Chapter 15 #2
I said them into the warm skin of her throat, the shell of her ear, the corner of her mouth.
I said, you are the best thing that has ever happened to me.
I said, I have been looking for you my whole life.
I said, I am never letting you go, Serafina, I don’t care what Palermo says, I don’t care what anyone says, I don’t care.
I said her name. I said it like it was the only word I had ever learned.
I said, I love you, baby girl. I said it three times. Four. I lost count.
She made a sound—small, breaking—and her hands came up into my hair and she pulled my mouth down to hers and kissed me, and the kiss was wet and salt and the salt was tears, hers, silent, the way they always were.
I kept moving.
I felt her start to climb. I knew her climb now.
I knew the small tightening of her thighs around my hips, the involuntary clench around me deep inside, the way her breath went shallow and quick and her fingers spread flat on my back like she was trying to brace against a wave coming from inside her own body.
I slid one hand down between us and found the knot of her with my thumb and stroked it in slow circles in time with my hips, and she broke.
“Marco—Marco—Marco—”
Not Daddy. Not this morning. This morning she said my name, and she said it three times the way I had said hers, and her body clenched around me so hard I saw white at the edge of my vision, and I followed her over within two strokes.
I buried myself deep and I stayed and I came inside her in a long warm pulse that emptied me out to the back of my skull, and I lowered my weight onto her and pressed my forehead to hers and did not move for a long time.
Her breath under me. Steadying.
My heart under hers. Hammering and then not.
I understood, lying there with my forehead against hers, that I was going to drive her north today.
I was going to put her in the Mercedes and take her ninety minutes up the lake and show her the land.
The decision was not a decision. It had already happened.
It had happened the moment she said yours without hesitating, and the only thing left was the doing.
I stayed inside her longer than I needed to.
When I finally drew out—slow, careful, her small sound at the loss of me going straight into the skin of my throat—I sat up on my heels and looked at her.
She was wrecked. Her hair everywhere. Her mouth soft.
The small flush on her chest that told me her blood was still up, and between her thighs the evidence of the last twenty minutes in a warm slick that was mine and hers mixed together, and looking at that I felt something primitive and unfamiliar move through me.
I wanted to leave her like this. I wanted her to carry me around inside her for the rest of the day.
I stood up. Walked to the bathroom. Ran the shower.
When it was warm I came back and I lifted her off the bed. She made a small surprised sound in her throat and wrapped her arms around my neck, and I carried her the eight steps to the bathroom and set her in the shower and stepped in behind her.
The water was hot. Her hair went dark and heavy under it. I stood behind her and let the spray fall over both of us for a long minute without doing anything, and she leaned back against my chest with her eyes closed and I felt the last tension go out of her shoulders.
I washed her hair.
It had become a thing. I did not say it was a thing.
She did not say it was a thing. But it had become a thing — the ritual I had apparently built for us without naming it, the small sequence of care that ended most days and now, apparently, started some.
I tipped a palmful of shampoo into my hand.
Worked it into a lather. Started at her crown and worked down, fingers slow, the pads of them against her scalp in the small patient circles she liked.
She made a small contented sound. Her head tipped back into my hands.
“Tell me if the pressure is right.”
“It’s right.”
“Tell me if the water’s too hot.”
“It’s perfect, Marco.”
I rinsed her. Hand shielding her eyes the way I had done the first time, because the first time she had not known to expect it and her face had done a small astonished thing and I had filed the astonishment away and meant to never stop doing it.
Conditioner. More patience than it required.
I worked a tangle out of the ends with my fingers rather than pull.
I ran a soaped washcloth over her shoulders, her arms, between her breasts, the soft round of her belly, down her thighs — the insides of them, where I had been a few minutes ago, slow and thorough and not trying to start anything, just cleaning her because she was mine to clean.
I washed myself after. Faster. Functional. She watched me through the steam with her head tilted against the tile, the way she had watched me at the kitchen counter the morning of the fitting, and I did not perform and I did not rush.
