Chapter 5: Sunday Dinner

I waited for the rest of it.

There wasn't any.

Santo stood up, picked his jacket off the bleacher and put it on.

"Santo."

"Lock the door behind me."

"They said it was her heart. Your father told my mother it was her heart."

"It was easier."

"Easier for who?"

He was already at the door.

"Lock it, Roz."

I locked it.

I stood with my back against it and listened to his car go.

Then I sat on the deck with my feet in the shallow end until the lights clicked off on their timer.

I'd hated him for fifteen years.

I'd hated him for standing on the edge of that pool and watching me.

I'd never once asked myself why a thirteen-year-old boy would stand so close to water and never, ever go in.

On Sunday I drove to Todt Hill.

My mother had called four times to make sure.

"Tullio asked," she said. "It's the old way. You come, you eat, you're polite, and you go home."

"And if Dino gets down on one knee in the antipasto?"

"Then you say no politely."

The house looked the way it always looked on a Sunday.

Cars along the gravel. Men smoking by the fountain.

The pool lay blue and flat behind the house, the cover off, the ring still somewhere on the bottom.

Nobody had dived for it.

The dining room table sat twenty.

Tullio took the chair at Santo's right hand, the ally's chair, the way he had for twenty years with Santo's father.

Dino sat across from me with a face.

My mother had put me between two Torrisi aunts.

They both patted my hands and told me young men were stupid.

The first course was quiet.

The second course was worse.

Dino didn't look at his plate. He looked at me.

Every time I lifted my fork I could feel it.

When the veal came out, he stood up with his glass.

"I want to say something."

The table went still. The aunts beamed.

"I made a mistake at the party," Dino said. "I made a joke about the worst day of Roz's life. I'm ashamed of it."

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