17. A Finished Argument
A FINISHED ARGUMENT
VALERIA
My husband comes into the kitchen at ten past five in the morning with an evidence bag in his hand, and he does not say good morning, and he does not say my name, and he holds it out flat on both palms like a man returning something he found in the road.
I do not take it. I look at it where it is.
The first thing I see is not the signature.
The first thing I see is a brown crescent burned out of the lower left corner, cupped and curled the way paper curls when a flame has had it and then lost it, and under the bag’s white label, in his handwriting, in his small upright accountant’s letters, one line.
Damage to lower left corner occurred at approximately 8:49 a.m. and was caused by me.
“Valeria,” he says.
“Do not talk yet.”
I have been awake since two.
My notebook is on the counter beside me, and I have not opened it, because I do not know yet which of the things I am afraid of I would be writing down.
I have been sitting in this kitchen since four with the light off, and Soldo has been asleep in the fruit bowl since about half past, on his back, with his feet in four different directions, like something that fell out of a moving vehicle.
I have not touched a cup. There is a cup on my side of the counter that has been sitting there since yesterday evening, upside down on the saucer, put out by a man for a morning he was not sure he would be here for.
I take the bag. I hold it up to the window where the light is coming in gray and I read it in the order the paper wants to be read in.
Scorch. Then his line. Then the cut edge, clean, blade against a straightedge, the whole top two thirds of the form gone. Then the rule. Then the name.
G. D’Amato.
And that open G. That stupid, arrogant, fifteen-year-old boy’s open G, never closed at the top, that he made in front of me on a napkin the first month I knew him because I said his handwriting looked like a doctor’s, and he said doctors close everything.
I do not make a sound. I put the bag down on the counter. I put both hands on the edge of the counter.
“You tried to burn it.”
“Yes.”
“How far did it get?”
“It caught. It was going.” He does not soften a single word of it. He stands where he is with his hands at his sides. “About a second and a half. Then I put it out in my hand.”
“And then you wrote it down.”
“Yes.”
“Before you bagged it.”
“Two minutes before.”
I look at that line of small upright letters for a while.
Here is the thing I am not going to say out loud in this kitchen, which is that in nine years and three husbands and one father, not one person has ever handed me the evidence of their own worst two seconds with their name written under it in their own hand.
Men bring me the version where the corner is not burned.
Ettore has never in his life handed me anything that did not arrive pre-forgiven.
The page between us is still open. I want that on the record. I am not closing it this morning over a piece of tape and a confession.
But I look at him and I say, “This is the first thing anyone has ever handed me that I did not have to take.”
He does not move.
“That is not forgiveness,” I say.
“I know what it is.”
“What is it?”
“It is a receipt.”
And God help me, that is the correct answer.
He tells me the room.
He tells it in the order he found it in, and he does not stop to check my face.
The whitewashed window downstairs. Twenty feet from the door to the bench and how long he stood at the door. The pegboard with everything outlined. The stool pushed in. A man who worked standing up and never once sat down to admire anything.
Then the tray, and the five jigs, and the numbers in pencil on the end grain, and the brown stain in the bottom of the channel of jig one gone into the grain and sanded and gone in again.
Then the crate, and the thirty ruined practice pieces.
Then the empty rectangle in the dust where the fifth one is not.
I stand very still through all of it. This is the one thing I have always been able to do, which is receive information about the deaths of men I have loved with my hands steady.
And then he says: “Four of them have been used.”
“Say that again.”
“Four of the jigs have been used. You have buried three.”
The kitchen goes strange around the edges.
“They are numbered in order,” he says. “One through five. In pencil. A man numbers a thing that way when he intends to keep doing it. Two, three and four are Domenico, Sandro and Giulio, in order, and four had a shim glued in because it had to sit tighter than the third.”
“Which leaves one.”
“Which leaves one. Before Domenico. Before you.”
I sit down on the floor.
I do not decide to. My legs simply stop being part of the arrangement, and I go down the front of the cabinets and land on the tile with my back against them, and Soldo wakes up in the fruit bowl and puts his chin over the edge to see what I am doing down there.
