Chapter 7: Tea at Mirella's

Mirella lived on the third floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, in the same two rooms she had rented since she was twenty-two.

I had been there a hundred times.

I knew the radiator that knocked, the broken blind and the plant on the sill that I kept alive when she traveled.

On Tuesday I climbed the stairs knowing for the first time what I was walking into.

Ettore had given me a recorder the size of a lipstick.

I had wound it into the end of a long wool scarf and tied the scarf around my neck.

"Take it off somewhere she won't look," he had said. "And don't stay more than an hour. Don't ask her anything you don't already know the answer to."

Mirella opened the door in a pale blue robe with her hair loose.

"Cari! You didn't tell me you were coming. Let me put the kettle on."

"I wanted to see you," I said. "I felt bad about Sunday."

"Oh, stop. It was funny." She pulled me inside by both hands. "I thought you were brave."

I took off my coat and hung it on the hook.

The scarf I draped over the arm of the sofa, where I always put it.

She made tea the way she had made it for fifteen years, loose leaf, in the chipped yellow pot.

I sat on the sofa and looked at the wall by the window.

A calendar hung there from a car dealership, the kind a landlord hands out at Christmas.

Most of the days were blank.

The ninth of March had a thick red circle around it, and nothing written inside.

She set a cup in front of me and sat close, folding her legs under her.

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