The Italian I Was Never Supposed to Understand novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Wedding

"You don't ask," Tommaso repeated.

"No."

He looked at me.

I looked at the date on the calendar by Pina's register.

Three weeks.

"Is the eighteenth good for you?" he asked me, very politely.

"I think I'm free," I said.

"Then it's settled," said Nonna, and went back to her wine.

Three weeks later I got married in my mother's dress.

It was cream silk, plain, with long sleeves.

Pina's cousin from 86th Street had fitted it to me in four evenings, with pins in her mouth and opinions about everything.

I wore my mother's small gold hoops.

I wore my denim jacket over the dress until the very last minute, because the garage was cold, and because I wanted to.

Da Pina held fifty people if nobody breathed.

Fifty-four came.

The drivers in their good suits. The foreman with his accordion. The accounting girls. The gold chain and the bob, openly holding hands now.

The old woman from Bay Ridge in a black hat.

Tommaso's mother and brother, flown in from Milan two days before, jet-lagged and furious about the price of parking.

Nonna in the front row in pale blue, with her cane across her knees and no wheelchair anywhere.

The priest stood in front of my painted wall.

Tommaso stood beside him in the black suit.

When I walked in on Pina's arm, he stopped breathing.

I saw it.

So did everybody.

The gold chain said "Madonna" out loud, and the bob elbowed him.

We said our vows twice.

Once in Italian and once in English, so nobody in the room had to pretend.

I said mine first.

"I promise to tell you the truth in both my languages," I said. "And to tell you when your sauce needs salt."

"It never needs salt," Tommaso said.

"It needs salt," said Pina, from the front row.

Everyone laughed.

He said his in his careful northern Italian, and then in English with the accent he'd never lost.

"I promise to cook when I'm angry, and not to be angry very often," he said. "I promise to let you be the boss. Technically."

Nonna snorted.

"And I promise," he said, and stopped.

His voice had gone.

He looked down at me for a long moment, his jaw working.

"I promise that you will never sit at a table where you are the only one who doesn't know what's being said."

I couldn't say anything.

I just held on to his hands.

The priest said the rest.

Tommaso kissed me in front of my painted wall, and fifty-four people stood up and shouted in forty kinds of Italian.

We ate for four hours.

Pina's orecchiette. Tommaso's mother's agnolotti. Nonna's trofie, which she'd made the day before at her own table, with her left hand holding the board.

Ferri Barolo, every bottle numbered in his mother's ink.

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