"Ask Nonna Sofia to open the book she hasn't opened for me yet." Mia untied her apron with hands that weren't quite steady. "The 1952 one. The one she keeps wrapped in a cloth like a relic. Because Father Anselmo told me something tonight β and if I'm right, that old man's wife and your grandmother didn't just come from the same country, Marco. They came from the same streets."
Chapter 20: The Menu of Peace
Nonna Sofia kept the book in the bottom drawer of the dresser in her sitting room, wrapped in a flour sack that had been washed so many times it had gone the color of weak tea. She made Mia sit down before she unwrapped it, the way you make a person sit before you tell them someone has died, or been born.
"In 1952 I was seventeen and already tired of being hungry," Sofia said. "So I began to steal. Not food β food runs out. Recipes. Every woman in the village who could make one thing better than anyone else, I watched, and I wrote. My mother said a girl with a book of other women's cooking would never starve and never be lonely. She was right about one of those." Her knotty hands smoothed the cover, where her own girlhood writing leaned uphill in faded blue: Ricette di San Vito. "You know the name now, piccola. Say what you came to ask."
"Vittorio Castellano's wife," Mia said. "Father Anselmo says her name was Agata. He says she was from San Vito too."
The old woman was quiet for a moment, and then she laughed β a real laugh, surprised out of her, the laugh of a woman ambushed by joy in a decade that had mostly brought her funerals.
"Agata Ferraro," she said. "Stole my ribbons. Taught me to curse. We made the Easter bread in her mother's kitchen with our sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she put too much orange peel in everything, every single thing, and would not be told. She married the Castellano boy at nineteen and I married my Moretti at twenty, and we wrote letters until the year the letters stopped." Her hand rested on the book like a hand on a shoulder. "I have wondered for sixty years if she remembered the bread. Open it, Mia. The Easter pages are at the back, where the paper is stained. If you are going to cook that old man his childhood, you will not do it from my memory. You will do it from ours."
For three days the kitchen of the lake house belonged to two childhoods. Mia cooked from Sofia's book and from Father Anselmo's notebook side by side, and where they agreed she trusted them, and where they disagreed she trusted the disagreement, because it meant two women had argued over the same dish in the same village sixty years ago, and an argument like that is a kind of recipe too.
She built the menu the way she had told Marco she would: as a walk through rooms. First, the anchovy toast β the poor food, the food of boys too hungry to wait, because Vittorio had been that boy. Then the broth, clear as glass, the one invalids and old men ask for. Then the pasta of the village, rolled by her own hands at Sofia's elbow while the old woman corrected her thickness with a wooden spoon and no mercy. Then the lamb, slow, with the orange peel β too much of it, deliberately too much β worked into the glaze the way Agata Ferraro had insisted on it against all advice. And last the Easter bread, braided, with the egg in its shell baked into the crown, from the stained pages at the back of the book.
"You are not cooking a treaty," Sofia said, tasting the glaze off Mia's spoon and closing her eyes. "You are cooking a haunting. He will sit at my grandson's table and his dead wife will stand behind his chair. See that she is welcome." She took Mia's face in both her floury hands. "And see that you are not afraid, piccola. Fear salts everything wrong."
On Friday night, the night before, the house was ready and too quiet. The silver was laid. The corridor of peace was walked and walked again. Mia was at the counter at eleven, going down a list that existed only in her head, when Luca came in β not in his suit, in shirtsleeves, like the nights of the cake, and she understood before he spoke that this was not an inspection.
"Walk with me," he said, and she walked with him out onto the terrace above the black lake, where the November cold came off the water and the house stood lit behind them like a ship.
"Marco thinks Saturday is about whether Vittorio still commands his family," Luca said. "It isn't. It's about whether I command mine. If I order my men to eat with the people who put Elena in the groundβ" He stopped. Corrected himself with an effort she could hear. "Who I told myself put her there. There is a difference. You have spent three months teaching me there is a difference, and I do not enjoy the lesson."
"And if it works?" Mia asked.
"Then I have made a peace I cannot rule the way I ruled the war, and I will spend the rest of my life learning how." He looked out at the water for a long moment. "Ask me what I'm afraid of, Mia. Everyone in my life has been too loyal or too dead to ask me."
"What are you afraid of, Luca?"
"Not dying." He said it plainly, like a man setting down something heavy he'd finally gotten to a table. "I have been ready to die since I was twenty-six years old; it is the family trade, and Elena's grave has my name half-carved beside hers in my head. Dying holds nothing for me at all." He turned to her then, and in the light from the house his face was the one she'd seen over a child's birthday cake β undefended, and furious at being undefended, and staying anyway. "I am afraid of you leaving. When this is done β when there's no poison to taste and no war to cook for and your contract is a memory β you will walk out of my kitchen the way you walked into it, through the wrong door, and you will take the only honest table in my house with you. I have buried a wife, Mia. I do not know how to simply watch a woman leave and call it peace."
The cold came off the lake. Behind them the great house waited with its silver laid and its corridor of peace and its thirty years of blood. Mia took his hand β the one that had burned, the one that had learned to fold batter like a tide β and held it the way you hold a thing you are not finished with.