Chapter 4: Uncle Ignazio

"How do you know that?" Teo said.

Ignazio set the pastry box on the table.

"Teo. Your men talk. A locket, a little girl in a graveyard, you sitting up all night." He spread his hands. "I can count. I loved her too."

He lowered himself in front of Dilly, one knee at a time, grunting.

He looked at the locket and his eyes filled.

"I was there the day your grandfather gave her this," he said to Dilly. "She was twelve. She cried because it was too grown-up."

Tears ran into his mustache.

He took out a folded handkerchief and dabbed them, and laughed at himself.

"Look at me. An old fool."

Dilly stepped behind my leg.

The white bird on her shoulder went flat and small.

"Shy," Ignazio said fondly. "Agata was shy too."

Agata had never been shy a day in her life. I learned that later.

Teo didn't correct him.

On Wednesday afternoon a long silver car came up the gravel lane to our cottage.

Ignazio got out with a box under his arm, wrapped in pink paper with a bow the size of a cabbage.

"For the birthday girl," he said. "I missed six of them. I have to catch up."

Gran let him in because Gran lets anyone in who brings a box.

Dilly sat at the kitchen table and opened it carefully, the way she opens everything.

It was a porcelain doll with brown ringlets and a velvet dress.

The kind you can't play with.

"Thank you," Dilly said, because I'd raised her right.

Ignazio reached out to touch her hair.

The gray cat came off the windowsill like a dropped sandbag.

It landed on the table between them and hissed, ears flat, every hair standing up.

Ignazio jerked his hand back.

"Cats," he said, and chuckled. "They never liked me."

The cockatiel had come in through the open window behind him.

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