Chapter 14: Every March

For a long moment nobody at the table spoke.

My father took his hand off my shoulder.

"My wife is tired," he said, to the room. "Dessert is in the garden room. Please. The book stays closed until she's rested."

The capos stood in a scrape of chairs.

Nobody looked at my mother, and everybody looked at the consigliere.

He closed the ledger with two fingers and showed nothing on his face at all.

"Kitchen," I said to my mother.

She nodded and came down the table with her chin up and her hands shaking.

Two of my father's guards followed us and stopped at the swinging door.

The kitchen was dark.

I turned on the light over the stove, the one I had turned on every morning for a year.

My mother stood by the prep table and did not sit.

"Why?" I said.

"Because he was going to enter you the day you were born."

She said it to the counter.

"That's the custom. The first entry goes in the week the baby comes home, a small one, so the page is started."

"Bianca's was a christening gift, and Elio's was a cake."

"I didn't understand what they were until the week you came home."

"I was nineteen when I married your father. My father called it my reward, and I said thank you."

"My line was crossed before I could vote."

I looked at her pearl earrings.

"You knew what the book was," I said.

"I learned. I sat in the basement that first winter, and I read the tally on Bianca's page."

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