I wrapped her in the cream towel. Carried her back to the bed.
Sat her on the edge and dried her hair with a second towel, gentle, rubbing the ends in small sections.
I put her in the grey cardigan and nothing else because she liked the grey cardigan and because I wanted her legs bare for the walk to the kitchen.
I pulled on a pair of soft trousers and left the shirt off.
The kitchen smelled like coffee before I got there because she had set the espresso machine to auto the night before.
She had started doing that a few mornings ago, without asking, and I had not commented on it because commenting on it would have made her stop.
I poured two cups. Warmed milk for hers.
Cracked four eggs into a bowl and whisked them with a fork and poured them into the pan with a knob of butter and a handful of parmesan and the last of the chopped herbs from the fridge.
She sat at the counter on the stool I had put there for her the first week.
She cupped her espresso in both hands. She had the cardigan pulled down over her thighs and her bare heels hooked on the rail of the stool, and when she lifted one foot to scratch the back of her other calf the gold chain caught the morning light at the ankle—one clean bright flash—and I had to set the spatula down for a second because the sight of it did something to my chest I was not prepared for at that hour.
I slid the frittata onto a plate. Cut it. Put the bigger half in front of her.
She ate.
I stood on my side of the counter with my elbows on the marble and drank my espresso and watched her eat. She noticed after a minute. She looked up. Raised an eyebrow.
“What.”
“Nothing. Eat.”
“You’re staring at me, Marco.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I like to. Eat, baby girl.”
“Okay,” she said. “What.”
“Pack a bag.”
She went still.
It was a small stillness. A half a breath’s worth.
Most people would not have clocked it. I clocked it because I had been clocking her for three weeks and I knew the shape of her stillnesses the way I knew the shape of my brother’s silences.
This one was the stillness of a woman registering that something unscheduled was happening and recalibrating in real time.
“A bag.”
“An overnight. Two days’ worth. Something warm. Good shoes—walking shoes, the ones with the flat sole. The rest doesn’t matter.”
“Where are we going.”
I set my espresso down.
“Somewhere I’ve never taken anyone.”
She looked at me across the counter.
The stillness deepened for a second—not a flinch, a registering, the same small click I had felt in the dining room with my brothers when I had told them the report had her name on it, the sound of a piece of information arriving and being slotted into a place that had been waiting for it.
Her eyes searched mine. I did not look away.
I did not explain. I had given her the sentence and I wanted to see what she did with it.
She nodded. Once.
“Okay.”
She slid off the stool. The cardigan settled around her thighs. The anklet caught the light again. She walked out of the kitchen toward the bedroom to pack, and I stood at the counter with my empty espresso cup and watched her go.
We left the city at eight-forty.
I took the lake route because it was the long way and I wanted the long way.
Sheridan up through Evanston, past the pale stone buildings of Northwestern, the curve where the lake came back into view between houses like a steel knife laid flat.
She had the window cracked an inch. Her hair was still damp at the ends.
She was wearing jeans and a soft grey sweater and the boots with the flat sole I had asked for, and she had put the grey lamb in her bag without asking whether to—I had seen her do it through the open doorway of the bedroom, and I had not said anything, and the lamb was now riding in the footwell between her boots.
Donatella’s charcoal scarf was looped twice around her neck. She had pulled it out of the entryway closet on the way to the door and wrapped it on without a word.
She did not ask me again where we were going. She had decided, apparently, somewhere between the kitchen and the elevator, that she was going to let the drive unspool and find out when I told her.
We drove for thirty minutes without talking.
I had the radio off. Her hand rested on her thigh.
Mine stayed on the wheel. The silence was the good kind—the kind that happens between two people who have figured out that most silences do not need to be filled, that filling them is the performance, that sitting in one together is the signal.
At the Wisconsin line I exhaled.
“There’s a piece of land,” I said.
Her head did not turn. I felt her listening. I kept my eyes on the road because I was going to have to keep my eyes on the road for this entire conversation and I had known that before I started it.
