Chapter 9: The Visit
On Sunday morning Tony told Paulie an address, and Paulie — who had driven him for thirty years to funerals, weddings, hospitals, and places that appeared in no one's diary — put it into the car without a flicker and said only, "Visiting hours start at ten, boss."
"Then we'll be unfashionably early," Tony said. "It's her day."
St. Brigid's Home stood in the Northeast, behind a hedge that somebody's grandson trimmed on weekends, and it smelled the way such places smell — soup and floor cleaner and old paper — undercut, that Sunday, with coffee, because Sundays were visiting days and the whole building ran an hour kinder than its schedule. Paulie parked under a maple and turned the engine off.
"How long?" he said.
"Until I come out."
"You want me inside?" Paulie had never once, in thirty years, been left out of a room his employer entered among strangers. "It's a nursing home, boss. There's a fish tank."
"There's a fish tank," Tony agreed, "and an old woman who has never in her life been guarded from me." He got out of the car alone, carrying nothing, which for a man of his habits was a kind of nakedness, and went up the walk past two daughters unloading a casserole and a man asleep in a wheelchair with a balloon tied to it, and gave the desk the name he had come with.
The nurse was young, and tired, and looked at the name and then at him with the alertness of people who read newspapers. "Mrs. Ferretti?" she said. "Room fourteen. You're lucky — Sunday's her day." She hesitated. "She's clear on Sundays. Weekdays, she might not… she might ask you the same question four times. Just so you know."
"I know," Tony said.
Room fourteen was small and kept like a chapel: a bed with the blanket folded to a knife's edge, a rosary worn thin as string, photographs in frames that didn't match — a wedding, a First Communion, a young woman in a kitchen with her hands in a bowl, laughing at whoever held the camera. Tony's eyes went to that photograph the way a hand goes to a bruise. He knew the kitchen in it; he had eaten in that kitchen as a boy, in summers he had mostly stopped remembering on purpose. He knew the laughing woman too — and the other one, the one holding the camera, out of frame, would have been his mother. He stood in the doorway with thirty-seven years of Sundays between him and that laugh, and understood that he had come to the right address about forty years too late for it to be easy. And in the chair by the window, upright, dressed, with her hair pinned and a shawl across her knees like a queen receiving in reduced circumstances, sat Pia Ferretti, eighty-nine years old, looking out at the hedge.
He stopped in the doorway. He had rehearsed an introduction in the car — his name, his business, softeners — and every version of it died where he stood, because she turned her head and looked at him and there was no confusion in it anywhere.
"Sit down," she said.
"Mrs. Ferretti—"
"Sit down, Anthony." Her voice was thin and absolutely level. "Standing over an old woman is for debt collectors and priests, and you are neither one today. Sit."
He sat. The visitor's chair put him lower than hers, which he suspected was not an accident of furniture. She studied him for a long moment, the way a cook studies a market fish, without politeness and without malice.
"You have Carmela's eyes," she said. "The rest of you is your father, God forgive the arithmetic. I wondered if you'd come yourself or send a boy with questions in an envelope."
"I came myself."
"So I see." Her hands, in her lap, turned one over the other, once, remembering work. "The girl first. Is the girl frightened?"
"She has reason to be."
"She always did have the best reasons and the worst luck, my Giulia." A flicker crossed her face, quick as weather. "She folded the peel."
"Ma'am?"
"The orange peel. In the sauce, at the end, folded once." Pia's eyes never left him. "She remembered the peel. She remembered the guest who does not sit down. I taught her hands when her mind was still too young to be trusted, and her hands kept it all." She nodded slowly, as if confirming a shipment. "Then it was hers. The dish, I mean. It traveled in her hands. Good. Hands don't lie about what they've held."
Tony leaned forward, and his own voice, when it came, surprised him with its plainness. "Last Tuesday night, in a restaurant, I ate my mother's ragù. Every part of it. The peel. The anise that isn't there anymore by the time it reaches the table. My mother has been dead thirty-seven years, and my aunts — her own sisters — couldn't make that dish if their lives hung on it. She never told them. She never told anyone." He stopped. "Except you."
He had given orders in rooms full of men who killed for a living and never once heard his voice go uncertain. It went uncertain now, in a small clean room, in front of a woman who weighed perhaps ninety pounds. "I have eaten in the best rooms in five cities, Mrs. Ferretti. I have eaten my own cooking, which is the only cooking I trust, for thirty years. Nothing in my life has ever tasted like my mother. Nothing was ever going to. Then a girl I never saw before Tuesday put it in front of me at a table where I was making peace with people who'd have buried me smiling, and my breath stopped in my chest like I'd been shot with it. So I am not here to threaten your granddaughter. I am here because a dead woman sat down at my table, and you are the only person alive who can tell me why."
"Except me," Pia agreed.
"So I'm asking you, because you're the only living person I can ask: how does a dead woman cook a man's dinner, thirty-seven years after her own funeral?"
Pia Ferretti looked at him for a long time, and something in her face settled, the way silt settles in water and leaves it clear.
"A taste cannot travel thirty-seven years by accident, Anthony," she said. "Nothing travels that far by accident. Not a taste. Not a debt." She folded her hands and set them, finally, at rest. "You came to ask whether your mother sent you something. She did. She has been sending it every Sunday since 1989, and it has been sitting in my kitchen all this time, waiting for an address." She glanced toward the door, then back, and her voice dropped to the tone of a woman beginning the long rosary.