Chapter 19
Pietro
When the light came up on the vines, I was already outside.
Not insomnia. Not the old compulsion, the running, the need to stay ahead of whatever my head was planning to do to me if I stopped moving.
I was up because I wanted to see it: the first spring morning when the new green forced its way out of the sticks and the rows went from dead to alive overnight.
Marco had said it would happen this week. He was right.
I put on the boots by the door, pulled my coat over the sweatshirt, and went out with coffee in a mug that had a chip on the rim. It belonged to Marco, but I had started thinking of it as mine. The handle was wide enough for my hands.
The ground was cold, but not the deep winter cold I remembered from Chicago.
There, it was a dead cold, a weight. Here, it was alive—wet, and heavy with the smell of thaw, and underneath the frost, I could feel the new things working their way up.
My feet crunched through it to the start of the first row.
Nero d’Avola. The Sicilian. Marco had told me, the week we first came down: “It’s stubborn.
Doesn’t belong here. Fights for every centimeter.
” He had said it with pride. We had been standing exactly here, at the start of the row, the two of us with matching boots and a bottle he had pulled from the last harvest. Marco, holding the glass to the sky, said, “She reminds me of Zia Pina,” and laughed.
I walked the row. The sticks had the look of everything in its first day above ground—undecided, embarrassed to be seen.
The buds were a raw red. The frost from overnight had melted already, so the air carried the cold smell of mud and the green of the river behind it.
I sipped the coffee, watched the fog come up from the bluffs.
The nightmares had come twice in three months. The last was after Malta. Never since. I slept six hours, sometimes seven. I slept next to her, in a house where the doors were not locked, and if I woke in the night it was because she had moved against me, hair in my mouth, or her hand on my stomach.
The coffee was good. I took another sip.
I put my hand around the chipped rim and found I could keep it steady, even in the cold.
I let myself watch the mist on the river, the way it dragged the gold out of the sky and set it in motion down the valley.
I let myself be proud. Not for surviving, not for what I had done, but for the way I could stand here and let the world be quiet and not go looking for danger inside it.
Halfway down the row, I stopped.
Marco had shown me this one. He had bent the cane sideways and pointed at the spot where the rootstock changed color—the place where they had cut the Sicilian, the wood from Monreale, and forced it onto an American frame.
He said, “If you do it right, you get the best of both.” He smiled.
“If you do it wrong, you lose everything.” I had not known, then, how much of the vineyard was made by the things you could not see from above ground. Now I did.
I thought about the way Marco’s hands had worked the pruning shears, the precision of it, the patience. I thought about my own hands, rough from winter, and the way she had taken them in both of hers the night before and held them against her face, warm and unashamed.
I thought about the ring in my pocket.
I had carried it since Chicago. My mother’s, the one thing of hers my father had kept after she died.
The gold was worn flat at the bottom. The stone was nothing—a cheap white sapphire, pried from the setting by some idiot cousin when they were kids and glued back in with kitchen epoxy.
It would not have passed any test, in Sicily or here.
But it was the only thing I had of her. The only thing I had kept through everything.
I had carried it from Catania, to Chicago, to this field. I had carried it through the worst night of my life, and the best.
Tonight, I thought. I would do it tonight.
I watched the river until the mist turned from white to blue, and the sky started leaking sun into the rows, and I knew she would be waking up inside. I let myself stay for a while, holding the mug, feeling the steady in my hands.
For the first time in my life, the word that came to me, unbidden and without shame, was home.
Iheard her before I saw her. The back door’s old hinge, the hush of bare feet over the porch mat, the little cough she did out of habit whenever she stepped into the cold. I turned around.
She was wearing my shirt. Not the fancy one she liked to steal, the old grey one with holes in the cuffs.
It hung off her in a way that made me want to put my hands on her, but she’d rolled the sleeves above her elbows like she always did.
Her hair was longer now, darker at the roots, the cut growing out into something elegant by accident.
She had on a pair of jeans that Serafina had given her—and the difference was clear.
When I met her, she had been underweight, drawn in at the collarbones, eyes too large for her face, haunted. Now she looked alive. Strong, even.
