7. The Letter, The Diner #2
From Florence a week after the funeral I call and get his voicemail and do not leave a message because I do not know what to say and I cannot stay in the not-knowing long enough to find out.
By October I am running the estate and managing the siblings and my own grief is in a sealed container I open once a day, in the morning, and close before anyone comes downstairs. By November I know I am pregnant. I do not call. I tell myself I will when the right moment comes.
The right moment does not come because I do not make it. The gap becomes a wall and the wall becomes the structure of my life.
Matteo is born in April in Nonno's room in the Florence villa. I hold him and think: he has Max's jaw. He always will. That is the first thought, and also the thought I will put away for nine years and take back out in small increments on floors like this one.
The beeping sound from an alarm brings me back. I am on the floor of my father's study in Seal Harbor. I put my hands flat on the floor and feel the boards beneath them, the slight give of the old wood, the present tense solid under my palms.
Up off the floor. To the kitchen, tea that I pour and do not drink.
Back to the desk, the design journal, and the small mark at the bottom of the last page.
The one I dismissed weeks ago as an idle doodle, a pen moving while she thought about something else.
She put it there and said nothing and waited.
She was always better at waiting than I am.
Alex, Keller’s Cafe
Whether I slept or not I don’t know. The driver calls at four-fifteen: the car is ready.
The diner is there exactly where he said it would be.
Twelve miles north on Route 1, a low building with a lit sign and a gravel lot half-full of long-haul rigs, their cabs dark, their trailers making the night feel heavier than it already is.
I have gone past this stretch of road a hundred times without turning in. The car turns in now.
Inside, the noise hits before the heat does.
The counter runs the full length of the room and every stool is taken.
The coffee machine is going. Somebody at the far end is laughing at something and the sound is enormous and completely indifferent to the hour.
The hostess does not look up. “Anywhere you like, hon.”
He is in the last booth. His coat is still on. There is a coffee in front of him and a second cup across the table, poured and waiting, which means he told them I was coming, which means he was certain I would. I slide in across from him. The vinyl is cold. The coffee is not good.
Not looking at him. Both hands around the mug, staring into it and start talking.
What I said in the sitting room: every time I almost called, I stopped because I knew it was for me. I tell him that was true and that it was not enough. He is quiet. He is waiting and I know this time he will not fill the silence for her. So, I go further.
“I don’t know how to need someone.” I keep going.
“I was taught, not in so many words, but I was taught, that needing is weakness. That the Strozzi women manage. We are the ones who hold it together. When Papà was sick the first time, Mamma organized everything. And never once let any of us see her fall apart." I pause.
"And I understood even then that that was the correct behavior. The model. And when Nonno died and Papà called and I was in that corridor, and I sat down on the floor for twenty minutes.” I stop.
“I got up. I organized. I became useful and I got on the plane, and I told myself I would call you when there was something worth saying.”
He has not moved. And he is not moved. He has not looked away from me, either.
“The real answer is that calling you meant being the person on the floor. And I did not know how to be that person in front of you. You had only ever seen me manage. I didn’t know how to say: I cannot carry this alone.
I didn’t know how to say any of it and then I found out I was pregnant and the window closed. ”
The coffee picked up. It does not improve.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do.
“The library,” I say, my voice smaller than I mean it to be. “The first time I saw you in the library. I knew within two sessions that you were someone I could depend on. That I could fall apart in front of and you would not think less of me for it." I stop.
"That terrified me more than any of the rest of it. Because depending on someone means they can leave. I had watched my father depend on my mother completely, and then she was ill for a long time and there was nothing left of him that worked. I was not going to do that. I was not going to let that happen to me.”
I look back down.
“So, I didn’t call. And then it was Matteo and the wall and the nine years and here we are in a truck stop at six in the morning and I am begging you.”
That word has not been said before. It is accurate.
He is quiet for a long time. The counter is full and the coffee machine runs its cycle and the morning shift is coming in and none of it touches the back booth.
“I’m angry,” he says. “I want you to know I’m angry. That’s not going anywhere quickly.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not going anywhere, either.” He picks up his coffee. “Both of those things are true right now.”
Nothing to say to that except thank you. And that is not something I can say yet without it breaking something open that I cannot afford to have broken in public.
We sit. The morning comes in through the windows past the rigs in the lot. New drivers arrive with the smell of cold air and the day beginning. Neither of us is in a hurry.
At six thirty-five my phone rings. Lorenzo Jr.
Max, when I look at him, nods once.
I answer and listen. What Lorenzo Jr. says changes everything in the room, and Max sees it change before I have finished hearing it.