15. What She Said First #3
Face in hands. From the relief of a thing held for eight years finding its right place at last. The way a load shifts when the person carrying it finally stands upright.
Max comes inside ten minutes later. He sits across from me at the kitchen table.
I read his face before he speaks.
Max says. "Matteo said, ‘can I give you a hug.’ Like that. Very formal."
I wait.
"I said yes. He bear-hugged me." A pause. "He whispered something."
"What did he say?"
Max is quiet for a moment, the steady quiet he uses when he is holding something.
"He said, ' I wished you were my dad when I saw you the first time.' That's at the will reading." He stops. "He has been carrying that since September."
Across the table, he takes my hand and holds it and does not say anything else, and neither do I.
Alex, Lorenzo Jr. Calls
Lorenzo Jr. calls at seven. Max is at the table with the authentication brief, Elena asleep against his shoulder in a way that apparently happened gradually and that neither of us is going to disturb.
"Renata moved the timeline," he says. He says it with the contained urgency of someone who has been in a workroom watching extraordinary things come off the table and is struggling to use his regular voice. "Three pieces are cut. She wants us at the atelier Thursday."
"Are they right?" I say.
"They're beyond right. She said the opening piece is the best thing she's made in twenty years. She said it in the voice she uses when a stitch is one millimeter off." He pauses. "Which means she means it."
I move to the corridor, to keep the conversation from waking Elena.
"How are you?"
"Good. Working. The kind of working where you forget to eat."
"Margot wants to come to Florence."
"From the atelier?"
"Yes."
There is something in his voice I have not heard before. Not the easy warmth he uses for everyone, which is abundant and real. A different warmth, the kind that appears when someone has stopped being careful about something.
"Of course she should come."
He sounds relieved.
I take the news back to the kitchen and tell Max.
"Four weeks."
"Four weeks. The Florence show, the Dr. Ferrante presentation, the press piece, the collection launch."
He runs through it as he runs through lists, efficiently and without alarm, because the list is long but the preparation is real.
"That's a significant amount."
"We've managed more."
"We have." The we is easy between us now in the way that the truth, once it stops being fought, tends to be.
Alex, The Evening
Giulia has directed the evening with the same complete authority and no announcement she brings to everything. The kitchen has produced pasta and coastal herbs without visible instruction.
The wine she selected herself: a bottle Papà brought from Italy twelve years ago, from the lower cellar, which means she knew exactly what was down there and decided this was the occasion.
Lorenzo Jr. is on the speakerphone propped against the fruit bowl. Elena is awake again, the nap behind her, running the kind of low-level energy that five-year-olds sustain when they know the evening is interesting.
Matteo is at the table telling Max what still needs to happen before the fort is right. The east wall needs three more stones. The flag post is leaning and has to come out and go back in straight. Elena keeps moving the blue flag to the wrong corner.
Max listens with the full attention he brings to everything. He asks, "Where the three stones are coming from."
Matteo answers, "I have pile by the sea shore."
Giulia watches this from across the table with the expression she wears when she has assessed something and approved of it. She catches me watching her and raises her glass.
From the speaker, Lorenzo Jr. describes the third piece. A coat in a charcoal that keeps appearing in Nonno's 1968 designs. He found the closest living match at a mill in northern Italy.
He says he has been calling the color Nonno's gray all week and Margot has started calling it that too and now the whole workroom calls it that. The table goes quiet.
"He would have loved that."
"I know. I designed it for him."
Later the children are in bed. Giulia has gone to her room with her phone and the expression she wears when she is managing something financial at eleven at night, which is often. The speakerphone is quiet.
The table is cleared. Max and I are in the kitchen with what is left of the wine and the coastal night pushing softly at the windows and the estate settled around us, a house that has found its right weight.
"This is what she wanted," I say.
"Yes."
"She planned almost all of it."
"Almost."
"She left the rest to us."
"I think we're doing all right."
Somewhere in New York, the ex-wife's lawyer has been waiting three days for a response to a letter Max has not yet answered. I know this because Max told me, the way he tells me things now: directly. It will require attention.
Tomorrow we will be in New York to view the first pieces.
Outside the kitchen window, the garden is dark. The fort is a shape in it, barely visible. The blue flag is still.