Chapter 24: Sunday Dinner

On Sunday at four, I came down the main stairs of my own house.

The dining room doors were open, and the long table was laid for six.

My sons were standing behind their chairs.

All four of them stood in dark suits with their hands at their sides.

Their phones were in a basket in the hall.

They had been told to be on time.

They had been there since a quarter to.

"Mom," Dario said.

He had a fork in his hand and was trying to hide it.

"You were not supposed to start without me," I said.

"I wasn't starting. I was holding it."

"He was eating the bread," said Tommaso.

"I was holding the bread."

The second son, at the foot of the table, made a sound that might have been a laugh.

It was the first one I had ever heard from him.

I stopped in the doorway and let myself look.

The candles were lit.

The old tablecloth I had picked in my twenties was on the table, with the mended hem I remembered.

The housekeeper stood at the sideboard with a tureen in her hands.

When she saw me, she set it down and pressed her apron to her mouth.

Then she turned very quickly and went back to the kitchen.

Cesare came around the table.

He held a velvet box in both hands, the same flat box I had carried into the Founders' dinner.

"It's mended," he said. "The jeweler worked all week. You can't find the seam."