Chapter 15
And then there is the thing that happened in the breakfast room, on an ordinary Thursday in November, which nobody wrote down and which I only know because Anna told me, years afterward, at the end of a long evening, and which is where I would like to leave all of them.
Sophie was seven.
She had lost a tooth that morning and had been carrying it in her pocket all day because she had not decided yet whether to give it to her mother or to put it under her pillow, and the deliberation had become a matter of some importance.
She came into the breakfast room with the tooth in her fist and found Dante at the table, alone, with his coffee going cold and his newspaper unopened in front of him.
She climbed into the chair beside him instead of onto his lap. She was getting too big for laps and had recently begun announcing this.
“Uncle Dante.”
“Yes.”
“Are you sad?”
He looked at her.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you are sitting the way Mama sits when she is sad.” Sophie set the tooth down on the table between them, carefully, the way a person sets down something fragile. “She says it is all right to be sad. She says you just have to say it out loud so somebody knows where you are.”
Dante was quiet for a moment.
“I am not sad,” he said. “I am thinking about something I did a long time ago that I cannot undo.”
“What was it?”
“I did not ask a question.”
Sophie considered this with the full weight of her seven years.
“Then ask it now,” she said.
“It is too late for that one.”
“Then ask a different one.”
Anna came in then, with her coat still on, and stopped in the doorway, because she could see from the set of his shoulders that something had happened, and because she had learned, over two years, to let the small things finish before she walked into them.
Dante looked up and saw her.
He did not look away.
“Anna. Sit down. I want to ask you something.”
She sat.
And the thing he asked her was not what she expected, and it was not a proposal, and it was not an apology, and it is not my business to repeat it here.
I will only tell you what she told me.
She said: “For two years I had been waiting for him to make it up to me. And he never tried, not once, and I used to think that was the coldest thing about him.”
She said: “It was not. He just did not believe a thing could be paid for. He had spent his whole life buying things. And then he sat across from me and asked me for something, with nothing in his hands, and it was the first time in his life he had ever done that.”
She said: “I said yes. Obviously I said yes. It was a very small thing. He asked if I would stay. Not as someone he had given shelter to. Not as an employee, or a guest, or a debt. He asked if I would stay because I wanted to, and he asked it as though I might say no.”
Outside, the snow had started — early for November, soft and slow, the kind that muffles a city until it looks like a photograph somebody left on a table.
Sophie remembered the tooth. She took it off the table and looked at it, and then she put it in her pocket, because she had decided that this one was going to be for her mother.
In the breakfast room, three people sat at a table with a newspaper on it that nobody had opened.
Above them, a window was open to the cold air, and the curtain moved.
May you like
And somewhere in the house, a clock that had been running for ninety years went on running, indifferent, keeping time for a family that had finally, after a very long time, arrived in the same room.
THE END
