Chapter 24: Agnese's Table

Agnese's dining room had never held fourteen people at once.

She made them do it anyway.

She sat at the head of a table that had been Salvatore's mother's, under a crucifix and a photograph of a Sicilian harbor.

She directed the seating with her cane.

Cesare on her right.

Me on her left.

Gaspare beside me, in a clean shirt, his arm out of the sling for good.

The old captain with the white mustache sat across from the heavy captain who had never looked at me.

The two laughers from the street sat at the far end in ties, looking as if they'd been sent to the principal.

The cook sat in a chair, not standing.

It was the first meal I had ever seen her eat at the table.

She held her fork.

At the foot of the table, in her church dress, sat my mother.

She had driven herself from Newark in a Buick older than I was.

"Where do I put this?" she asked, holding out a foil tray of her own lasagna.

Agnese looked at it for a long moment.

Then she said something fast in Italian to the cook.

"She says it will go next to hers," the cook told my mother, in English. "So that people can compare."

"That's fair," said my mother.

The two women looked at each other.

Dinner began.

I waited for the old sound.

Fourteen people at one table, and the language rolling over my head like a river over a stone.

It didn't come.

Agnese rapped on her glass with a spoon.

"*Prima l'inglese,*" she said.

English first.

She said it twice, once in each language, with great ceremony.

"*In questa casa,*" said Agnese Santelli, "*per la signora, si parla prima l'inglese.*"

In this house, for the lady, English comes first.

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