Someone, Mia understood, standing in the bright kitchen afterward with cocoa she didn't remember making, had known the house from inside.
Chapter 13: What Happened to Elena
Mrs. Ricci told it three days after the blackout, in the small kitchen, while rolling out dough for the Sunday baking β told it the way you hand someone a loaded thing, carefully, without looking at it.
"You will have wondered," she said, "about the signora. Everyone who works here wonders. Nobody asks me. You are the first one who has not asked, and that is why I am telling you."
Mia kept her hands busy with the ricotta filling and said nothing.
"Elena was not from a family like this one," Mrs. Ricci said. "She was a schoolteacher. From Kenosha. She met him at a charity dinner where he was β how do you say β being displayed, the way these families display their sons, and she laughed at something he said that was not meant to be funny, and he told his mother he had met the rudest woman in Wisconsin." A ghost of a smile crossed the housekeeper's face. "He courted her for a year. Properly. Flowers, mass, her father's permission. When they married, she moved into this house and made it β warm. There is no other word. She put music in the dining room. She made him eat at the table with everyone, like a person."
The rolling pin moved steadily. Flour dusted the air like snow in sunlight.
"They had four years," Mrs. Ricci said. "Four good years. I have worked in this house thirty-one years and I tell you, those were the only years it was a home and not a fortress."
She folded a corner of the dough over, precisely. "She sang in the mornings, that one. In this kitchen. Italian songs, badly β she learned them from the radio and got every third word wrong, and the staff would correct her and she would laugh and sing them wrong again on purpose. She knew every servant's name and every servant's children's names. When my mother died in Naples, Elena sat with me in this room until the morning, drinking tea I did not remember making. The wife of the house, sitting up all night with the housekeeper. That was who she was. When people here say her name now, they lower their voices like it is a saint's. I lower mine because she was my friend, and I am allowed."
"What happened?" Mia asked, quietly.
"The car." The pin stopped. "It was his car β his armored one, the one he took to the city. That morning hers would not start, some small thing, a battery. So he gave her his, and took the ordinary one himself, and laughed about it. He stood in this doorway and laughed and said a schoolteacher would lower the tone of his motorcade." Her voice did not break; it did something worse, it flattened. "There was a truck. On the expressway. It was meant for him β everyone understood that by nightfall, whatever the police report said. It was never solved. These things, in their world, are sometimes never solved."
The dough rested under her hands.
"He came home that night and sat in the dining room," she said. "The table was set for their dinner β they were to eat at eight, just the two of them, she had asked me for the good plates. He sat there until morning. The food went cold. Nobody cleared it. I cleared it myself the next day, at noon, because I could not bear the menservants doing it like it was nothing."
Mia's eyes were burning. "And he's eaten alone since then."
"Five years. One plate, one glass, at the far end of a table for thirty. Marco has begged. The Nonna has commanded β the Nonna, imagine, and even she could not move him. He says a man should eat his punishment where he can see it. I set that table, signorina. Every night for five years I have set one place at that table, and I have hated it every single night, and I have never once refused. That is what service is. You carry the grief of the house as well as the plates."
She turned then, and looked at Mia directly for the first time since she'd begun.
"And then a waitress knocks his dinner on the floor and saves his life, and he makes his rule β she eats first β and do you know what I thought, when I heard the rule?" Mrs. Ricci's chin lifted. "I thought: at last, there is a second plate on that table. Even if it is a taster's plate. Even if he pretends it is only business. Five years that man has eaten with a ghost, and now he eats with a living woman close enough to knock his plate away. You may think your job is small, Mia Callahan. In this house, it is not small. A saved life weighs more here than a debt of money. The old families understand that in their bones. He owes you his life, and he knows it, and a man like Luca Moretti pays his debts β all of them, always, even the ones that frighten him."
"Frighten him," Mia repeated.
"You think he is not frightened?" Mrs. Ricci picked up the rolling pin again. "He is frightened every night at eight o'clock, at the far end of that table. He has been frightened for five years. That is why the Nonna summoned you, I think. That is why I am telling you this, and I will deny it if you repeat it." The pin rolled out, smooth and relentless. "He does not need another person in this house who is afraid of him. He has a houseful. What he needs β what that table needs β is somebody who will sit down in the empty chair and eat like it is the most natural thing in the world."
"I can't do that," Mia said. "I'm the cook, Mrs. Ricci. I'm staff. I'd be fired by Marco before the soup course."
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Ricci serenely. "Perhaps not. I only dust the chairs, signorina. I do not decide who sits in them."
Mia finished the ricotta in silence, thinking of the long table, and the one plate at the far end, and the chair beside it that had been empty for five years β and of a schoolteacher from Kenosha who had once laughed at the wrong joke and made a fortress into a home, and how much courage it must take, after a loss like that, to ever set a second plate again.
That night, serving, she set Luca's dinner down as always. But as she turned to go, she did the smallest thing β a thing no one had done in five years.
She set her own tasting plate at the place beside his, instead of taking it back to the kitchen.