Chapter 13: The Long Table

The road opened for good on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and by noon we were in the air.

Before we left, Marcello's driver called the care home in Aurora where Roxanne's sister had lived for three years.

The night nurse told him the sister was gone.

A private ambulance had collected her on Christmas Eve at six in the morning, at the family's request, for a better bed at a clinic in Illinois.

"The family?" I said.

"Roxanne's name was on the form," Marcello said. "The ambulance was Kinsella's."

"So that's where the photo was taken."

"On the north side of Chicago. A private clinic with a garden and a wall."

I thought of a woman asleep in a narrow bed, thin enough that the blanket hardly rose.

I didn't say what I thought of Roxanne.

The Bellandi house stood on the lake, a long gray stone building with the black water right under its windows.

I had imagined a fortress.

It was a beautiful house where nobody had been warm in years.

Marcello's mother took me up to a bedroom with a view of the water and said, "Dinner is at eight. Wear what you like."

I wore my own black sweater and a pair of jeans, and I kept the thin gold ring in the pocket.

The table seated sixteen.

There were fourteen men and Marcello's mother at the head, and an empty chair at her right hand.

"Sit," she said, and I sat in it.

Marcello took the chair across from me.

Nobody picked up a fork.

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