Chapter 6: The Soup Was Cold

Twelve days after my funeral, I carried a basket of bread into my mother's dining room.

Ugo had hired the caterer himself.

He had slipped me into the crew with a white jacket, a hairnet, and a pair of plain glasses from a drugstore.

My side pulled every time I lifted my arm.

I told the head waiter I'd pulled a muscle.

He told me to carry bread and keep my mouth shut, which was the easiest order I had ever been given.

The room was exactly as I remembered it.

The long walnut table, the chandelier my father had bought in Murano, and the portrait of my grandfather over the sideboard.

At the head of the table sat my mother.

On her right sat Irene, in cream silk and my pearls.

On Irene's right, in a charcoal suit, sat Pietro.

This was the engagement dinner.

They had set the date, and twenty-two people were there to cheer it.

I went to my mother's chair with the basket.

She was talking to a capo about a shipment of flour.

"Bread, Signora?" I said, in a rough voice I had practiced in the van.

She took a roll without looking up.

Rosalba had never in her life looked at a waiter.

I stood there for three seconds with her elbow six inches from my hand, and she did not turn her head.

I kept walking.

Irene was holding a spoon over her bowl and wrinkling her small nose.

"This soup is cold," she said, clearly, to the room. "Whoever made this was not paying attention."

A waiter hurried over to apologize.

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