Chapter 13: Nonna's Kitchen

I didn't hit her.

I want that on the record, because I have thought about it every day since.

I stood on the sidewalk in front of the Corsi hotel and looked at her.

Livia looked back at me with her dry eyes and her red dress and her bare arms going pink in the cold.

"She said, 'Is she coming?'" Livia said. "Then she didn't say anything for a long time."

"Stop."

"I listened to her breathe. You wanted to know what happened during that call. That's what happened."

Nathaniel was beside me now.

He didn't touch me.

He just stood close enough that I could feel him there.

"Go inside," he said to Livia. "Right now. Before I forget my manners."

She smiled at him, the same small smile she gave waiters.

Then she turned and pushed through the revolving door, and the brass band swallowed her.

I sat in the Volvo with my hands between my knees.

Tripod put his whole head over the seat and breathed on my neck.

"She's dancing," I said.

Nathaniel started the engine.

"I'm taking you to Marisa's," he said. "And then I'm sleeping on her mother's floor, and her mother can hit me with whatever she wants."

At eight the next morning my phone rang on Marisa's pullout.

I didn't know the number.

"Mira." It was an old woman's voice, rough with sixty years of cigarettes she'd quit. "It's Nonna. Come to the house. Come now, before the family."

"Nonna, I'm not coming to Sunday dinner."

"Who said dinner? Come to the kitchen. Come in the back."

She hung up.

Nonna didn't believe in goodbye on the telephone.

The back door on Taylor Street opened onto a kitchen that hadn't changed since 1970.

Yellow linoleum. A crucifix over the door. A pot of sauce already going at nine in the morning.

Nonna was at the stove in a black dress and an apron, stirring with a wooden spoon taller than her forearm.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Don's Wife Never Looks Back from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.