Chapter 13: Sunday

"What key?" I asked.

Connie shrugged. "With Nonna, it could be anything. Once she said bring the bread and meant a lawyer."

I texted back.

"Which key, Nonna?"

The answer came ten minutes later, with no punctuation.

"Bring your tools you'll see"

On Sunday at one I climbed three flights of stairs on Bay Parkway with Nonno's red toolbox banging my knee.

The hallway smelled like gravy that had been going since six in the morning.

Nonna opened the door in a black dress, her pearls and a flowered apron.

She looked at the toolbox and nodded.

"Good. The bathroom lock sticks. Fix it after we eat."

Then she stepped aside.

Cesare was standing at her kitchen sink with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

He had a dish towel over his shoulder and his hands in the water.

The Don of the Lanza family was washing a colander.

"Nonna," I said.

"He came early," she said. "So he washes. Sit."

I sat at her little table under a picture of the Pope and a calendar from a funeral home.

Connie wasn't there. I understood then that she'd been told not to come.

Cesare looked at me over his shoulder.

"I didn't know you were coming," he said.

"Neither did I."

"Nobody knows anything in this family," Nonna said. "That's the problem. Cesare, the pot."

He scrubbed the pot.

She fed us like she was trying to make up for three years at once.

Escarole soup. Macaroni with gravy. Braciole tied with white string.

She made Cesare cut the string off mine.

She told me about the summer she was nineteen and worked at the shirt factory on Sackett Street.

She told me Cesare's grandfather had walked her home every night for a month before he said a word.

"And the first word was a lie," she said. "He told me he was a tailor."

I laughed with my mouth full.

"What was he?"

"What do you think he was?" She poured me more wine. "He had a tailor. That's not the same."

Cesare smiled at his plate.

"He lied to me again, after we were married," she said. "A big one. I won't tell you what. It's dead with him."

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