Chapter 24: The Wife Who Lives

On Sunday morning, before the table, we went to the cemetery in Providence.

Two men with a hand truck were already at the Barone plot, and a mason in a canvas apron stood waiting beside the marble stone.

Luca held my hand and looked up at the lily carved at the top.

"What's it say, Mamma?"

I read it to him.

ALESSIA MARINI BARONE, AND THE HEIR SHE CARRIED.

"That's you," he said, pointing at the second line.

"That's you," I said. "And me. It's not true anymore."

Santo stood on my other side with his hands in his pockets.

He had told the mason what to do, and then he had told him to wait for me.

"What should it say instead?" he asked.

I thought of the empty white coffin under the grass, and the morning I had stood in a car on a cliff road and decided to be dead.

"Nothing," I said. "Take it down."

The mason looked at Santo.

"Do what she says."

They tipped the stone onto the hand truck with a grunt and wheeled it away.

The bare patch of ground it left behind was green and ordinary.

I knelt and pressed my palm to the turf, and Luca copied me.

"She was a good wife," I told the grass. "She's going home to lunch."

Santo helped me up with his good hand and held on a second longer than he needed to.

At one o'clock we walked through the front door of the villa.

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