"Then sit still, and do not interrupt an old woman with questions until she's done. I am only myself on Sundays, and I will not waste me. It begins with my brother."
Chapter 10: Nino
"My brother's name was Nino," Pia said. "Say it once, Anthony, so it can be in the room."
Tony said it. "Nino."
"Nino Lombardi. Twenty-four years old in the spring of 1989, which makes him fifty-six years younger than me now, forever — that is the kind of arithmetic this family of yours has given me to do in my old age." She looked out the window a moment. "He was the baby. My mother had him late and loved him stupid, the way you love the last one. He drove a car for a service on Passyunk — a black car, a clean shirt, a license he was proud of like it was a diploma. He ironed his own shirts, Anthony. He was saving to marry a girl named Teresa who worked in a bakery, and he owed nobody anything, and he knew *nothing* — you understand me? Nothing. He knew who sat in his back seat the way a bus driver knows. Faces. Weather. Tips."
Tony sat very still in the visitor's chair.
"That spring your father wanted a man dead — a Bianchi man, a bookkeeper who had begun keeping a second set of books with names in it. Giuseppe did not do things halfway, God rest him, because God will have to; nobody here would. The hit was set for the morning run to the airport. And your mother—" Pia's voice, so level until now, found its one crack. "Your mother heard the name of the car service from your father's own mouth, at his own table, because Giuseppe in those days still believed a wife was furniture that couldn't listen. And she knew whose car it would be. She had known Nino since he was nine years old and stealing plums through her fence. He called her *zia*. He ate at her table every Sunday of his childhood, next to me, in the years when our mothers put us girls in the kitchen together and the two families were one family at the table, whatever the men were doing in the street."
Pia turned her hands over in her lap, once, slowly.
"She begged him the night before. I know this because she told me herself, in my kitchen, with her hands shaking too hard to hold the knife, and Carmela's hands never shook. She went to her husband in their own house and she said: *Not the boy. Take the other one if your business needs a body, but send word, change the morning, do it on a street where my friend's brother isn't driving. He carries a lunch pail, Giuseppe. He isn't in this.* And your father told her she was asking him to choose her friend's brother over his own house. He told her that mercy, in his position, was just another word for weakness, and weakness got families buried. He told her not to ask him again. So she stopped asking." Pia's eyes were dry and terrible. "It is the only thing your mother ever stopped doing all at once. Everything else, she stopped one Sunday at a time."
The next morning Nino put on his ironed shirt and drove to pick up a fare. The car was stopped at a light on Oregon Avenue. It took less than a minute. The Bianchi man died in the back seat. Nino died in the front with his hands on the wheel, not understanding, I pray to God, anything at all — not who, not why. He was twenty-four years old and he was *collateral*. That is the word your father's people used, at the funeral parlor, out of my mother's hearing. Collateral. As if he had been a building that fell down near an explosion.
"We buried him on a Saturday. Your mother came to the church and stood at the very back, where the family couldn't see her grieve, because a Russo wife did not grieve a Lombardi driver in public in 1989. She looked at me across my brother's coffin, and I looked at her, and neither of us said a word, and we understood each other completely, the way we had since we were nine. And the next day — Sunday — my kitchen door opened at ten in the morning, and your mother walked in with her market bag on her arm, the way she had every Sunday since we were girls."
"She said: *I will not cook it in that house again. Not at his table. Not for his name.* She unpacked the bag — the veal, the pork, the tomatoes, the oranges with the thick skins. She said: *But it has to be cooked, Pia. An apology has to be made fresh, every week, by hand, or it isn't an apology, it's just words. Words are what he uses. I'll use the truth.* And she cooked her ragù at my table that Sunday. And the Sunday after. And every Sunday that God sent, in my kitchen, for the rest of her life. At her own table — the Russo table — that dish never appeared again. Not once. She struck it from her own house the way you strike a name from a list. Her sisters thought she had lost the taste for it. Her husband—" Pia smiled, and it was not a kind smile. "Her husband never noticed what was missing from his table. That was his punishment, and he never even knew he was serving it."
Tony's hands had closed, at some point, into fists. He opened them deliberately, finger by finger, the way a man sets down something breakable.
"And after she—" he began.
"After she died," Pia said, "I kept the Sundays." She shrugged, one shoulder, an old woman's shrug that carried thirty years. "What was I to do? Stop? The apology wasn't finished, Anthony. It hadn't *arrived* anywhere. She cooked it as penance and I kept cooking it as penance, and my hands taught my granddaughter's hands the way Carmela's hands taught mine, and for thirty years that dish was made in my kitchen every Sunday — by two women, then by one, then by a girl who didn't know she was kneeling at an altar. She thought she was learning lunch."
Pia leaned forward then, in her chair by the window, and took — slowly, because everything she did now was slow except her eyes — one of Tony's hands in both of hers.
"Your mother cooked her apology for you, Anthony. Not for me. For *you* — the son who would sit in his father's chair in a world his father made, the boy she couldn't protect from the inheritance. She sent it to my table because there was nowhere in her own house it was safe. And last Tuesday night, my granddaughter carried it across this city in a staff pot and set it in front of you at a table of peace, not knowing. Thirty years of Sundays, and the apology has finally arrived at its address."