Chapter 13: Burn It

I picked up the typed sheet and walked to the woodstove.

Adele watched me with her hands folded over her lilac buttons.

I opened the iron door with a dish towel, and the fire inside was low and orange.

I fed the paper in one corner at a time.

It curled, went brown, and then went up.

"Cara," Adele said, "I have copies."

"I know you do."

"Then why burn it?"

"So you'd have to watch me do it."

She said nothing to that.

I took the wedding ring out of her handkerchief, laid it in the center of the basket and pushed the basket across the table to her.

"Take it with you. It was never a gift. It was a leash."

She looked at the ring for a long moment.

Then she lifted the white baby blanket out of the tissue, held it against her chest and kissed it.

"This one I'll leave," she said. "It's for my grandchild, and he will need it."

"She or he will have a blanket from me."

"We'll see, cara."

Renzo opened the door and held it.

He walked his mother down the porch steps with a hand under her elbow, because he was a man who did that even for her.

I stood in the doorway and heard them on the gravel.

"You'll lose everything for a woman who will go back to your brother," Adele said to him, in Italian.

"Go home, Mama."

"Thursday at ten, then," she said, and she said it to me over his shoulder, bright and clear. "A judge will be waiting, whether you come or not."

The silver car backed out of the yard and its taillights turned on the trees.

Renzo came back up the steps and shut the door and leaned his back against it.

He did not ask me anything.

I went to the sink and gripped the edge of it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Seven Weeks Pregnant, until I Found His Secret Chat from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.