He Spoke Her Language, So I Said Goodbye novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Rosa's Offer

On Monday morning Dante's mother called me nine times, and on the tenth I picked up.

"Willa, cara," Rosa said. "Come to the restaurant. Today. Please. I make you lunch."

I had eaten at her table every Sunday for three years.

She had taught me to roll gnocchi off a fork and had cried at my engagement dinner.

"Don't go," Bridget said from the doorway of her bedroom, in her scrubs. "She wants something."

"She does," I said. "I want something too."

Ferraro's sat halfway down Salem Street in the North End, between a bakery and a church with a green door.

It had been closed on Mondays for forty years.

The front door was unlocked, and Rosa sat at the family table in the back with a pot of coffee and a white envelope.

She stood when I came in, and she held my face in both hands.

"You look thin."

"It's been three days."

"Sit. Eat."

A plate of gnocchi was already on the table, and I sat in front of it and didn't touch it.

Luca stood behind the bar drying a glass.

He looked up at me and went back to the glass.

Rosa sat down across from me, folded her hands and cleared her throat.

"What my son did is shameful," she said. "I said so to him yesterday, and I said so loud. The whole street heard it."

"Thank you."

"But you played it for everyone." She said it gently. "My friends from church were there, Willa. my late husband's cousins. A hundred and forty people watched my son laugh at you."

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