“North of here. About an hour more. On a slope that catches the afternoon sun. Eighteen acres. A stone farmhouse on it—not big, two bedrooms, a kitchen with a hearth that works. An old well. A barn I rebuilt the roof on myself the first summer.”
“You own a farm.”
“I own land. There’s a farmhouse on it.”
She was quiet. I heard her shift in her seat, settle, face the windshield.
“Ten years ago,” I said. “I bought it with money my father didn’t know I had. He thought I was spending it on the club. Some of it I was. Most of it I wasn’t.”
“Your father didn’t trust you?”
“It wasn’t that. He just thought . . . what everyone thinks. That I’m a charmer. A womanizer. Unserious.”
“He didn’t know you well?”
“Not well enough.”
I paused for a moment.
“The first summer I cleared it. There was half a century of scrub up there, old fence lines rusted into the ground, a collapsed outbuilding I had to pull apart by hand because I couldn’t bring equipment up the access road until I’d widened it.
I widened it myself. I slept in the farmhouse with the windows open because there was no glass in them yet.
I rebuilt the barn roof. I had no idea what I was doing with any of it. I learned as I went.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“The second summer I went to Sicily. Monreale—just outside Palermo, up the hill, where my grandfather was from. I went to the cooperative up there and I sat with the old men for two weeks and I drank more grappa than a person should drink in a lifetime, and at the end of the two weeks they sold me cuttings. Nero d’Avola.
The one my mother liked. The one my father drank at the table every Sunday of my childhood.
I brought the cuttings back in a case I checked as luggage and prayed over at O’Hare, and I planted them up the south slope with my own hands over three weekends that fall. ”
Her head turned toward me. I felt it. I did not turn.
“They took,” I said. “Against everything I knew about the climate, against every piece of advice I had gotten from three different consultants who told me I was an idiot, they took. The third year I got a crop that was not embarrassing. The fifth year I made a barrel that was actually drinkable. The seventh year I made twelve barrels and I put them in the cellar and I did not tell anyone.”
“Marco.”
“I go up there on weekends when I tell the family I’m in Milwaukee.
I tell them I have a supplier meeting. I tell them I have a quiet thing with a woman who doesn’t want to be photographed.
I have told them everything except the truth, which is that I have an eighteen-acre piece of land north of Kenosha where I grow my grandfather’s grapes and rebuild a stone farmhouse one room at a time, and I do it alone, and I have never brought another person onto the property. ”
Silence.
I took the Kenosha exit. I kept my eyes on the road.
“Dante doesn’t know. Santo doesn’t know.
Donatella doesn’t know—and Donatella knows everything about everyone.
Rosa doesn’t know. The only other human being who has set foot on that land is the old man I hired in year two to help me prune, and he died last winter, and I went to his funeral in Racine and I stood at the back and nobody there knew who I was. ”
Her hand moved.
I saw it in my peripheral vision. Slow, deliberate. She laid her palm flat on my thigh, halfway up, just above the knee. She did not grip. She did not stroke. She put her hand there and she left it there and the weight of it was the only thing I could feel.
“Why now,” she said.
Her voice was very quiet. The floor-of-her voice. The one I had heard on my desk while she read the report, the one I had heard last night in the dark when she had said I don’t want to go back to Palermo and I had not answered her in words.
I drove.
I let the exit ramp curve us away from the highway and onto the county road that ran west through the flat corn country, and I waited until we were on it and the trees had closed in on either side and the car was quiet again, and I said it.
“Because I’m in love with you.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“Because I want you to see the part of me nobody else has. Because I have been building it for ten years without knowing I’ve been building it for you.
I want you to know that before Palermo answers.
I want you to know that whatever your father decides, whatever Gianni does with the report, whatever shape this takes when it takes a shape—there is a place.
There is a place that is mine and not the family’s, and I am taking you to it today because it’s yours now too, if you want it. ”