She stood on the top step with her arms crossed, mug in hand, looking down at the field. When she saw me, she smiled, a real smile, none of the old rationed carefulness.
“There you are, Daddy,” she said.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.
She came down the steps. She moved different now. No scanning, no mapping of escape routes, no edge-of-the-room posture. She walked like she belonged. She put her feet in the mud and didn’t flinch at the cold.
She stopped beside me and took a sip from her mug. She leaned her head on my shoulder and looked at the vines. “Do you think Marco’s going to cry when he sees the buds?”
“He cried over the melanzana last week,” I said. “This is more important.”
She laughed. I felt it in her shoulder, a shake against my arm. I wanted to tell her everything I was thinking, but the words crowded up. So I just stood with her, quiet.
After a while, she said, “I got an email last night. From the Wendell Pierce Foundation.”
She paused, to see if I understood the reference. I did. The man from the bench in Chicago. The first friend she’d made after two years alone, and the last.
“They wanted to let me know,” she went on, “that the Chicago shelter took in nineteen veterans off the street last month. Nineteen. They have a boxing room now. They said they added it because so many of the guys asked for it, and because a few of the case managers thought it might be good for . . . what did she say . . .” She paused, made herself smile, “. . . for people who needed to punch the world back, even a little.”
I imagined Cora, somewhere, nodding.
She said, “They sent me a picture of the lobby. There’s a photo of Wendell on the wall. It’s the only one they had. The intake file one. He looks so serious. But he has a book in his hand.”
“He would like that,” I said.
She nodded. “They paid for the whole thing with the Maltese recovery. They said so. The audit letter was attached. I clicked it.” She laughed, short and dry. “I’m an addict, I guess.”
I looked at her. She looked back.
“I couldn’t act in time for Howell,” she said. “And I couldn’t save Wendell. But the men who sleep warm tonight, they do it because of what I found. I acted. It was too late for him. It’s not too late for them.”
She held my eyes until I nodded.
The sun cleared the far hill and threw light on the upper third of the field.
The vines glowed red and gold. I thought, for a second, about what she had carried in her body all that time—the guilt, the belief that care was only a thing you paid for with suffering.
And I saw, in the way she squared her shoulders and took back her mug, that she was carrying less now.
She turned to me, put her face in the crook of my neck. “You smell like outside,” she said.
“You smell like coffee,” I said.
We stood that way until the chill reached us both.
She said, “Come inside. Marco’s going to be herr soon.”
“He’s going to want to show you the grafts,” I said.
“I know. I like when he talks about the vines. It makes him happy.”
She started up the steps. I followed. At the top, she stopped and looked back at me. The look on her face was new. Not hungry. Not scared. Not even grateful. Just there.
The noise of a car on gravel floated up from the drive, way down by the barn.
I looked at her.
She smiled, tucked her hair behind her ear. “They’re early.”
“Marco is never early,” I said. “That means Serafina must be driving.”
“Or the baby’s driving?” she said.
I laughed. We went inside, and I heard her humming to herself in the kitchen while I took off my boots.
Outside, the sun was full on the river, and the buds were opening everywhere.
The baby was called Vittoria. She was half hair, half rage, and took after Serafina in both respects. The hair was black, already curling at the ends, and the rage was mostly reserved for her father, who bore it with the fatalism of a man who had given up hope of ever being in charge again.
“Get over here,” Marco shouted, before he’d even killed the engine.
I walked out with Angela. She had changed into the denim jacket I liked.
It was warmer now, and the sun off the river made the back porch a good place to stand.
She smiled at the baby, but hung back, as if she didn’t know whether she was allowed to touch her.
Serafina solved that. She walked straight up the steps, put Vittoria into Angela’s arms, and said, “She’s heavier than she looks. ”
Angela’s whole face changed. She looked down at the baby like she’d been handed an ancient treasure. The baby grabbed her finger and held on.
I watched her, and I saw something I had never seen in her before. Not a new thing—an old thing, finally let out. Angela looked up at me, and then away, quick, the way a person looks away when there is too much to see.
Marco came up behind me and put his arm around my neck. “You gonna make me a cousin, or what?”
“Working on it,” I said.