“No,” he says. “Your grandfather always intended to buy; there were family politics.” He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t have to. In Atlantic City, property isn’t so simple. “The landlord has been… cooperative. The lease renews in three months. Bianca will need to sign as owner at that time if she intends to keep it.”
The room shifts its eyes to me. I feel like a dish being sent to a table to be cut and eaten.
“I don’t know what I intend,” I say. The honesty shocks me as much as it shocks them. I am usually a person with decisions, with lists, with mise en place in my mind. Today I am a person with a letter and a key to a door I’m not sure I want to open.
“Then you don’t decide today,” Zia says as she walks back in with a tray of coffee. Her voice has that firm kindness she used when she cuffed me away from the stove when I was five. “Eat. Read. Sleep. You are no good to anyone with your tired eyes and brain.”
Mama’s face does something confusing. She looks at me like she is angry at me for existing and also like she wants to crawl into my lap and let me stroke her hair. I have a flash of her at twenty, pregnant with me and alone, and then of her yesterday, kissing her mother’s fingertips in the coffin.
“I can’t go back there,” she says suddenly. “Not today.”
“Then don’t,” Zia says, no hesitation. “I will go get clothes and stay with Bianca in the house tonight. You sleep at yours, and we will make a plan tomorrow.”
“I have to—” Mama starts, and then stops. “I have to go home.”
“Mama, please stay,” I plead softly. “Just for a bit.”
“I—” She shakes her head, but she stays sitting.
Mr. Caruso closes his folder. “I will leave you,” he says, standing. He puts a hand on the tin of cookies and then leaves it. “You know where to find me. Take time. The law is slow; you can be, too.”
“Coffee,” Zia reminds him, and he almost smiles.
“In the kitchen,” she says, and shepherds half the room that way, as if movement will help.
Mama doesn’t move. The envelope in her lap sits unopened. She stares at it as if it might open itself. Finally, she slides a nail under the flap and tears it open quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid. She reads. Her face changes more than once, confused, clear, grieving. She presses the paper to her mouth for a second and then lowers it and smooths it like a mother smoothing a daughter’s hair.
“She says,” Mama says, and her voice is almost a laugh and almost a cry, “to take a nap.”
I laugh wetly. “Of course,” I say. “It’s just like her.”
“Why don’t you go read yours?” Mama says gently. “I’ll be here.”
I take my letter and walk to the back door because I can’t read it in front of everyone. The screen squeals the way it always has, the little spring tugging it shut behind me.
The yard is small, but it’s ours. The fig tree is heavy with leaves, the fruit still hard, a month too early. The planters on the stepsare full of basil and flat-leaf parsley, and one stubborn rosemary bush that always wintered really well. I sit on the top step where we shell peas in June. The concrete is warm from an afternoon sun that finally decided to show its face.
I open the letter. Her handwriting is messier here, like she wrote quickly and didn’t want to think too much about how it would be read.
Bianchina, it starts.My small white. She called me that when I was little and too pale in winter. She called me that when I burned the onions and cried.
If you are reading this, Mr. Caruso is doing his serious face in my dining room, and your mother probably wants to throw me in the ocean. Let her. I can swim.
I blink until I can see the words again.
You think I did you a cruelty. I didn’t. I did you a favor. It doesn’t look like one. The good favors never do.
You are a cook the way a fox is a fox. You think because you left that means something changed. It didn’t. Italy or Atlantic City, you are still the girl who smelled the sauce and knew exactly what it needed with just your nose. You are the only person besides me who stirred when the pot told you to stir and not when the recipe said to. You will know what to do.
I can hear her saying it, that briskness that is love. To anyone else, it wouldn’t make sense.
If you don’t want it, don’t take it. If you want it later, take it then. If you want to run it, run it. If you want to find someone to run it who is not a fool or a thief, do that. It is yours, not to own you, but so that no one owns it instead. Do you understand me?
My throat hurts. I swallow, and it hurts worse.
The house is for you because you’ve never had a place that was just yours. Your mother made her bed under my roof once upon a time. Now she has her own, and this is yours. Let her be mad at me instead of you. I can take it.
There is a postscript in her cramped, quick letters.
