14. Order
ORDER
LORENZO
I have washed my hands five times before dinner, and I only notice on the fifth.
The water is going and my sleeves are pushed up and I am standing over the pantry sink like a surgeon, and there is nothing on them. There has not been anything on them since a nurse in an ambulance bay handed me a packet of wipes and I used all six.
I turn the tap off and look at them.
She has spent nine hours today looking at the two things at the ends of my arms, and I have spent nine hours learning what that is like from the inside.
So I dry them, and from now on I keep them on the table where they can be seen, and I carry them the way you carry a weapon somebody has taken off you and handed back for the walk home.
“Lorenzo.”
Valeria is in the doorway with a folder against her chest.
“I need the 2001 correspondence. All of it. Renata’s second box, and the cover letters, and whatever is in the manila.”
“It is on the table.”
“Thank you,” she says, and goes.
That is the whole of Monday night.
Tuesday runs on the new arithmetic of this house, which I have decided to treat as a supply problem and not a wound.
There are nine feet of my grandmother’s table and I do not spend them.
I do not walk behind her chair. I do not put a cup down at her elbow on my way past. I have been doing that since the first morning without ever deciding to, and it turns out to be the hardest one to stop.
At 4 in the afternoon Nonna corners me in the hall outside the small dining room and points at a stool with her stick.
“Sit. I am not craning my neck at you.”
I sit.
“Do not apologize to her again,” she says.
“I have not.”
“You will want to by Thursday. Everybody does. The second one is not for her, it is for you, and she will smell it in the room.” She folds her hands on the head of the stick.
“In sixty-one years your grandfather lied to me four times. Twice about money, once about a car, and once about an appointment with a doctor in 1988. The money I made him eat in front of his brother. The car I did not care about. The appointment I have never forgiven and he died anyway, so do not tell me about time healing.”
“Nonna.”
“An apology is not a feeling, Lorenzo. It is a thing you hand across a table and it has to weigh something.” She taps the stick once on the rug that Aldo bought in Kashan and that has survived two wars.
“You cannot give that girl back ten days. What you can give her is every day after this one costing her nothing to check. She finds a thing at 2 o’clock, she knows it at 2 o’clock.
You find a thing at 2 o’clock, she knows it at 2 o’clock.
Not tidied, not in the right order for you, not after dinner. ”
“And if the thing is bad?”
“Especially then. That is the only part that counts.” She looks past me down the corridor at the library door. “Go on. And eat something, you look like your father.”
I find it on Tuesday at 9:40 p.m.
Column five of the distribution schedule is two sets of initials. The instrument requires two wet signatures on every distribution, which is why the paper exists at all, and why it lives in binders a woman could photocopy instead of on a screen anybody can query.
Initials are useless without a key. For two days they have been letters.
Then, in Renata Alba’s second shoebox, in a folder she labeled AUTH in pencil, there is a memorandum she typed every January for twenty-four years, on the machine with the filled-in lowercase e, listing the authorized countersignatories of the trust with their specimen initials in a column beside their names.
I go year by year. I find the one that covers the row I want.
The row is nine years old. It is the consortium adjustment that landed four days after they buried Domenico Iorio in Bay Ridge.
The first set of initials is G.P.
Gaetano Presti, who brought a white box of sfogliatelle to a table in Manhasset every Sunday for thirty years and never ate one, and who died in his kitchen in June of 2019 with the radio on.
His initials are on the row after Domenico and on the row after Sandro Castellano and on the placement row from nine years ago and on the row the week her second engagement was announced. Four for four.
The second set is G.D.
I check the memorandum three times, and then I check the January memorandum from the two years either side, because there are one hundred and forty D’Amato and Rinaldi names in this thing and I want to be wrong.
Giulio D’Amato. Junior officer, consortium administration. Twenty-nine years old.
My brother read every page of every document he was ever handed.
He was the one who was still on the second page when I was finished, and I used to think that was slowness, and I said so in a church six days ago in front of four hundred people.
He drew a boat on a legal pad in Newark for four hours and then took Ettore Rinaldi apart in eleven minutes because he had read the schedules at the back.
And nine years ago he put two letters in column five beside Gaetano Presti’s, on the line that paid a man for burying his own daughter’s husband.
I sit with that for as long as it takes to breathe twice, and then I get up.
Nine feet is not far.
She hears the chair and looks up, and I come around the corner of the table and put the schedule down in front of her and turn it so it faces her the right way, and I put the January memorandum beside it and turn that too.
“Column five,” I say. “The row after Domenico. Second set of initials is your husband’s brother.”
