Pipe Burst Guest novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Thermos
Marisa is told by the whole family she is seeing ghosts, then overhears her husband tell her best friend it is Ines he loves. She walks out with the thermos and an old man offers her her father's second set of books.
At the Sunday table, in front of fourteen captains, my husband called me a liar.
I had laid the evidence beside his plate.
A gold earring with a small pearl, found on the passenger seat of his car.
Three hotel receipts from his private account, all for one suite, all for a night he had told me he spent at the shore.
Cesare, Don of the family and the man I had married six years ago, did not even pick them up.
"The earring belongs to a client's wife," he said. "The hotel is a client expense. Ask my cousin, he signs for it."
His cousin smiled into his wine.
"The Donna's hunting mistresses again," he said, and half the table laughed.
I looked down at my own hands.
For three years I had planted trackers and followed every woman who stood too close to my husband.
Last spring I had swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills in front of him, begging him to say her name.
I woke up in the hospital with Cesare asleep in the chair, grey in the face.
He held me and said, "There is no one else, Marisa. What do I have to do to make you believe me?"
The family doctor told me to stop seeing ghosts and get some sleep.
Even I had started to wonder if she was something my mind had made up.
Only one person never wavered.
Ines Orsatti, my best friend of ten years, held me every time and said the same words.
"You're not crazy. I believe you. If you leave him, you live with me. If you keep looking, I'll look with you."
I told her about the earring.
She asked to hold it, to look at the pearl.
The next morning it was gone from my jewelry box.
Now at the table I reached for it and found the receipts were the only thing left.
"Marisa," Ines said softly from the end of the table, shaking her head. "You're doing it again."
Cesare's chair scraped back.
"Sit down and eat," he said. "You are embarrassing the family."
I sat down.
Tullio, the cousin, filled my glass and winked.
Every year on March ninth, Ines went to my father's grave with white carnations.
She always got there before I did.
I thought it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.
On Thursday, Ines was admitted to Pennsylvania Hospital with stomach pain.
I cooked her favorite broth the way I did every time she was sick and carried it up in a thermos.
At her door I stopped, because Cesare was inside and his voice was raw.
"Ines, I can't keep this up. I'm going to tell Marisa. It's you I love."
I put my hand flat on the wall.
Then Ines screamed.
I looked through the gap and saw her holding a fruit knife to her own neck.
"No! You can't tell her."
"When my parents died, Marisa is the only reason I'm alive."
"If she finds out her husband and her best friend have been sleeping together, how is she supposed to keep living?"
Cesare's whole face changed.
He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her.
He said nothing at all.
I clamped both hands over my mouth so that no sound could come out.
The woman I had hunted for three years had been standing between me and my husband the entire time.
She had listened to me cry about her in my own kitchen.
I walked into the bathroom down the hall, ran the cold tap and washed my face until it stopped shaking.
When the mirror gave me back a woman who looked fine, I picked up the thermos.
I went into the room.
Cesare was on the chair beside her bed.
Ines looked up and her whole face lit.
"Marisa, sweetheart, you came."
She took the thermos from me, smelled it and smiled.
"That smells amazing. Nobody looks after me like you do."
"I know," I said.
Cesare looked at me for a moment too long.
I smiled back at both of them.
Then I put my wedding ring in the pocket of my coat.
So I stepped out.
I did not go home.
I drove to the Hotel Arden, which my father had left me, and which Cesare thought was only a place to wash money.
The old man who ran the kitchen office was waiting on the loading dock with his cardigan buttoned wrong.
Aurelio Pace had been my father's consigliere for thirty years.
"Marisa," he said. "Before you say a word, listen to me."
"Your father kept a second set of books in the cellar of this building."
"Cesare has been looking for it for ten years."
"He never found it."
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