Chapter 17: The Kitchen

Gaspare was gone before the light came.

The bed was empty and the sheet beside me was warm.

He had left no note, and no goodbye.

I noticed that, and I lay in the grey room and noticed that I noticed.

At eleven on Sunday morning, I stood outside my parents' kitchen door in Mondello.

I wore a black headscarf and sunglasses.

Nella waited at the gate.

My father went to the ten o'clock Mass every Sunday of his life and came home at noon for lunch.

I had an hour.

I let myself in with the key I had never given back.

The kitchen smelled of onions and tomatoes.

My mother stood at the stove with her back to me, in her black dress and apron, stirring a pot that had been simmering since dawn.

She was fifty-eight and she had cooked for forty people at this stove.

She cooked grief the same way.

"Mama."

She said, "Put the bread on the table, Venera," and did not turn.

"It isn't Venera."

The wooden spoon stopped.

She turned around slowly.

I took off the headscarf and the glasses.

The spoon hit the floor and splattered red across the tiles.

My mother put both hands to her mouth.

She made a noise I had never heard from her, a high, cracked sound, and she crossed the kitchen and took my face in her wet hands.

"Rosaria. Rosaria. Madonna. They said you burned."

"I know."

"I buried you. I wore black. I..."

She was crying and kissing my forehead and my cheeks, and for a moment I let her.

I was thirty-four years old, standing in my mother's arms, and I wanted it more than I wanted to be right.

Then she stepped back.

I watched her face change.

It happened all at once.

Her eyes went to the window, the door, the hall.

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