Chapter 12: Sunday Dinner

I took the chain off the door because it was Gianna.

She came in, set the covered dish on the dresser, and put both arms around me.

She smelled of garlic and rose water, the same as she had for ten years.

"Look at you," she said. "You haven't slept. You haven't eaten. Dario, look at her."

"Hey, Nettie," said Dario from the doorway.

"Annette," I said.

He blinked.

"I told you. It's Annette."

"Okay. Annette." He said it like a word in a language he was learning.

Gianna sat me on the edge of the bed and took the lid off the dish.

Baked ziti, still steaming.

"Eat," she said. "Then we'll talk."

I ate, because I was hungry and because she was watching.

It was the best food I had tasted in a week, and I hated that.

"Sunday dinner is tonight," Gianna said. "At my cousin's restaurant, the whole family. Your family. I told them you'd come."

"Gianna."

"It's one dinner, bella. I'm not asking you to move home. I'm asking you to sit at the table."

I thought of the guest room, and the folder, and a man in a towel who hadn't said a word.

My wrist still remembered the speed of his pulse, and I hated that too.

I thought, I have nowhere else to eat.

"One dinner," I said.

The restaurant was a narrow room in Brooklyn with red tablecloths and a photograph of the Marchetti grandparents above the bar.

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