Her eyes go down. She reads the schedule, and then the memorandum, and then the schedule again.
“When did you find this?”
“Four minutes ago.”
She looks at the clock on the shelf. She looks at me.
“Thank you for the order you told it in,” she says.
I go back to my end of the table and sit down, and I do not say anything else, because there is nothing you can add to that without taking something off it.
We work it for an hour and a half without either of us suggesting that we should.
“Twenty-nine,” she says. “What was he in that building?”
“A junior officer. He had a desk in consortium administration for two years before my father moved him to the port company. He countersigned expense coding and vendor renewals and adjustments, and there would have been forty of those a month.”
“Then his initials on that row are not a commission. They are a payroll clerk’s initials on the ninth thing somebody put in front of him on a Thursday.
” She has her pencil out and she is not writing with it.
“Presti is on all four. Presti is also the man your father-in-law’s whole life ran through and Presti is in a grave, and I have stopped being surprised by that. ”
“Say the other thing.”
She puts the pencil down.
“Whoever built this kept it on paper for thirty years,” she says. “A typist who made copies at a church for nineteen years and nobody stopped her. This machine is beautifully documented, Lorenzo, and nothing in this life is beautifully documented by accident.”
“It was built to be found.”
“Eventually. By somebody. Under pressure.” She turns the schedule around with one finger. “And when it is found, the first D’Amato name a person hits, four days after a murder, is your brother’s. Twenty-nine years old then, dead nine years later, and unable to explain himself.”
“You do not believe it.”
“I do not believe it and I cannot prove it, and I want you to hear the difference, because someday somebody is going to put this page in front of a room and I would like us to be the ones who have already looked at it.” She holds my eyes.
“I am telling you that I think it was left there for me to find, and I want it on the record that I said so tonight and not after we know.”
“Noted.”
“Say it back.”
“You said it tonight,” I tell her. “Before we knew.”
She could have had that dated and initialed and admissible in fourteen seconds. She has put it in me instead, which is the least defensible filing decision of her career, and she made it looking straight at me.
Fabrizio comes up from the terminal on Tuesday evening at 8 with the manifests in a folder under his arm.
He is three steps into the library before he stops. He looks at her end of the table and at my end and at the nine feet of oak between with nothing on it, and then he looks at the two of us, and he does not say one word about it.
He puts the folder on the sideboard. He goes out and comes back with a plate, and he puts it into my hands.
“You have eaten nothing since the coffee at 9 a.m. yesterday,” he says. “Do not make me stand here.”
“Fabrizio.”
“Bread and the veal. The girl heated it twice.” He stands there while I take two bites and then he takes it back. “Signora, there is soup, and I am going to send it in whether or not you tell me to.”
“Send it in,” Valeria says.
He goes to the door and stops with his hand on the frame.
“Is there anything I can carry?”
I look at nine years of a dead man’s initials spread across my grandmother’s table, at Renata Alba’s shoeboxes, at the copy of a page with a black oval where a name used to be.
“No,” I say. “Nothing tonight.”
He nods once and does not push. “Then I am at the port at 6. Call me at any hour, and I mean any hour.”
He shuts the door behind himself with the same softness he does everything.
Wednesday at 11 the courier from Manhasset arrives.
Ettore Rinaldi’s first written answer under the terms his daughter set him is bound in a black spring binder with a clear cover. Eleven pages. Tabs. A cover sheet with the date, the question as she asked it, and his signature at the bottom in fountain pen.
“He included a table of contents,” Valeria says.
“For eleven pages.”
“There are four sections.” She turns it around so I can see it. “Section three has subsections.”
“He is courting you in the only language he has.”
She looks at the binder for a moment, and the corner of her mouth lifts by a single degree, and it is not a smile and it is the first thing in two days that has been in the same family as one.
“Nonna moved the sugar bowl,” she says.
“When?”
“This morning. Three inches. She has been putting it exactly between us since Monday, and this morning it is on my side of the middle.” She goes back to the binder. “That woman is running a border checkpoint out of a tray.”
The question my wife filed on Monday was who the trustees of record were in 2001, when the second amendment was instructed in writing and Renata Alba typed it under protest and initialed it at the bottom the way you initial a thing you do not agree with.
Her father has answered it in section two, with a page of his own handwriting explaining where each name came from and which of them he met and how often.
The list is three names long.
Gaetano Presti, for the Rinaldi.
A Providence attorney named Wallace Kerr, admitted 1961, struck from the roll in 2003 and dead in 2011.
And the third name on the instruction, in Renata’s small clean type, on a machine with a bad lowercase e, in a letter dated the eleventh of April 2001, is my father’s.