Chapter 12: The Folding Chair

"Then you put it in the wrong place," I said to my mother.

She stood in the lit doorway with the dish towel twisted in her hands.

"I thought you liked being near the kitchen," she said. "You never said otherwise. You'd hop up before I could ask."

"I hopped up because nobody else would."

"You never told me."

"You never asked me, Mom."

She opened her mouth and closed it again.

Behind her, the whole house had stopped moving.

My aunt took Lucia down the steps without a word to me, and my uncles drifted after them to the cars.

Tommy walked past me with his hands deep in his pockets and stopped on the sidewalk.

"I'm sorry, Pao," he said. "I mean it. I don't expect you to say anything."

"I won't."

"I know."

He went on down the block alone.

Franco put his glasses back on and said nothing, and then, for the first time in the fourteen years I had known him, he did not offer to make a plan.

Dario stayed longest.

He stood at the top of the stoop with his jaw working, looking at the folding chair, and then at me.

"Can I come with you?" he asked. "Wherever you're going."

"No," I said. "Not tonight."

"Pao."

"I'm not saying never," I said. "I'm saying not tonight."

He nodded, once, and went back in the house.

The door closed.

The street was empty, the reindeer on the next lawn blinked red and white, and a cold wind came up the avenue from the water.

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