Chapter 23: His Sister's Hat

We went to Queens on a warm Saturday, the four of us, with Luca asleep in a sling against Maxim's chest.

Nonna came too.

She wore her good navy dress and carried a paper bag of lemon cookies and her purse.

"One for the baby, one for the stone," she told me. "She's a Bruni now, in my book."

The maple over Katya's grave had come into full leaf.

Under it, the grass was soft and green, and someone had left it trimmed.

That someone was Maxim, who had been out twice in May with a pair of shears and told no one.

He knelt at the stone and I knelt beside him.

Nonna set a cookie on the granite and said something in Italian that I did not translate.

"Katya," Maxim said. "This is your brother. His name is Luca."

He slid his hand under the sling and drew our son out, sleepy and warm, in a white cotton gown.

Luca blinked at the leaves.

Maxim took a gray cloth box from his jacket.

I knew it before the lid came up.

It had lived in the bottom left drawer for six years, and the drawer had stood open since March.

Inside lay the little yellow hat.

"I've been carrying it for a month," he said. "I never knew what to do with it."

"I didn't want to lock it up again, and I didn't want to put it on a shelf."

"What do you want to do with it?"

"She had it for eleven weeks," he said. "It was never going to be hers for longer."

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