Chapter 16 #3
It moved across my tongue and it was Sunday lunch at eleven o’clock.
It was my grandmother’s hand on my hair.
It was the dining room in the house on Via Cavour with the shutters half-closed against the afternoon heat, and it was my father at the head of the table pouring for his brothers, and it was the cold stone floor under my bare feet when I snuck out of bed at night and went to the kitchen for water and caught the smell of the empty bottle left open on the counter.
It was the Bialetti.
It was home.
It was not home.
The fruit was different. I did not have the vocabulary for how it was different and it would have taken a better palate than mine to name it, but the fruit had grown under a different sky than the Sicilian fruit.
The pepper was sharper. The finish was cleaner.
The wine tasted like home had been picked up by a careful hand and carried across an ocean and planted in a different ground and had grown into something that remembered and did not pretend.
It tasted like him.
“Marco.”
“Mm.”
“I want to stay.”
He was still. He was not drinking. His glass was on the table beside mine, full, untouched.
“I know.”
“Not for the week. Not for the month.”
“I know.”
“Forever. I want this to be my life. This house.
This fire. Those vines. You. I want to wake up in the bedroom upstairs and drink coffee at that table and walk down that row and learn the names of the things you grow and I want to be the second chair at that table.
I want to be the cup beside yours on the drainboard. I want to —“
My voice cracked. I did not try to save it.
“I want to come home.”
He set his glass down.
He turned on the couch. He took my face in both hands—his palms warm, his thumbs under my jaw, the way he had taken my face in the car on the morning of the anklet—and he tilted my face up to his. His eyes were wet. He did not pretend they were not.
“Then it’s your life,” he said.
“Marco —“
“Then it’s your life, baby girl. Then it’s ours.”
He kissed me.
It was a long kiss, but not hungry. It was a kiss that sealed a thing.
The taste of the wine on both our mouths.
The fire on the left side of my face. The blanket around my shoulders.
The grey lamb on the cushion beside us. I closed my eyes and I let him kiss me and the inside of my chest was quieter than it had been in my entire adult life.
The fire snapped.
A log shifted on the grate and sent up a small flare of orange. I felt him smile against my mouth.
And then my phone rang.
The ring cut the room.
Loud in a house that had not heard a phone ring once since we arrived. My bag was on the floor by the door where I had left it. The ring came up out of the canvas and filled the space between the fire and the wall, and I felt Marco go still beside me.
I got up off the couch. The blanket fell. I crossed the room in bare feet over the terra-cotta and I dug the phone out of the outer pocket.
The screen said PAPA.
Not Gianni. Not the family office. Papa.
Three letters. The photograph on the contact was one I had taken of him nine years ago at a cousin’s wedding in Taormina, a photograph in which he was laughing, a photograph I had kept as the contact image because I had never stopped hoping it would show up on my screen without me having dialed first.
I turned.
Marco was watching me from the couch. The firelight on the side of his face. He understood what the screen said before I told him. I held it up. He nodded, once.
I swiped.
“Papa?”
“Figlia mia.”
His voice. It was warm.
I sat down on the bottom step of the staircase because my legs went.
“Papa.”
“I read it.”
I closed my eyes.
“I read it this morning. I read it twice. I closed the door of my study and I poured a coffee and I read it a third time.”
“Papa—“
“Let me speak, figlia. Let me say this. I have had all morning to find the words and I want to give them to you properly.”
I did not speak.
“It is the finest piece of work,” my father said, “that has ever crossed my desk. With your name on it or anyone else’s. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
“Yes.”
“The analysis is clean. The framework is patient. The counter-positioning against the Valenti exposure is better than anything any of my consiglieri have given me in fifteen years. The recommendation is correct. I knew it was correct in the first five pages. I read the rest because I wanted to watch you make the argument.”
I pressed my palm flat against my mouth.
“I am going to follow it,” he said. “The alliance with the Carusos. The terms as you have written them. The Atlantic non-interference. The Palermo distribution. All of it. I am going to call Dante Caruso tomorrow morning and I am going to give him my word.”
I made a sound.
It was not a word. It was the sound that comes out of a person when the thing they have wanted for twenty years arrives without warning, through a telephone, in a stone farmhouse in Wisconsin they did not know they were going to be in when the day started.
I put my hand on the wooden newel post of the staircase and I held it because I needed to hold something that was not going to move.
“Serafina.”
“I’m here, Papa.”
“I am proud of you.”
I could not speak.
“Do you hear me, figlia? I am proud of you. I should have said it years ago. I should have said it every one of the years I did not say it. I said it to your mother, once, about a report you wrote when you were twenty-two, and I did not say it to you. I was wrong. I was wrong about a great many things and I am beginning, slowly, to see which ones.”
I looked up.
Marco was standing now. He had crossed half the room and stopped. His face was wet. He had not tried to hide it. He had not come closer because he was letting me have this with my father without his weight on the thing, and I loved him for it so hard my ribs hurt.
“Papa,” I said. “Thank you.”
“No. No thank you. This is owed.”
We were quiet for a second.
“Papa. Can I —“
“I need you here.”
I did not register it at first.
“Here?”
“In Palermo. Tonight. There are things to discuss, figlia. Things I am not going to discuss on a phone. The shape of your role going forward. The way we announce the alliance to the Commission. The way we explain Gianni’s position.
There is much to do and there are conversations that cannot wait and cannot happen over this line.
A car will meet you at Palermo airport. I have booked the flight.
It leaves O’Hare at ten tonight. You will land in the morning.
You will come to the house. We will sit at the table and we will talk the way we should have been talking for ten years. ”
“Papa —“
“I know it is sudden.”
“Can it wait until—the end of the week. I can be there Friday. I can be there Saturday. I can—“
“No, figlia.”
His voice was not hard. It was the opposite of hard. It was gentle, and it was certain, and the gentle and the certain together made a wall I had been running into my whole life.
“Tonight. The window for this conversation is tonight. The Valenti side is already moving. Gianni is already moving. If I do not have you beside me at this table tomorrow morning when I make the calls I am going to make, the calls come out differently. I need you, figlia. I need my strategist here.”
My strategist.
He had never used the word about me in his life.
“Papa.”
“Come home, Serafina. The ticket is in your email. The car will be at the door.”
He was quiet for a second.
“Come home.”
He hung up.
The line went dead very softly.
I lowered the phone.
I looked at it in my palm. The screen was dark.
The time on the top showed four-eleven. The flight left at ten.
O’Hare was ninety minutes south of here.
I would need to be in the car by seven at the latest. I would need to be packed.
I would need to be on a plane over the Atlantic in six hours, flying east, away from the couch and the fire and the twelve barrels and the row of vines and the wall at the top of the slope and the coat spread in the grass and the man standing six feet from me with his eyes wet and his hands loose at his sides.
I looked up at Marco.
“He wants me home tonight.”
My voice was very small.
Marco did not answer.
He did not need to. He had heard enough of it through the air of the small room to know what the call had been.
He looked at me the way he had looked at me across the desk on the day I sent the report, which was the way a man looks at a woman who has just been handed a door she did not know was going to open and is going to have to decide in the next six hours whether to walk through it.
He crossed the room.
He did not hurry. He crossed the terra-cotta in four long steps, and he took the phone out of my hand and set it on the stair beside me, and he pulled me up off the step into his chest, and he wrapped both arms around me, and he held me.
The fire snapped behind him.
Outside, through the rippled glass of the window, the last of the grey sky was going over toward dark, and the vines on the slope were disappearing into the night one row at a time.