CHAPTER ONE #2
When he put it that way, there was nothing I could say.
Refusing a frightened widow and a child because I wanted to be consulted about the guest rooms would have made me into someone I didn’t want to be, and he knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t do it.
I don’t think he was using that. I think it simply never occurred to him that I’d been asked a question with only one possible answer.
“No,” I said. “Of course she should come. I’d just like to have been part of deciding it.”
“Then you’re part of it now.” He came around the table, tipped my face up with two fingers under my chin, and kissed my forehead. It was the gesture he used when he considered a conversation finished. “Thank you. She’s had a hard year. You’ll like her.”
He went to get dressed. I sat at the table with my cold coffee and looked out at the garden, where Mr. Hinge had moved from the oak to the fence and was still complaining at nothing.
When Dante came back down in his suit, he stopped in the doorway with his keys in his hand.
“I’ll have Grant add her to the detail list today,” he said. “And I’d rather not have any photos of her or the girl going out anywhere. No family group shots, nothing on anyone’s phone. If Nico posts one thing, I’ll throw his phone in the Sound.”
“You never let anyone post photos of us either,” I said. “Your cousins used to tease you about it. The only Moretti without a single picture of his wife online.”
“My father’s rule.” He shrugged, adjusting his cuff. “He told me once, when I was sixteen. You don’t point at what you love. People follow your finger.” He said it offhandedly, a man repeating a piece of old advice he’d stopped hearing years ago. “It stuck.”
“That’s very romantic.”
“It’s very practical.” He kissed me on the way past, quick, at the corner of my mouth. “I’ll be home by seven. Tell Ines I’m sorry about the east wing.”
“Tell her yourself.”
“I will,” he said, and he did, poking his head into the pantry on his way out to say something that made Ines laugh, and then the front door closed behind him and the house went quiet.
I sat there a long time. I thought about the east wing, which I’d redecorated four years ago and hadn’t been into since Christmas.
I thought about a little girl whose school was being watched.
I thought, briefly, about the Memling, the merchant holding his coin in a room in Bruges, and whether I’d go.
Then I got up, found a notepad, and started a list for the east wing, because somebody had to, and in this house the somebody was always me.
* * *
The rest of the day went the way my days went.
Elena called at ten to ask whether I’d confirmed the linen rental for Sal’s gala, which I had, in February.
The foundation’s treasurer called at eleven about a donor who’d pledged twenty thousand dollars and then gone quiet, and I spent half an hour drafting a note to the donor’s wife, whom I’d sat beside at a luncheon in the fall and who had a granddaughter at Fordham.
Carmela called at two to ask whether I thought Rocco’s cousin should be invited to Sal’s gala, given the business with the parking lot, and I said no, and she said thank God, she’d been hoping I’d say no.
I walked through the east wing in the afternoon with Ines and my notepad. The rooms were beautiful and cold. Nobody had slept in them since Christmas.
“Two rooms,” Ines said. “The big one for her. The little one with the window seat for the child?”
“The little one,” I agreed. “Did he tell you when he called you last night?”
Ines hesitated. She’d worked in this house for eight years, and she’d been loyal to me for most of them, and she chose her words the way she chose produce, carefully. “He said Mrs. Moretti would want the little room for the girl. He said you’d know how to make it nice.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. It was a compliment, and it was also a job he’d handed to me through the housekeeper at eleven at night without mentioning it to me first. I wrote little room, window seat on my list and underlined it twice.
Dante came home at seven fifteen, which for Dante was early. He found me in the kitchen and put a flat paper bag on the counter in front of me without saying anything.
Inside was the exhibition catalogue from the Groeninge Museum in Bruges. The Memling show. It wasn’t out in the States yet. Somebody would have had to call Belgium.
“How did you get this?”
“Paula has a cousin in Antwerp.” He opened the refrigerator and looked into it. “You said maybe. I thought if you had the book, maybe would get easier.”
I turned the pages. The merchant with his coin was on page forty, full size, every crack in the varnish visible. I sat down at the island and looked at him for a long time, and when I looked up Dante was leaning against the counter eating an olive out of the jar with his fingers, watching me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You looked happy this morning, talking about it. You don’t look like that very often when you talk about family things.” He ate another olive. “I noticed.”
We ate dinner at the island, leftovers Ines had put aside, and he told me about Marco and the shipment and a longshoreman in Red Hook who had named his pit bull after Dante’s father, which Paolo did not yet know.
I told him about the east wing, the little room, the window seat.
He listened and asked what color I was thinking.
I said yellow, maybe, or green. He said Alessandra’s mother had liked yellow. I said I’d think about it.
It was a good evening. I want to be clear about that.
Nothing about it was strained. I went to bed that night beside a man who’d called Belgium because I’d said maybe, and I fell asleep believing, the way I’d believed for years, that whatever small things got lost in the traffic of his family and his work, I had the thing that mattered.
* * *