The word “we” feels like a knife and a helping hand. I am both cut by it and held up.
“Why?” Mama asks, and now it is almost a whisper, and if the room wasn’t completely silent, they might’ve missed it. “Why would she do that to me?”
A silence follows. Someone coughs. The baby sighs and goes back to sleep. Mr. Caruso places a palm on the folder. “She included a letter,” he repeats. “To each of you. Perhaps… perhaps her words will be better than mine.”
He takes the stack of envelopes. He sorts them with ceremony; it is necessary that small solemnity.
He hands Mama hers. “Francesca.” He gives Zia hers. “Loredana.” He passes me one with my name in his neat print.“Bianca.” He passes the rest out to everyone in the family and keeps one at his side. “There is also a letter addressed to—well, to the family in general. Allow me to read what she intended to be heard by you all gathered together.”
He unfolds a single page. He does not do a voice, thank God; I would break apart if he tried to pretend her cadence. He simply reads.
“My loves,” he reads. “If Angelo is holding this paper, then I am where I hoped to go, and I do not want crying in my dining room. Go to church for that. In my house, we eat, and we laugh, and we tell the truth.”
A laugh rustles through the room, soft, aching. It is her. It is her.
“I have thought about this a long time,” Mr. Caruso continues, his eyes on the lines, his voice steady. “Longer than you will think. Francesca, if you are scowling, smooth your face. It will stick that way.”
Even now, my mother’s hand rises to her forehead like she can iron her expression flat.
“I did not leave my house and my restaurant to Bianca because I love her more,” Mr. Caruso reads, and the relief of that sentence is a thud and a sob in the same breath.
“I left them to her because I want her to be free, and because I believe she will know what to do with both. Francesca, you have carried me and the restaurant for years. You have done it withyour back, and your hands, and your heart, and I have watched you get older with worry. I do not want you chained to the stove until you cannot stand, as I was. I want you to live out your life and have what you want.”
I can’t look at Mama. I can only look at the envelope in my hands, my name in bold black.
“Bibi,” Mr. Caruso reads, and my heart squeezes so hard it makes my vision go pinprick. “Don’t make that face at me. Breathe,stellina. I am not handing you a punishment. I am giving you a choice. You have a life in Italy—good. Keep it, if you want it. But you also have a life here, and you have always had your hands on both stoves. Your key is in the kitchen. A new one. Don’t lose it like you lost your first set of knives.”
A ripple of small laughter. I did. I left them on a bus in Rome and cried like a child. She soothed me over the phone and told me it was the universe telling me to stop being so delicate.
“Francesca,” the letter says, back to my mother. “Do not be stubborn. You are allowed to be angry at me. You have been angry at me for less. Be angry and then take a nap. Let Bianca decide what to do with a clear head.
“If you all fight about this,” Mr. Caruso continues, “I will come back and haunt you with burnt sauce and a smoke alarm that won’t stop. I mean it. Now kiss each other and eat something. Put on coffee for Angelo.”
He stops. The page trembles once in his hand and then is still. The quiet that follows is thick and holy.
Mama holds her envelope like it might bite. Zia opens hers with the care she uses unwrapping ornaments at Christmas. I slide my thumb under the flap of mine because I can’t not. The paper whispers. Inside, my name again, in blue pen this time, not Mr. Caruso’s ink but hers—Nonna’s loops and hurried slants, the way she wrote shopping lists. My chest is tight. I don’t read it yet. I can’t. If I read it, I will be in the kitchen with her, and I can’t handle that in a room full of people.
“I’m going to make coffee,” Zia says, which is her way of saying she needs to do something with her hands. She gets up. Half the aunts get up with her like a flock of birds turning at once.
“Francesca,” Mr. Caruso says, and his voice is very careful now, stepping between glass and glass. “We will, of course, take care of filings. There is no immediate action required. The house is Bianca’s; she can decide when and how to—”
“No,” Mama says again, but the word is different now. It is not refusal. It is wonder and fear and something like pride. “She lives in Italy.”
“I do,” I say, because it is true and I need something true to say out loud. “I— My life is there.” My job. My apartment. My chef, who promised me a menu... The cats on the sill… “I don’t—Nonna knew that.”
“She knew,” Mr. Caruso says. “She knew and, still, she chose.”
The room blurs for a second as if the air is full of steam. I blink until everyone comes back into focus. The envelopes. The lilies. The wood-grain table. I realize my hand is clenched tightly in my lap, and I force it to relax, suddenly embarrassed by the childishness of it. I smooth the edge of the envelope instead.
“What about debts?” Marco asks, because he is practical. “What about the mortgage?”
“There is no mortgage on the house,” Mr. Caruso says. “Regalia has a modest line of credit with the bank—nothing unusual in a restaurant. There are accounts payable and receivable, as any business has. Your grandmother kept her books religiously.” His mouth almost quirks. “More religiously than she went to Mass.”
Zio Enzo snorts. “She went to Mass to check on the competition,” he says. “She went to the books to pray.”
“The accounts are part of the bequest,” Mr. Caruso continues. “As are any obligations. The staff contracts will need to be reviewed. There is a lease on the building—”
“The building?” Talia interrupts, surprised. “She didn’t own—”
