Chapter 22: Shore Road

I showed him the photo when he woke up.

He squinted at Dora's handwriting for a long time.

"She spelled your name with a C."

"She's done that for five years."

He handed the phone back.

He didn't ask if I was going.

He didn't ask where I'd live, or whether he should come.

He lay on his narrow bed with his arm under his head and waited.

"I'm going home," I said. "To Court Street. My bakery. My mother's book. I want to wake up in Brooklyn."

"Okay."

"And I want you there."

He went very still.

"Not because you decide it," I said. "Because I do. Find your own room. Carry your own pianos. Wait in my line like a person."

"Every morning," he said.

"Don't push it."

Eight days later I walked up the front steps of the house on Shore Road for the first time since March.

My aunt was on my arm.

She'd flown in on Friday, her first time in America since my mother's funeral.

She'd spent Saturday in my bakery telling my morning baker her crust was too American.

"This is the house?" she asked at the top of the steps.

"This is the house."

"It's ugly," she said, loudly, as the door opened. "Big and ugly. Your mother would have hated it."

Dora stood in the doorway in a black jumpsuit and her white sneakers, with her nose ring and her curls pinned up.

She looked about fifteen and about fifty at once.

"Tante!" she shouted, and threw her arms around my aunt, who allowed it.

Then she hugged me so hard my back cracked.

"I'm so nervous," she said in my ear. "I've been nervous since Tuesday. I made Ma's lasagna and it's terrible."

The dining room was full.

Not eighty people.

Twenty, maybe. Dora's friends. Three old captains and their wives. Elettra's mother.

The same long table, but in the dining room this time, not under the glass.

Dora sat at the head.

She pointed at the chair on her right.

"That's you," she said to me. "Don't argue. I'm the boss."

The place card said Clara.

I sat down in it.

Luca sat beside me, one chair down.

Not at the head.

Not at anybody's right hand.

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