Chapter 32: The Boat He Built

Gia came up the loft stairs at eight with the baby on her hip and a mouthful of hairpins.

"Sit," she said around them. "Don't talk. Don't cry. I just did your eyes."

"You haven't done my eyes."

"I'm about to. So don't cry."

She put the baby on my bed, where he lay on his back and kicked at the curtain and told it something important.

Then she stood behind me and did my hair.

Not the low chignon. I'd worn that for ten years at Sunday tables.

She left it down, the way it was in the Buick.

She pinned the front back with white beach roses she'd picked along the harbor road at six.

"There," she said.

I looked in the mirror.

I looked rested and calm.

"Ma would cry," Gia said.

"You said don't cry."

"I said you don't cry." She was already crying. "I can do what I want. I'm the matron of honor."

"You're not a matron. You're not married."

"I'm the matron of honor of having a baby," she said. "It counts."

The baby yelled in agreement.

The dress was plain white cotton, with short sleeves and a row of little buttons down the back.

Sandro's mother had cut it from a pattern on the hatch-cover table in July.

Gia had sewn every seam. The woman from the bar had done the hem.

It didn't cost anybody forty thousand dollars.

It fit like it had always been mine.

At eleven the old man knocked on the loft door in a suit that had last been worn at his own wedding, in 1971.

He had taken off his wool cap.

Without it his head was pink and bald and he looked like somebody's grandfather, which he was.

"Ready?" he said.

"You're walking me?"

"Somebody's got to. Your father's not here." He held out his elbow. "And Sandro says I'm the only man in this town you'd let tell you what to do."

"That's not true."

"No," he agreed. "But it sounded good."

I took his arm.

The whole yard had been swept.

The boy from the bucket line had done it at six, for free, and told everyone.

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