Chapter 4: Sunday Table

On Sunday at one o'clock the house on Federal Hill smelled of braised short rib and burnt sugar, and I was told to come down.

I had slept in my clothes with the door unlocked and the window locked, and nobody had touched me.

The dining room had a table that seated twenty, with two long leaves pulled out of the wall to make it forty.

There were old men with big hands in good wool jackets, and their wives in black, and nephews, and a priest with a napkin tucked in his collar.

When I walked in, the room went quiet from one end to the other.

"The foot," Rocco said, behind me.

He didn't touch my back.

He nodded toward the far end of the table, the farthest chair from the head.

I walked the whole length of it with forty people watching.

I sat.

The chair beside mine was empty, and the one beside that was empty too.

No one wanted to be next to me.

At the head of the table, in a high-backed chair with a cushion, sat a very small woman in a black dress with her hands folded on a cane.

She had white hair in a bun and sharp dark eyes, and she was looking down the whole length of the cloth at me.

"That's Rosaria," a voice said at my elbow.

A young man in a Ferrante Produce jacket had taken the seat beside the empty ones.

"Rocco's grandmother," he said.

"Don't talk till she does."

"Thanks," I said.

"I wasn't going to."

Vincent was already at the table.

He sat halfway down the left side in a clean gray suit, with a glass of wine, smiling at the uncle beside him.

He saw me and lifted his glass an inch, kindly.

Then the old woman stirred.

She planted her cane, and the whole table started to rise in order to pull out her chair, and Vincent got to his feet with everybody else.

He bent to say something in his aunt's ear.

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