The Don's Wife Never Looks Back novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Log

I left Nonna's by the back door before the first aunt reached the kitchen.

I carried the sewing box against my chest the whole way down Taylor Street, like Mama used to carry it to fittings.

I didn't put it down on the train.

Marisa came home from her shift on Monday at seven in the morning and didn't take her coat off.

She stood in the middle of the living room in her navy scrubs and pulled a folded paper out of her chest pocket.

"Don't ask me how," she said.

"How?"

"I said don't ask." She sat down on the arm of the pullout. "The director told the whole night staff not to talk about your mom. He had a lawyer in on Friday. So I went into the system at four this morning while he was asleep in his nice house."

She unfolded it on my knees.

It was a printout from the clinic's records.

An outgoing request, with a red URGENT flag in the corner.

Transfer authorization. Patient: Sartori. Sent to the Corsi office account, Livia's address, at 9:04 p.m.

Read at 9:06 p.m.

Under it, in the cardiologist's own words: Pump failure. Transfer within the hour or she will not survive.

There was no box for billing.

There was no box for anything but yes.

"It was never a form," I said.

"No."

"He said she read it to him. He said it was billing."

"I know what he said. I was there when it didn't come back." Marisa's voice cracked, and she pressed her lips together until it stopped. "I called that office four times between nine and eleven. It rang through to a machine."

"You could lose your license for this."

"Then I'll work at a Walgreens." She wiped her face with her sleeve. "Mira. I watched her ask for you."

I folded the paper and put it in my wallet, behind the photograph and both of Mama's notes.

My wallet was getting heavy with Mama.

That night Marisa's mother made a pot of escarole and beans big enough for a parish.

Her two brothers argued about the Bears across the table.

Nathaniel came at six with a bag of bread from the panadería on 18th Street and a bottle of wine he said a client had given him out of guilt.

Marisa's mother looked at the wine and then at him.

"You're the architect."

"Yes, ma'am."

"From the roof."

Nathaniel went faintly pink above his beard. "Yes, ma'am."

She looked him up and down, the flannel and the wire on his glasses and the ink on his hands.

"Too skinny," she said, and filled his bowl to the top.

Marisa's younger brother said, "He's dating Mira and he's scared of you, Ma."

"Good," said Marisa's mother. "Everybody should be."

I laughed so hard I had to put my spoon down.

Nathaniel kicked me under the table, very gently.

After dinner I stood up and put on my coat.

"Where are you going?" Marisa said.

I took Mama's house keys out of my pocket.

I'd been carrying them since the funeral.

"Home," I said.

The house on the corner of a narrow Bridgeport street was the same as it had been every day of my life.

Two stories of red brick. A cement stoop with an iron rail. Mama's plastic geranium still in the front window, because a real one died every winter.

I stood at the bottom of the stoop for a long moment.

Nathaniel stood behind me with Tripod on a leash and a bag of my clothes from Marisa's.

He didn't say anything.

He let me go up the steps by myself.

The key stuck the way it always had.

You had to lift the knob and lean.

Inside, it smelled like her.

Machine oil and lavender and the onions she'd fried on Sundays for twenty years, soaked into the wallpaper.

Her sewing room was the front parlor, with the old Singer gone from its table, because the Corsis had moved it to Lake Forest when she went into the clinic.

There was a square in the dust where it had been.

I set her sewing box down in the middle of that square.

Then I turned around, and Nathaniel was standing in the doorway with my bag in one hand and a leash in the other and his glasses fogged from the cold.

"Do you want me to go?" he said. "I can go."

"No."

"I can sleep on the couch. Tripod snores, though. I'm warning you."

"Nathaniel."

He stopped talking.

"Don't go," I said. "Don't sleep on the couch."

I took the bag out of his hand and put it down.

Then I took his hand and walked him up the narrow stairs to my old room under the slanted roof.

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