Chapter 24: A Table With Six Places

On the first Sunday in October I cooked for six in the third-floor kitchen.

It had one oven, four burners and a sign that said CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF, SERIOUSLY.

Luca had pushed two tables together in the common room and borrowed chairs from every door on the hall.

The roommate from Ohio had loaned me a tablecloth, and the girl across the corridor had loaned me a candle in a jar.

I didn't own a single plate.

I had eight, and they didn't match.

Nonna's sister had given me the recipe on an index card in faded ink, and I had followed it with my thumb pressed under each line.

Three trays of eggplant parmesan sat on the counter, bubbling at the edges.

At five o'clock, Luca's mother came through the door in her school lanyard with a bag of bread and a tub of her gravy.

"I didn't trust your oven," she said, and kissed me on both cheeks.

"It's a good oven."

"It's a dormitory oven, sweetheart. I'm only a little bit joking."

She opened the lid on the first tray and looked at it for a long moment.

"You grated the cheese yourself," she said.

"I did."

"Good girl."

Nonna's sister arrived at five thirty, with Franco carrying her bag up three flights, and she sat down at the head of the table.

"Where's my chair?" she said, though she was already in it.

Franco wore a clean shirt.

He had moved into a studio over a hardware store in Bayonne, two blocks from where we had grown up, and he had bought a plant.

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