Chapter 4: Never Touched

The rectory office had a crucifix, a box fan and a plate of pizzelles nobody had touched.

The priest was in his seventies.

He'd baptized me.

He'd married me, too, in the church next door, in my mother's gown cut down to fit.

"Giada," he said. "Annette's mother says you're sleeping in a hair salon."

The whole block had known by breakfast.

"I want an annulment, Father."

He folded his hands on the desk.

"An annulment isn't a divorce with incense on it, sweetheart. The Church has to find the marriage was never a marriage."

"It wasn't."

"On what grounds?"

I'd practiced it in Annette's mirror at six in the morning.

It had sounded fine in the mirror.

In front of the man who'd baptized me, my face went hot.

"He never touched me," I said. "Not on the wedding night. Not once in six years. We have separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the house."

The priest didn't blink.

He'd heard worse in a box with a screen in it.

"Never consummated," he said.

"Never."

"Does Mauro agree that's the truth?"

"Mauro doesn't lie. He told me so on Saturday."

The priest took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

"The tribunal downtown will want to hear it from both of you. Under oath."

He looked at me over the top of his hand.

"You understand what that means for a man like him? In this neighborhood?"

"It means he has to say it out loud."

"It means everybody's going to know."

I thought about the twelve men at the table laughing at "I love you."

"Then they'll know," I said.

He wrote something on a yellow pad and tore it off for me.

When I opened the office door, the rectory secretary was standing right outside it with a watering can.

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