Chapter 4: On the Porch

I unlocked the bedroom door and walked out onto the porch in my socks.

Renzo glanced back at me and moved one step to the side, leaving me the top stair.

He did not take my arm or stand in front of me.

I noticed that.

The yard light made everything flat and white.

Dario stood at the bottom of the steps with his tie pulled loose and his eyes red.

The two cousins waited behind him on the gravel.

"Casey," he said. "Thank God. Come down here, amore, and we'll go home."

"I am home," I said. "It's a lot colder than the last one."

I said it in Italian.

Dario flinched.

He had a way of flinching that I used to call sensitive.

"Why are you talking like that?" he said, in English.

"Because I can," I said, in Italian. "Because you never once asked if I could."

The taller cousin gave a short laugh and said something low to the other.

I answered him before he could finish.

"You wrote that I'm a cow in a cardigan," I said. "On the fifth of March. At eleven at night."

The laugh stopped.

"You also wrote that I'd never learn the words for 'baptism', that your aunt should speak louder so I'd feel stupid, and that I smell like a bakery."

"It was a joke," the cousin said, in English.

"It was Italian," I said. "I've been learning it for seven years. Your wife should know what you write when she's asleep."

Down by the shed, a light came on.

An old man in a boatyard jacket stood in the door with a flashlight, listening.

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