CHAPTER 45
"We bury our dead in the morning, and in the afternoon we have to learn to live again. No one teaches you how to do both things on the same day."
LUCA MORETTI
We buried our men on a gray morning.
The family chapel was at the back of the property, behind the vineyard—old stone, a low roof, a cypress on each side of the door.
My great-grandfather built it. My father is buried there. My mother too.
That morning, four coffins.
Tonio. Pasquale. And Enzo and Dario, the two young soldiers who'd fallen in the October attack, defending the house while I got Valentina out through the kitchen.
Four men. Four families. Four names I would carry.
I didn't give a speech. A Don doesn't give a speech. But I stopped in front of each coffin and said the name out loud, for everyone to hear, because a man who died for the family deserved at least to have his name said by the mouth of the Don.
The widows were in the front row. Enzo's mother, from Salerno, who'd sent her son to me with a recommendation and a blessing. Pasquale's brother, from Caserta.
I shook every hand, told each of them what would be done—a lifelong pension, a house paid off, children put through school.
The old way. The family took care of the families of those who died for the family.
In front of Tonio's coffin, I stopped longer.
Tonio carried me in the trunk of a car in 2009, when I took a bullet to the ribs in Rome and had to disappear. Tonio drove for my father for twelve years before he drove for me. Tonio looked after the nonna in Capri. Tonio took Valentina to the altar with the nonna in the back seat.
And Tonio died with two bullets in his chest, between my wife and death, at the pantry door.
I put my hand on his coffin. The wood was cold.
Grazie, I thought. You protected her, you protected both of them and didn't even know there were two.
Raffaele was beside me but said nothing. He just put his hand on my shoulder, once, and left it there.
The nonna was in the second row, her black dress more closed than usual, her cane braced in both hands. When our eyes met, she nodded slowly.
Coraggio, her look said. Coraggio, grandson.
After the funeral, I called Matteo into my father's study.
He came in carefully, the way a man does when he still remembers that this same man sent him to the south cellar months ago.
"Sit," I said. "The cellar is over, Matteo."
He looked at me.
"The suspicion is over." I rested my hands on the desk. "You're family now. Not because you're Valentina's brother, but because you threw yourself in front of my wife at Villa Salina. In front of a bullet, for my wife and my child."
Matteo's face changed.
"Child."
"She's pregnant."
Matteo closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were wet.
"Sorella," he murmured, more to himself. "Madonna, sorella."
"You threw yourself in front of her without knowing," I said. "That pays off any debt I ever thought you had. You're fratello in this house. Chiaro?"
He stood. He held out his hand, and I shook it—not as Don and prisoner. As brothers-in-law, almost as brothers.
When he left, I stayed alone in the study.
I looked at the bookshelf. The baptism photo was still turned against the wood, where I'd put it the night of Carlo's execution.
I picked it up.
My father in the center. Baby Raffaele in his lap. Carlo on the left, gray suit. Salvatore on the right, black suit.
The two godfathers. Both false. Both dead now, by my hands or by my wife's dagger.
I took a pair of scissors from my father's drawer and cut.
I took out Carlo and Salvatore. I left only my father and baby Raffaele. I cut the two traitors out of the photo of my family, and threw the pieces into the cold fireplace.
Then I put the cut photo back on the bookshelf. Facing out, this time.
VALENTINA MORETTI
The nonna came back from Capri in the afternoon.
I found her in the garden, on the stone bench near the great-grandfather's grapevine—the same spot where, months ago, Luca had almost kissed me and I'd turned my face away.
A whole life fits in a garden, sometimes.
I sat down beside her.
"Lucia loved this grapevine," she said.
"You used to bring her here?"
"Every summer, before Capri. In May, when the grapes were new." The nonna smiled at the corner of her mouth. "She and Luca's mother, Marta, would sit on this bench and drink limoncello while you children ran in the vineyard. You, Matteo, Luca, Raffaele."
I swallowed hard.
"I don't remember it."
"You were three, signora." The nonna put her hand on mine. "But you were here. Before everything, before the hatred. You were all here, together, when it was still possible."
I felt my eyes well up.
Matteo appeared on the path through the vineyard and came over to us. He sat on the ground, in front of the bench, the way he used to sit as a child.
"Sorella. Luca told me."
I smiled and put my hand on my belly.
"You're going to be an uncle, Matteo."
He laughed with those slightly gapped front teeth, the smile I'd recognized in that photo on the wall of his mother's room.
The same smile from when we were children.
"Uncle," he repeated, the way you try out a new word. "Madonna. Uncle."
Donna Beatrice crossed the garden with a tray. Coffee for the nonna, tea for me—she'd already swapped my coffee for tea without my asking, because she knew, everyone in this house knew now.
She set the tray on the bench, but before she left, she stopped and looked at me.
"It'll be good to have a child in this house again, signora," she said, low. "It's been thirty-four years."
And she left, in her way, without waiting for an answer.
The sun began to drop over the bay.
I looked at the house—Villa Moretti, white, enormous. For months it had been a fortress: windows shut, soldiers doubled, heavy curtains. Now, at the end of that afternoon, with the nonna beside me and Matteo on the ground and a child inside me, it was beginning to look like something else.
It was beginning to look like home.
I looked at Vesuvius, on the other side of the bay. Dark, enormous, sleeping in the blue water, as always. But that afternoon, with the sun going down behind it and the sky turning the color of fire, it looked, for the first time, at peace.
Thank you, I thought—I don't know to whom.
To Mamma. To Marta. To the two mothers who sat on this bench before me.
I came out whole, and I didn't come alone.