The kitchen filled the way it filled now: kids set to rolling tagliatelle under whichever grandmother had claimed the flour, a Bianchi granddaughter arguing with a Russo cousin about a christening as if it were a border dispute, which in the old days it would have been. Tony came at noon and took the stool near Pia's chair that had somehow become his on Sundays — the Don of the Russo family, on a stool, shelling peas into a bowl in his lap because Pia had pointed at the peas and then at him, and there were still instructions in that kitchen that outranked him.
"You look like your mother when you're hungry," Pia told him.
"I am hungry."
"Then it's a compliment. She was never prettier than when she was waiting for the sauce." She patted the back of his hand, once, with a hand that had buried a brother, a best friend, and most of the century. "You sit good now, Antonio. In a kitchen. It took you long enough."
At one o'clock Gia brought the tasting bowl herself — three ribbons of tagliatelle, the ragù dark and glossy, steam rising into the good light by the pass. Everyone in the kitchen understood the ritual and arranged, casually, to be busy at something within earshot. Pia ate slowly, the way she had taught two generations to eat: not tasting, exactly — auditing. The room's noise thinned. She set the spoon down across the bowl with terrible finality.
"Almost," she said.
A sound went through Gia that was half laugh and half something else. "Almost. Nonna. After all this time, almost."
"Almost is the best word in a kitchen," Pia said, with the air of a judge explaining the law. "His mother never got better than almost from me in fifty years of Sundays. Carmela understood. Almost means it is alive. Almost means there is a next Sunday to fix it in. Nothing in a family is finished. That is not sad. That is the whole point."
She ate two more bites and pushed the bowl gently toward Tony. "You finish it. You're hungry, and she's watching me eat like a nurse."
She left at three, earlier than usual, tired in a way that had nothing theatrical in it. At the door she stopped and looked back at the room — the steam, the flour, the two names in brass catching the afternoon light. "She would have liked the letters," Pia said to no one in particular. "Carmela. She always said brass was vain. She would have liked it anyway."
Gia drove her back to the guest house and put her to bed with the window open an inch, the way she liked it, the radio low. Pia was asleep before the blanket was straight, one hand resting open, palm up, like a woman who had finally set everything down.
She died in the night, on Tuesday going into Wednesday, quietly, in her sleep, with the window open an inch and the glass of water untouched. Gia found her in the morning and understood before she touched her — the stillness in that room was of a different kind than sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed and held the open hand, and said the things you say, and then she phoned Tony Russo, and Tony Russo came across the yard in his shirtsleeves and stood in the doorway of his own guest house and said, very quietly, "She waited for Sunday."
"She finished her shift," Gia said. "That's all. She finished it and she went home."
The funeral filled the old church past its doors. Both families came in their blacks — Russos on one side, Bianchis on the other — and by the second hymn the sides had dissolved into whoever had arrived with whom, which was most of the neighborhood. People stood along the walls and out onto the steps, where Paulie worked the door in a dark suit. Tony sat where Pia had once put him — moved, years of pride ago, out of the back pew and into the family pew by an old woman's gesture — and he stayed there, in the place she had assigned him, for the whole of it.
Afterward, three hundred people had to be fed, and there was only one kitchen in Philadelphia where that was going to happen, and only one pair of hands the day trusted with the ragù. Gia cooked for three hundred mourners out of her grandmother's hands' memory. Grief had taken the lists out of her head and burned them. But her hands knew. Her hands folded the peel without asking her. Her hands found the star anise by touch in a pot big enough to bathe a child in, and lifted it out at the moment her mind was somewhere in a church, listening to a hymn.
Tony ate his bowl standing at the pass, in his funeral suit, among the servers.
"Almost," Gia said to him, tasting from the spoon at last, at four in the afternoon. Her voice shook and held. "She'd have said almost."
"Then it's right," Tony said. "Don't you dare fix it."
That night, long after the last tray, Gia dreamed she was small again in a kitchen that no longer existed, and the sauce on the stove was, at last and impossibly, exactly right. And Pia, tasting it in the dream, laughed her real laugh. "Almost, tesoro," she said. "Almost. There's another Sunday. There's always another Sunday."
Chapter 27: The Cook's Own Table
The offers arrived within a week of each other, as if the city had been waiting for Pia's funeral to clear its throat.
The first came from Altrove. Aldo Ferraro drove out to the kitchen himself, on a Tuesday, and stood in the doorway watching Gia run a midweek prep class for nine-year-olds before he said anything at all. He was sixty-eight and tired of being a monument in his own dining room. The owners wanted a name to build the next decade on, and they wanted hers: head chef, her menu, her brigade, her name in the paper in the size of type that restaurants are made of. The ragù, of course, would be the signature.
"They'll pay you stupid money," Aldo said, without enthusiasm, because he was an honest man. "Stupid money is still money."
The second offer came from her own side of the river. Tony asked her — not through Paulie, not through Anna, but standing in the kitchen at closing, folding and refolding a dish towel — whether she would cook for the Russo house. Not for events. For the house. The family table, properly, the way it had been run when his mother ran it: staff, standing, a salary that made Aldo's owners look shy. "A house like mine should have a cook like you at the center of it," he said. "That's not a compliment. That's just an accurate description of the last year."