Chapter 20: The Shoebox

Gianluca's POV

I told Renata I was going to the airport to buy a ticket for Monday, and it was true.

I did not tell her it was a ticket for today.

She had already spent a week being decided about, and I wasn't going to ask her to decide about her mother's kitchen.

Two of my father's men flew north with me.

By evening we were on a Staten Island street of brick houses with small flags in the windows.

Smoke came out of the Ostuni kitchen vent.

Tommy opened the back gate before I knocked.

"She locked the front," he said. "I told her you'd come."

"Where is she?"

"At the sink."

I went in through the kitchen.

Concetta stood with her back to me and a pot of water in her hands.

Behind her, in the steel sink, a pile of paper smoldered with thin black smoke.

The room smelled of burnt cardboard.

I crossed to the sink and turned on the tap.

"That's mine," she said.

"Most of it isn't."

I pulled out what I could with a wooden spoon, and the water hissed and turned gray.

The top sheets were gone.

Under them were envelopes, wet but whole, with RENATA OSTUNI typed on the front in a font I knew from my own cards.

"Where's the rest?" I said.

She said nothing.

Tommy pointed with his chin at the hall closet.

I opened it.

The bottom shelf held a laundry basket, filled to the top with mail.

There were more than sixty envelopes.

A school letter on top, stamped with the architecture program's seal, said the housing deposit was due on the first.

A second one told Renata her request for a scholarship had been approved for four thousand dollars a year.

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