EPILOGUE
One Year Later
“Thanksgiving,” Dante said, standing in the kitchen doorway on a Tuesday morning in October with a coffee in each hand. “Luca called. He wants to know if we’re hosting, or if he and Nadia should do it at their place, or if we’re all going to Ma’s.”
I was at the kitchen table with a condition report spread in front of me and a pencil in my teeth. I took the pencil out.
“What do you want?”
“I asked first.”
“I know. I’m asking what you want.”
He handed me one of the coffees and sat down across from me.
He’d been awake since five, which he did now on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because the man in Westchester had suggested he start his day before anyone else could start it for him.
He’d taken it literally, the way he took most instructions, and now he ran along the river at five thirty and came back and made coffee before I woke up, and he seemed, for the first time since I’d known him, like a man who slept.
“Honestly?” he said. “I’d like to not host. I’d like to go to Luca’s and eat whatever Nadia makes, which will be ambitious and possibly on fire, and not be responsible for anything.”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
“I’m installing a show at the Harwell the Monday after. I’ll be half dead.” I tapped the report. “Tell him we’ll bring wine and the pie from DeLuca’s.”
“The apple or the pumpkin?”
“Ask him which they’d prefer.”
He picked up his phone and texted his brother, and then he looked up. “And my mother? She’ll ask if we’re coming to her for Christmas Eve.”
“We’ll go. Two hours. Then we come home.”
“Two hours,” he agreed. “I’ll tell her.”
He would, too. He’d tell her himself, and she’d say something mildly cutting, and he’d say, Ma, and she’d stop.
That was how it went with Elena now. She hadn’t become a different woman.
At my birthday dinner in the spring she had told me my hair was too short, and at the foundation dinner in September she had spent twenty minutes explaining to a curator from the Harwell that her daughter-in-law was the most gifted restorer in the state, as though she had personally discovered me.
She asked before she came to the house. Mostly.
When she forgot, Dante reminded her, and she looked irritated and went home.
Last Easter I’d shown her how to do the lamb.
It had been edible. She’d said, afterward, stiffly, that perhaps she should have asked me years ago, and I’d said yes, perhaps she should have, and we’d left it there.
It was enough. It was more than I’d had.
* * *
The Harwell show was in its last week of installation when Alessandra brought Mia to see it.
Mia was nine now and had lost both front teeth and grown what seemed like a foot.
She still had the gray rabbit, though it lived on her bed now instead of traveling everywhere, and she walked along the cases in the conservation gallery with her face pressed nearly to the glass, looking at forty tiny portraits I’d spent the past eight months surveying and stabilizing.
“Did you fix all of these?” she asked.
“Some of them. Some I just made sure wouldn’t get worse.”
“That’s fixing too,” she said, with total authority, and moved on to the next case.
Alessandra stood beside me with her arms folded, watching her daughter. She’d started her own small practice in the spring, residential interiors, three clients and a waiting list. She’d done Luca and Nadia’s apartment. She had not done ours, and neither of us had ever needed to say why.
“She’s in the school play,” Alessandra said. “She’s a tree. She wanted you to know.”
“I’ll be there.”
“She’ll make you sit in the front row.”
“I’ll sit in the front row.”
Alessandra smiled. “Is he coming too?”
“If I ask him. I’ll ask him.”
“Look at you,” she said softly. “Asking.”
“We both ask now. It’s very tedious. We asked each other about a pie for twenty minutes this morning.”
She laughed, the real laugh I’d heard only a handful of times the month she’d lived in our house, and Mia turned around and shushed us both because we were in a museum.
* * *
At Luca and Nadia’s on Thanksgiving, Nadia’s turkey did not catch fire, although the stuffing briefly did, and Luca put it out with a dish towel while Nadia swore at him in Spanish and Paolo laughed so hard he had to sit down.
Elena brought a salad nobody ate and pronounced the gravy adequate.
Carmela asked me, for the third year running, whether I’d ever thought about going into interior design, since I had such an eye, and Alessandra, sitting beside her, choked on her wine.
Nadia’s younger sister Paloma had come up from Philadelphia for the holiday.
She was twenty-three and had just started law school, and she had never met any of us before.
Somewhere around the pie, when the conversation had come around to how everyone had met, she turned to me with the frank curiosity of someone with no idea what she was walking into.
“How did you two meet?” she asked. “You and Dante?”
The table went quiet. Not badly. There was simply a pause, a family of people who all knew the answer and were all waiting to see who’d give it.
I looked at Dante.
He was looking at me. Not at his mother, not at Luca, not around the table to measure the room. At me.
“Our fathers set it up,” I said to Paloma. “It was an arranged marriage.”
“Seriously?” Her eyes went wide. “Like, arranged arranged?”
“Arranged arranged,” Dante said. He put his hand on the table, palm up, where everyone could see it, and I put mine in it. “They arranged the wedding. Everything after that was us.”
Paloma looked from him to me and back again. “That’s either the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or the most terrifying.”
“It was both,” I said. “For a while.”
Elena, at the end of the table, said nothing at all. She only lifted her glass a little, toward us, and drank.
* * *
We got home a little after ten. Dante had driven, and he asked in the car whether I wanted him to drop me at the apartment or bring me home, and I said home, and he said all right, and I noticed, as I always noticed, that he still asked.
The house was quiet. It was a different house now, in all the ways that mattered and some that didn’t.
The east wing had become my workroom, with north light and a long table and the smell of solvent.
The breakfast table had been moved to the window, and no one had assigned seats at it, and I sat at his right hand every morning because I wanted to.
The pearls were in a safe-deposit box, waiting for whoever in the family wanted them next.
The diamond bracelet had gone to auction in the spring, at my suggestion and his agreement, and the money had paid for two more scholarships at the foundation.
The rocking chair was in the corner of my office by the window, four inches left of where he’d first put it.
I stood in the kitchen in my stocking feet, too tired to go up yet, looking at the moonlight on the back garden. Dante came in behind me and stopped in the doorway.
“Tea?” he asked.
“Please.”
He made it the way I liked it without asking, which was allowed now, because he’d asked the first forty times. He handed it to me and leaned against the counter beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched.
“You were quiet in the car,” he said.
“I was thinking about Paloma’s question.”
“The most romantic or the most terrifying.”
“I used to think being chosen happened once,” I said. “At the altar. I thought that was the whole thing. Somebody chose me, or somebody chose for me, and after that it was settled and I just had to live inside it.”
He was quiet, listening.
“It isn’t settled,” I said. “It never gets settled. You chose me at Frank’s table in front of two hundred people. And you chose me this morning about the pie. And the morning is harder, honestly. Nobody’s watching in the morning.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why the morning matters.”
I set my tea down on the counter. He turned toward me, and I looked at him in the half dark, my husband of eight years and some months, a man I’d been married to twice, the second time on purpose.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“I’m allowed.”
“You are.” He reached for my hand.
There was no table for him to reach under, no family to hide it from, and nobody watching, only the two of us in our own kitchen at the end of an ordinary Thursday, and he took my hand in plain sight, the way he did most nights now, and held it, and I held his back.