. That’s the part I’m going to have to carry. She’s been beside me every day since my father was arrested and I never once asked her what it was costing her.
“Mamma.” Euridice’s voice has gone very quiet. “Ask me properly.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You haven’t asked me anything. You’ve told me what I’m going to do.” She wipes her hands down her thighs, leaving two purple prints on her jeans. “Ask me properly and I’ll answer you properly.”
Carmela stares at her.
“Come home,” she says.
“And Alessia?”
“Alessia has made her choice.”
“So have I.” Euridice says it without any heat at all, which is what makes it terrible. “She made hers on the steps in front of every camera in New York and I made mine standing next to her. You watched me make it, Mamma. You’ve had six weeks to pretend you didn’t.”
“You don’t know what you’re giving up.”
“I know precisely what I’m giving up. I’ve been giving it up since the morning they took him.
” Her voice finally goes, just slightly, on the last word.
“I’m giving up Christmas. I’m giving up Sofia’s baby.
I’m giving up being the one you telephone.
I’ve done the arithmetic on all of it, every night, for five months, and I keep getting the same answer, and the answer is that she was sitting at that table on her own and nobody else stood up. ”
The wind comes up the hill and moves through the rows and nobody says anything at all.
Then Carmela turns and looks at me.
I watched this woman open my husband’s face on a courthouse step in front of forty cameras, and I’d take that again over what’s on hers now.
“You took my brother,” she says.
“Zia-”
“You took my brother, and now you have taken my daughter, and you are going to stand there in his vineyard with his money under your feet and tell me you are the one who was wronged.”
“It’s my mother’s vineyard,” I say. “And I’d give all of it back tomorrow to have not been the last person in this family to find out what he was.”
Her face does something then. For about a second there is a woman under there, sixty-one years old, who has lost a brother to a prison and a daughter to a hillside and has nobody left to be furious at except a girl she used to buy Easter dresses for.
Then it closes, and she is Zia Carmela again.
“Don’t send me an invitation,” she says.
“Mamma.” Euridice’s voice cuts across the space between them, and there’s something in it I’ve never heard before - not anger, not grief, but something colder.
Something final. “You’re standing in the dirt defending a man who had someone killed.
Uncle Domenico murdered a man and made it look like an accident, and you drove two hours to yell at her. ”
Carmela’s mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“You should be ashamed,” Euridice says. “Not of me. Not of Ally. Of yourself. Of every Sunday you sat at that table and never once asked where the money came from. Of every Mass you attended with blood on the family name and acted like it was holy.” Her voice doesn’t waver.
“I’m your daughter, and I love you, and I’m telling you that you are on the wrong side of this.
You have been on the wrong side of it my whole life.
The only difference is that now there’s a verdict that says so. ”
The silence stretches out between them like something physical.
Carmela’s chin trembles - just once, just barely - and then it steadies.
“Don’t send me an invitation,” she says again, quieter this time.
She walks back to the car with her heels going into the dirt at every step and her spine perfectly straight, and she doesn’t look back at her daughter, not once, not even when the driver shuts the door.
We watch the car go down the drive.
Then Euridice sits down in the dirt between two rows of my grandmother’s vines and puts her face in her hands, and I go down beside her and get my arms around her, and she cries the way people cry when they’ve been holding it for five months in somebody else’s spare room.
“I didn’t ask you,” I say into her hair. “Euri. Five months and I never asked you once.”
“You had enough.”
“Don’t. That is the excuse every single person in this family has used on me my whole life.” I hold on tighter. “You sat on that couch and listened to me cry about a man and you were losing your mother in the next room and you let me have all of it.”
“You’d have done it for me.”
“I want to be someone who does it before she’s asked.”
She laughs, wetly, into my shoulder. Somewhere behind us Matteo has started shouting at people to get back to work, mostly to give us the privacy of noise.
Euridice pulls back and looks at me with her mascara gone and her jaw set, and she takes hold of my wrist the way she did in the town car with the letter in my lap.
“Then do something for me,” she says.
“Anything.”
“Don’t you dare make it worth nothing.”
I go still.