Nine years.
Nine years of a room going quiet when I come into it.
Nine years of my own father, who took money for it, sitting across a table from me with a jaw full of chalk, unable to say one sentence to me that had the word husband in it.
Nine years of the newspapers, and the two names they gave me, and the one I actually hated, which was not the cruel one, it was the pitying one.
Nine years of getting up in the morning and being the reason.
And the whole time there was a man in the ground before Domenico. Before me.
I was not the beginning of anything.
And here is what comes up through the floor of me and out into the kitchen, where I cannot get it back, and it is not grief, and it is not rage.
It is relief.
It is pure, hot, disgusting relief, and it goes through me like something poured, and I hear the sound I make and it is a laugh, and it is the wrong shape, and it comes apart in the middle into something else.
“Valeria.”
“Do not.” I put my hand up. I am looking at the leg of the table. “Do not come over here.”
“I am not going to.”
“Do you understand what I am doing?” I let it sound like that. “There is a man dead who I never met and I never knew his name and I did not even know he existed until forty seconds ago, and he is dead, and the first thing my body does about it is feel better.”
“Yes.”
“That is the actual size of me.”
“Valeria.” He crouches down where he is, ten feet away, at the other end of the kitchen, and stays there. “You have carried nine years of a thing that was not yours. Your body just put it down. That is not the size of you. That is the weight coming off.”
“It is still relief.”
“Yes,” he says. “It is. And you are the only person in this house who would have said so out loud.”
I sit on the floor of my dead mother-in-law’s kitchen and cry for a stranger for about ninety seconds, which is the first crying I have done since the hospital, and none of it is for Giulio, and I let it be true.
Then I get up.
Then I wash my face at the kitchen sink like a farmhand, and I take the bag off the counter.
“I need his handwriting. All of it. Everything he ever wrote that I can put next to this.”
“Queens,” he says.
“Queens.”
Doreen Pyle has a space heater going in August and a cardigan on over the cardigan, and when she sees me come through the door, she stands up so fast her chair goes into the wall.
“Oh, honey. Oh, you look like a ghost.”
“Good morning, Doreen.”
“Is this him?” She is looking past me at Lorenzo, who is filling the doorway the way he fills doorways, in a coat that cost more than the building. She lowers her voice to a volume that is audible in New Jersey. “He’s very tall.”
“He is.”
“Your other one was funnier.”
“He was,” I say.
Behind me, Lorenzo says, “That is fair.”
Doreen decides she likes him. I watch it happen in real time, and I have no idea what she based it on.
Then she gives us the good flashlight, which is the highest honor available in this building, and tells us that if the light in the corridor goes out, we should hit the panel twice, not once, because once is what a man would do.
Unit 6C is the same.
Everything in the world reorganizes itself every eleven hours and this room does not.
The two chairs are still facing each other with the little table between them because he furnished a storage unit for two people, which is the single most Giulio thing that has ever been done by anybody.
The cardigan is still over the back of the left one.
The espresso cups are still on the shelf, and the sugar is still in the tin, because he took three, which is not a preference, that is a medical event.
And along the far wall, the boxes.
And the gap where box eleven is not.
I have been standing in front of that gap for eleven days. I have said the words “box eleven” out loud to my father, to Kelleher, to this man. I have assumed it was taken during the diversion with the specimens.
I will come back to it.
Right now I need paper.
We put the two chairs together and we use the little table, and I take out everything of his that has a mark on it.
Grocery lists. The back of a photograph.
A birthday card he wrote to me in the second year, badly, in a hurry, in the car.
The margins of his own case files, which are full of him arguing with people who are not in the room.
A receipt for thirty-six months of something he never told me about.
Our marriage license, where he signed his name next to mine on a line that made us both laugh because the pen was terrible.
Lorenzo sits on the other chair with his hands on his knees and does not touch anything.
“Tell me what you are looking for,” he says. “So I can want the same thing you want.”
“I am looking for a forgery,” I say. “I want it to be a forgery. So do you. That is a problem, so I am going to say out loud what would make me wrong, and then you are going to hold me to it.”
“Go.”