My Don's Friends Spoke Italian to Shut Me Out novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Vivo

Agnese teaches Margo her first Italian words and a face in a photo, and Margo packs a trauma bag.

The next morning Cesare was gone before I woke up.

There was a note on his pillow in his square handwriting.

"Stay in today. Ask Agnese for anything you need."

I had never asked Agnese for anything.

His grandmother lived in the apartment below ours, with a view of the river and a rosary in her hand at all hours.

She was eighty, and in six weeks she had said maybe forty words to me, all of them in Italian.

I took my blood pressure cuff and my glucose meter anyway.

I was a nurse before I was a mob wife, and it was the only way I knew how to knock on a door.

The aide let me in and went to make coffee.

Agnese was propped up in a high-backed chair by the window, with a black cardigan buttoned to her chin and a pair of eyes that missed nothing.

I said, "Buongiorno."

She said something long and quick.

I held up the cuff.

She looked at it, then at me, and rolled her sleeve up with a sigh.

Her pressure was high.

Her sugar was worse.

I said so, in English, to a woman who didn't speak it, and she patted my cheek.

Then she pointed at herself. "Agnese."

"Margo."

"Mar-go." She tried it twice and gave up.

She pointed at my wrist, where I'd been holding her pulse, and pinched my own pulse between her fingers.

"Vivo," she said.

I frowned.

She tapped my wrist again.

"Vivo. Vivo."

"Alive?" I said, and pressed my own two fingers to my neck.

She nodded so hard her bun trembled.

It was the first word anyone in that family had given me for free.

I pulled out my phone and typed it into a translation app, and the app said, alive, living.

Agnese watched me do it and clapped her hands once.

Then she pushed herself out of the chair and went to the bookshelf.

She took down a small, worn book with a cracked red cover and put it in my lap.

It was a children's primer.

On the first page, a boy in short pants pointed at a cartoon cat.

Inside the front cover, in blue ink and a child's wobbling print, was written CESARE.

I held it up so she could see I'd noticed, and she folded my fingers shut over the book.

"Per lui," she said.

I typed that in too.

For him.

"For Cesare?" I said. "He wants me to learn?"

She didn't answer.

She was looking at the silver frames on the sideboard.

I knew most of the photographs.

Cesare's father, big and smiling.

Cesare at his first communion, scowling in a white suit.

A young Tommaso with his arm around Salvatore on a boat, both of them holding up the same fish.

Agnese walked to that one, took it in both hands and looked at it a long time.

Then she said, softly, "Tommaso."

She turned the frame face down on the sideboard.

"Traditore," she said.

I didn't need the app.

I typed it anyway and watched the screen fill in.

Traitor.

The aide came in with the coffee and saw the frame and said something short and sharp.

Agnese snapped something back.

The aide took the frame, set it upright again with a nervous glance at me and left the room.

Agnese went back to her chair, closed her eyes and said nothing else.

I took the primer with me.

Over the next three days, between my shifts at the hospital, I learned to say please and thank you and where is the bathroom.

I did not learn to say what I needed.

Wednesday night, Cesare came home late with a manila envelope under his arm and left it on the kitchen counter while he showered.

I should have left it.

I opened it.

It was six pages, stapled, in Italian, with a line at the bottom of the last page for a signature and a handwritten note clipped to the front.

I didn't understand a single word.

I laid the pages out under the kitchen light and took a photo of each with my phone.

I fed them into the app one at a time, and it spat out a mess of broken English.

Most of it was useless.

Transfer.

Rights of berth.

Terminal lease, thirty years.

On the last page, above the signature line, the app gave me four words in a row that it was sure about.

Gallo Maritime.

Cesare Santelli.

Friday.

The shower shut off down the hall.

I stacked the pages back inside the envelope exactly the way I'd found them.

When Cesare came into the kitchen with a towel around his neck, I was at the stove making eggs.

"You're up late," he said.

"Hungry."

He took the envelope, looked at it, and tucked it under his arm.

"I'll be gone most of tomorrow," he said. "Stay home. Not the hospital, not the shops. Home."

"What time is Friday?"

He paused.

"Don't worry about Friday."

"What time?"

"Noon," he said. "And Margo, I mean it. Stay here."

He kissed my forehead and went to bed.

I stood there with the spatula in my hand.

I had never seen him read a page of that envelope.

He had carried it home, and he had not opened it once.

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