The Widowed Don Hired a Doctor for His Son, and She Brought Two Boys Who Wore His Face novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: My Younger Boy

In the daylight kitchen Carmela sees the photo and drops a dish; Ines gives the name her husband used; Nico asks her to bring the boys on Saturday.

Nico did not throw me out.

I had expected the door, or a hand around my arm, or the two men in dark jackets who stood in the front hall and never seemed to sit.

He looked at the screen for what felt like a full minute.

Then he laid two fingers flat on the quilt beside the phone and didn't touch it at all.

"Not here," he said.

"Not over him."

Teo had fallen asleep against his ribs.

It was the first real sleep the boy had had in fourteen months, and neither of us was going to be the one to wake him.

"Stay with him," Nico said.

"I'll sit in the chair."

"And then?" I said.

"Then I want to hear all of it, in daylight, in my kitchen, with my mother in the room."

"Your mother?" I asked.

"She's been awake since five every day of her life, and she'll be at the stove," he said.

"If you've come to tell me something about my family, she should hear it from you and not from the island."

It was a courteous answer, and it left me nothing to argue with.

I texted the sitter that I would be late.

I did not sleep.

At six I walked into the Vasari kitchen with my cardigan buttoned wrong and the phone in my pocket.

There was coffee on and a smell of cinnamon and burnt sugar.

The kitchen was enormous and whitewashed, with a table that sat sixteen.

Carmela Vasari stood at the stove in a black dress with her back to the door.

She was sixty-seven and about five foot one, with iron-gray hair in a low knot and forearms that had been kneading dough for fifty years.

I had met her once, in the hall, and she had looked at my shoes.

"Sit," she said, without turning.

"Eat.

"You're thin for a doctor."

"Thank you, Mrs. Vasari."

"Carmela," she said.

She didn't say it warmly.

It was an instruction.

Nico came in a moment later in the same white shirt, unshaven, and took the chair at the head of the table.

He looked at me, and I saw that he hadn't slept either.

"Show her," he said.

I put the phone on the wood and turned the screen up.

Carmela turned from the stove with a casserole dish in both hands, the big blue one for baked pasta.

She looked at the photograph.

I will never forget how fast it happened.

Her face didn't change at all.

Her hands simply opened.

The dish hit the tile and broke into six pieces, and rigatoni and red sauce slid across the floor to the toe of my shoe.

Nobody moved.

Carmela stood with her hands still held out in front of her, palms up, looking at two little boys in rain boots.

"Mamma," Nico said.

"That smile," she said.

She said it to the dish on the floor.

"My younger boy had that smile."

She didn't say his name.

I would remember that all my life, that she walked around it the way you step around a hole in a floor.

"Mamma, sit down," Nico said.

"I'm not going to sit down.

"I'm going to clean this."

She got down on her knees on the tile, sixty-seven years old, and began picking up broken blue pieces with her bare hands.

I knelt beside her and helped.

She didn't look at me, and I didn't speak.

When the sauce was off the floor she stood and put the pieces in the trash.

She washed her hands at the sink for a long time.

Then she turned around and looked at me properly for the first time, with black, very tired eyes.

"How old?" she said.

"Four," I said.

"They'll be five in February."

"Their father?"

"I married him five years ago in June, in a courthouse in Beaumont," I said.

"He told me his name was Rocco Marsh."

Carmela put a hand on the back of a chair.

"He said he sold marine insurance," I said.

"He laughed at everything, and he couldn't cook."

I made myself go on.

"He was shot in his truck on the Bolivar ferry road eight months after we married.

"I was seven weeks pregnant.

"I never met his family, and I never knew he had one."

I put my hand in the neck of my shirt and drew out the chain.

The ring hung at the end of it, a plain gold band worn smooth on the inside.

I laid it on the table beside the phone.

Nico stared at it.

"There's an engraving," I said.

"R.M. and I.M., Beaumont, and the date.

"Fourteen months ago I found his picture in the program from your church's Blessing of the Fleet.

"It was on a table at the back, and he was standing behind you."

"Ines," Nico said.

It was the first time he had used my first name.

It was very quiet, and it sounded like it hurt him.

"I need you to say something to me," I said.

"Your brother's name was Rocco?"

"Yes."

"Then I'm his widow," I said.

"Those boys are your nephews, and I don't know who killed their father.

"I don't know why nobody came to find me.

"I took this job because I couldn't think of any other way into your house."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Nico pushed back his chair, stood, and walked to the window over the sink.

He stood with his back to us and both hands braced on the counter, and his shoulders were not steady.

Carmela didn't move from the chair she held.

"My son has been told for five years that his brother was killed by a man in Houston," she said.

She still hadn't said the name.

"Closed casket.

"Nobody at the funeral but the family.

"No wife."

"There was a wife," I said.

"Nobody sent for her."

It was the sharpest thing I had said in that house, and I watched it land on the old woman's face.

She flinched.

Then she looked at her son's back, and her mouth shut like a lid.

Nico turned around.

His face was composed again, every line of it, the courtesy back on like a coat.

But his eyes were wet, and he made no move to hide it.

"Stay for coffee," he said.

"I'm not asking as the man who hired you.

"I'm asking as his brother."

"I'll stay."

He poured two cups with a hand that was almost steady and set one in front of me.

His fingers brushed the back of mine on the saucer, and neither of us said so.

"Bring them Saturday," he said.

"I'll know my brother's sons when I see them."

"You'll see them in the photograph and think you know them," I said.

"They're four.

"They bite."

A sound came out of him that was almost a laugh.

It cracked in the middle.

"So did he," Nico said.

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