He Scorned His Substitute Wife, Now He Begs Her Back novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Zia Nella's Kitchen

Zia Nella stitches Livia's head in her Honesdale kitchen and brings out a coffee can of money saved for her. At the gate, a black SUV pulls up with Luca.

The bus got into Honesdale at seven, and the rain had turned to a cold gray drizzle.

Livia walked the wet blocks to the yellow house with the crooked porch rail.

The kitchen light was already on.

Zia Nella opened the door in her cardigan, with her reading glasses on their chain and a wooden spoon in one hand.

She looked at the dried blood on Livia's neck and said, "Madonna mia."

Then she put down the spoon and held her.

Livia hadn't been held in three years.

She stood in the doorway of the house she had grown up in and shook until her teeth hurt.

"Sit," Zia Nella said. "Not there, that's the good chair. There."

She sat in the old chair by the stove, the one with the stuffing coming out of the arm.

Zia Nella came back with a tackle box.

It held thirty years of school nurse supplies, and she sorted through them fast.

"Look at the light."

Livia looked at the penlight.

"Follow it. Now count backward from a hundred by sevens."

"Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine."

"You still can't do the eighties," Zia Nella said, and Livia laughed, and then she cried.

The old woman cleaned the cut on her scalp with a gauze pad and did not stop talking.

"Who did this? Don't tell me. I'll know the minute you tell me and I'll do something stupid. I'm seventy-one. I can still do stupid."

"My husband."

"I said don't tell me."

"He threw me down the stairs."

Zia Nella's hand went very still.

Then she pressed a butterfly strip over the cut, harder than she had to.

"I'm driving you to urgent care when it opens at nine," she said. "You're getting a scan. Don't argue."

"I'm not arguing."

"Good. You never did, and I always hated it."

She went to the stove and put a pot on, and the kitchen began to smell like onions.

"Your mother called me last night," Zia Nella said, with her back turned. "After midnight."

"What did she say?"

"That you were a disgrace to her name, and I should keep you here and not let you near a phone." Zia Nella tapped the spoon on the pot. "I told her I'd been keeping you for twenty years without her permission and I'd go on."

Livia hung her coat on the hook by the door, and something small fell out of the pocket.

It was a square of paper folded very small, soft from handling.

She picked it up and put it back.

"You still carry that?" Zia Nella said.

"It's the only thing I own that doesn't belong to anyone else."

"The winter the heat broke," Zia Nella said. "A box came to the door with that coat in it, in your size. I never found out who sent it."

"It says Stay warm. L."

"I know what it says. I read it before you did."

She set a plate on the table.

It was eggs and toast and a heap of fried peppers, and Livia ate all of it.

"Now," Zia Nella said. "Why are you here, and don't tell me you missed me."

"I missed you."

"Livia."

"I was Mirella for three years, Zia."

The old woman sat down across from her slowly.

"I know that. I'm old, I'm not stupid. I saw the wedding in the paper, and I saw the bride, and I knew whose face it was."

"You never said."

"Who would I say it to? Your mother?"

Livia pushed her plate away.

"They promised me three million dollars at the end. Mother just gave me fifty thousand and a bus ticket."

"Ah," said Zia Nella.

"And my sister lands today, and she's going to walk into it wearing my face."

"Did you do it? The girl?"

"No."

"Good. Then we find out who did." Zia Nella stood and went to the cabinet over the refrigerator and took down a coffee can.

It was a red Maxwell House can with the label peeling.

She set it on the table and took off the lid.

It was full of folded bills and rubber-banded stacks of twenties.

"Your mother sent me a check every month for twenty years," Zia Nella said. "A hundred and fifty dollars. She thought she was paying rent on a child."

"Zia."

"I never cashed more than I needed. The rest went in the can." She pushed it toward her. "It's thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars. I counted last Sunday."

"I can't take that."

"It's yours. She paid it for you. It's the only honest thing she ever did, and she did it by accident."

Livia put her hand on the lid and couldn't speak.

Outside, gravel crunched in the driveway.

Zia Nella went to the window and moved the curtain with one finger.

A black SUV had stopped at the gate, with its engine running and its wipers going.

A man stood beside it in a dark suit with no umbrella, looking at the house.

"Is that him?" Zia Nella said.

Livia didn't need to look.

"That's him."

The old woman picked up the wooden spoon.

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