31. Nothing Happened #3
I was in this house on the ninth of February. I know exactly what I was doing, because it was a Monday and there was a lunch, and I sat at that table four miles from Barnes Street and passed the salt to a man who has since been buried, and a woman of seventy-one was on her own kitchen floor.
Three days before anybody came.
And there has been a shoebox behind a board in the blue room, forty feet from where I sleep, for every single one of the four years I have known this house.
And then I see the other thing on the table, squared to the cards the way he squares everything, and it is not his.
It is a civil registration. State of New York. Dated the nineteenth of July, a county clerk’s printing across the top, my name in one box and Giulio’s in the other in a hand that belongs to neither of us.
The two lines at the bottom are empty.
The steel clip at the top of it is empty as well, because the pen that was supposed to go into those two lines came back to this house in a paper sack with a cracked wristwatch and a bakery punch card, and my husband has carried it since the crypt, and in between it spent twelve minutes against Ciro Tebaldi’s artery on Cross Street, and it kept him alive for eighteen more days, and it has still never signed anything.
I have not held this since a man said it is in my glove compartment in a sacristy at twenty past twelve with my hands still red to the wrist.
He has driven it around for five weeks. In those five weeks four hundred people have called me a widow, and two families have, and a newspaper has, and a machine in Providence has put the word on a check with a bird on the card, and the only person in the state who knew better was the man who arranged for it to be true.
There is a note with it. His printing, small, no salutation.
I did not know what you would want done with this, so I have not done anything.
And I stand in a dead woman’s kitchen with my hand not quite touching a piece of paper that says I am nobody’s wife, and I think: that is the first time in thirty-one years that man has left a thing undone on purpose.
I do not pick it up.
I do not know yet, and it turns out you are allowed not to know, if somebody has the decency to ask.
And standing over the paper that says I am nobody’s wife, because today is apparently the day the blanks get filled in, I let myself have the thing I have known since a bedroom in July and have never once allowed into words.
Nine years on something I never let lapse and never asked myself why.
Here is why. I never gave Domenico a child, or Sandro, or Giulio, because a child is a thing you plan, and a plan is a sentence, and the sentence was: this one will die too.
I have been betting against my own husbands since I was twenty-four, quietly, monthly, in my own body, and I collected three times, and I called it being careful.
Lorenzo comes in behind me and stops in the doorway and I hear him understand it.
“He is gone,” he says. “The blue room is empty. The board is off the wall.”
“I know.”
He comes and stands beside me and looks down at thirty-five cards on his mother’s table.
“He has given it to you.”
“He has given it to me,” I say, “and he has left a blank line at the bottom, and he has spent his entire life understanding exactly what a blank line at the bottom of a page does to a person like me.”
“Then do not fill it in.”
I look at my husband.
“No. I am going to fill it in. Not tonight, and not on my own, and not until I have sat in eight kitchens and said the whole thing from the front.” I pick up the elastic band and put it in my pocket and leave the cards where they are. “And I am going to be honest with you about why.”
“Go on.”
“Because if I do it I will be the woman with the money who decides where women go,” I say. “Which is what she was. Which is what he was. And Nella Moro asked me at eleven o’clock this morning whether her keys were a rule or a personality, and I could not answer her.”
“So what is the answer?”
“That I write it down,” I say. “All of it. My name at the top, every offer, every refusal, in their words, and what it cost, and the ones I got wrong, and the ones where I was glad, and I put it somewhere that can be read by somebody who does not like me.” I put my hand flat on card thirty-five.
“That is the only difference there has ever been between a fund and a man in a good coat, and I am going to.”
Two notebooks of mine are upstairs on a chest of drawers. Five weeks of it, folded down the middle, private, and there is not one page in either of them that I ever meant anybody else to pick up.
Lorenzo is quiet a moment.
“He asked for one thing this morning,” he says. “On the pavement. Her name written down. Properly. On a thing that gets kept.”
“I know.”
“Where?”
“Not on a card in a kitchen,” I say. “I have been a lawyer my whole adult life and I have never once done anything with a piece of paper that a man could not undo. So we are going to put Annamaria Serra somewhere that outlives every person standing in this room, and every person in this family, and the family itself.”
Under the table, Soldo puts his chin back down on the cross-brace and goes to sleep for the first time in five weeks.