The Italian I Was Never Supposed to Understand novel · Chapter 17 of 32
Chapter 17: Not My Brother's Keeper
I left Pina the microphone and went after him.
He hadn't gone far.
He was standing under the dented awning at the end of the loading dock, where the drivers smoked.
Rain poured off the edge of it in a sheet.
His white shirt was soaked through across the shoulders.
"Tommaso."
He didn't turn around.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have asked him like that. In front of everyone."
"You asked him what I wouldn't."
"In front of forty people."
"In front of my mother." His voice was flat. "She'd have found out in court. From Raffaele's lawyer. This was better."
He finally looked at me.
His eyes were red, and not from rain.
"Three thousand euros," he said. "The hail year. He needed a tractor and a loan, and he didn't ask me, because I was here. Because I left."
"You didn't leave him. You took a job."
"I took a job four thousand miles from the vines and sent money and called it helping."
Behind us, through the dock door, the foreman started playing the accordion, badly.
Somebody was singing.
"Come home with me," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I'm going to cook something," he warned. "Something very angry."
"I have eggs."
"That's all you have. I've seen your refrigerator."
At two in the morning he was standing in my tiny kitchen in Carroll Gardens in his wet shirt.
He was making a frittata with four eggs, half a zucchini and a parmesan rind.
He beat the eggs.
I sat on the counter beside the stove with my bare feet against the cabinet.
"Can I tell you something?" I asked.
"You're going to anyway."
"Why I stopped speaking Italian."
His fork slowed.
"My mother used to sing in the kitchen. Every song she knew was in Italian. When she died, I couldn't hear it. Not in a shop, not on the street. Every Italian voice was hers, and then it wasn't."
He turned the flame down.
"So I stopped. And then I met Chiara, and she laughed at fake Italians, and I just let her think I was one of the Connecticut ones."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of The Italian I Was Never Supposed to Understand are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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