Chapter 5: The Toast

I said the first thing that came into my head.

"I left my reading glasses upstairs. I'll get them myself, please don't ring anyone."

The clerk beamed and slid a card across the marble.

"Of course, Mrs. Corvino. Six-fourteen, same as always."

I took the card, said thank you and walked to the elevator at an ordinary pace.

I did not get in.

When the doors had closed on an empty car, I came back, put the card on the desk and said I had remembered the glasses were in my bag.

Ettore was waiting with the engine on.

I got in and told him the number.

"Six-fourteen," he said, and wrote it on the back of his hand.

We did not talk on the way home.

Before the house woke I put both bottles back where I had found them.

Sunday lunch came around again.

Agata sat at the head of the table in her black dress, her rosary at her wrist, and she said grace as she had every Sunday of my marriage.

She was Dario's mother and she had run that house since before I was born.

She had never once said she liked me.

The capos were there, the cousin was there, and Mirella sat at my left, laughing at something the cousin said.

She wore a gold cardigan and a pearl teardrop in each ear.

I stared at the pearls for as long as I dared.

Then I stood up and lifted my glass.

The room went quiet, because I had not stood to speak at that table in six years.

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