Chapter 10: The Widows' Kitchen

Sabina's POV

The widows' kitchen is the basement of the Church of the Assumption on Fingerboard Road, and every Thursday at seven it smells of onions.

I had never been inside it.

For three years I had sent an envelope here on the first of every month, out of the household account, and signed it with a name that was not mine.

Mrs. Falzone, the household.

I came down the stairs with my bandaged hand held against my chest and nothing in the other.

Fourteen women stood at two long tables, in aprons, with their sleeves pushed up.

They all stopped.

A pot boiled over, and nobody moved.

"I'm not here to ask for anything," I said. "I wanted to see where the money went."

Nobody answered.

The old woman from the captains' supper put down her knife.

She was the one who had laughed at Orsola.

She had a flour-white face and steel-grey hair, and her husband had been shot on the docks nine years ago.

"Sit down, child," she said. "You'll make us nervous."

"I can peel."

"With that hand?"

"With the other."

She put a bowl of potatoes in front of me.

I sat, and I peeled, and the kitchen began again around me, slowly.

Nobody talked about the Falzones.

They talked about a daughter's wedding and a boiler that was leaking, and a neighbour who put too much oregano in everything.

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