“I gave her up.” Her fingers tighten. “I gave her up on a courthouse step because you were standing on your own and I decided you were worth it. So don’t you spend the next two years waiting to be certain, Ally.
Certainty isn’t coming. Nobody gets it. You either marry that man or you let him go, but you do not get to hover in the doorway of your own life while the rest of us pay for the view. ”
I take my wrist back.
I do it gently, because I love her, and because she has just been left standing in the dirt by her own mother. But I take it back.
“No,” I say.
“Alessia-”
“You don’t get to hand me that bill.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect it to.
“I know what you gave up. I’m going to be paying you back for it for the rest of my life and you’re going to hate every minute of that.
But you don’t get to put what you lost on one side of a scale and my husband on the other and then tell me which way to tip. ”
She stares at me.
“That’s what he did, Euri.”
“That is not fair.”
“It’s completely fair.” I’m crying and my voice is perfectly level, which is a thing I didn’t know a person could do.
“Every single thing that man ever took, he took and then handed me the receipt for it. The houses. The name. The boy he ran off this hill when I was sixteen. ‘I did it all for you, figlia mia.’ I was the reason. I was the reason for thirty years and not one person ever asked me whether I wanted to be.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
“I am not going to marry Anthony Stallone to make your loss add up. If I do it, it will be because of him. Not you. Not my father. Not what the family says at Christmas. Him.”
Euridice looks at me for a long moment with her mascara gone and a streak of purple across her cheekbone.
“Fine,” she says thickly.
“Fine?”
“Fine.” She shoves my shoulder hard enough to rock me sideways. “That’s the first thing you’ve said in five months that sounded like you. God. Don’t make speeches at me, I’ve had a day.”
She goes back down to the crates.
I don’t.
I go up instead, all the way to the top, to the end of the long row where the oldest vines are. The place I waited in a blue dress until it got dark. The place a man knelt in the mud six weeks ago with a plain gold band in his fist and told me he’d start over as many times as it took.
Nobody can see me up here. That’s the entire point.
I line it up properly and I make myself look at all of it.
He used me. He put my mother in a notebook and wrote use this beside her. He sat at my father’s table for three years counting what he heard and then came up the stairs and put his hands on me, and there is no version of any of this where that stops being true.
And then the other column.
He brought me the letters. In the wet grass at his uncle’s grave, when I would have gone to my own funeral never knowing they existed.
He told me about the notes the night before a newspaper could tell me.
He stood on a courthouse step and let my aunt open his face and never lifted his hand or his voice.
He let me walk out of a hotel corridor with my dress half undone and didn’t come after me, because coming after me would have been for him and not for me.
This morning he told me to my face that he thought I was wrong about the picking, and then he spent seven hours at the bottom of the block telling strangers it was my hill.
That’s the whole case. It isn’t pretty. It’s four years of lying and five months of a man doing the hardest thing available to him every single day without once being thanked for it.
I think about waiting two more years.
Then I make myself ask what I’d actually be waiting for, and the honest answer is a feeling of certainty that is never coming back, because he took it and neither of us can put it where it was.
So the question isn’t whether I’m certain.
It’s whether I believe the evidence, and the evidence is five months long and it is all in one direction.
That’s not a feeling. That’s a record. I have been treating it like a feeling because feelings can be wrong and I have been so frightened of being wrong again, and a record is a different thing entirely. A record you can read.
It isn’t finished. It’s five months against four years and it will take a great deal longer than this to balance.
But it is going the right way, and it has been going the right way every single day, and I am done pretending I can’t see it.
The wind comes up through the rows. Down at the bottom of the hill I can see him, a small figure in borrowed boots carrying a crate on his shoulder toward the pad, doing what I told him to do on a day he thinks I’m making a mistake.
I stand there for a long time with the shears still in my hand.
Then I go down.
Euridice looks up when she sees my face and puts her crate on the ground.
“Signora Bruni closes at six,” I tell her.
“Ally-”
“And not a word to Anthony.” I’m already walking. “He’s been unbearable for three weeks and I want to be ready for whatever he’s building toward, whenever he finally gets around to it.”