The Last Time You Chose Her novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Wrong Number

Pietro changes her dressing and neither of them moves. She calls her mother's number and hears her mother say please, then hears Irene order the funeral flowers. She decides to go to her own funeral.

On the third morning, Fausta held out her hands and showed me how they shook.

"Arthritis," she said. "I'd put the bandage on crooked and you'd bleed on my good sheets. He has the steady hands."

She went out and shut the door.

Pietro stood in the doorway with a metal tray, and I was suddenly very aware of the thin cotton shirt Fausta had lent me.

"I can do it myself," I said.

"You can't reach."

That was true.

He set the tray on the bed and sat down beside me.

"Lift your arm."

I lifted it.

He peeled the old tape back slowly, a few inches at a time, and the cool air touched the stitches.

His fingers were warm.

They pressed flat against my ribs on the right side, just below the bruise, and held there.

Neither of us moved.

I felt my own pulse in my throat.

His thumb stopped at the edge of the wound, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.

He hadn't slept more than three hours a night since the clinic, so that had to be why.

"Does it hurt?" he said.

"No."

"Liar."

He cleaned the stitches and laid a fresh pad over them.

His hand stayed on my side a second longer than it needed to.

Then he stood up and took the tray to the window.

"It's healing clean," he said, with his back to me. "The surgeon will be pleased."

"Pietro."

"What?"

I wanted to ask why his voice had gone rough.

"Thank you," I said instead.

"Don't," he said. "Not yet."

He left.

I sat there for a long time with my hand pressed where his had been.

Then I saw the phone.

It was an old cream-colored landline on the nightstand, with a curly cord, and I knew only one number by heart.

I dialed it before I could think.

It rang three times.

"Pronto."

My mother's voice.

I had heard it every day of my life, and it was thinner than I remembered.

I couldn't speak.

"Pronto?" she said again. "Who is this?"

I pressed the receiver against my ear until it hurt.

"If you're a reporter," she said, and her voice went low and shaky, "I will find you."

There was a long pause.

"Please," she said, very quietly. "Who is this?"

I had never in my life heard her say please.

Then, somewhere behind her, another voice, bright and quick.

"Mamma, the florist is here. White roses or cream?"

Irene.

My mother breathed in.

"Cream," she said, away from the phone. "White was Marta's."

The line went dead.

I held the receiver until the dial tone started.

I put it back in its cradle very carefully, the way Pietro had set down that tray.

When he came back with Fausta, I was sitting up against the headboard with the blanket pushed off my legs.

"I'm going to the funeral," I said.

"No," Pietro said.

"It's Thursday. It's my funeral."

"You can't walk across a room."

"Then I'll walk across it slowly."

"There will be two hundred people in that church. Your mother, your sister, every capo in New Jersey."

"I know."

"And if one of them looks twice at you, we lose the only thing we have."

"Which is?"

"That they think you're dead."

"I know," I said again. "I still want to see their faces."

He looked at me for a long moment.

I saw the argument go out of his shoulders, one inch at a time.

Fausta cleared her throat.

"I have a black lace veil from my sister's funeral in nineteen seventy-one," she said. "It covers a face down to the chin. And there's a pew at the back of Saint Anselm's behind a column where my cousin used to sleep through the sermons."

Pietro shut his eyes.

"Nonna."

"What? She's going. Look at her. I'd go too."

He opened his eyes and looked at me, and I held his gaze.

"Then you go in black lace," he said, "and I sit where I can reach you."

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