Chapter 42
Dante did not push her. He came to the library in the evenings and sat in the other chair and read the newspaper, and sometimes they talked, and sometimes they didn’t, and it was the most ordinary thing either of them had ever had.
On the third week, she asked him for a job.
“You don’t need a job,” he said.
“I need a job.”
“You have a house.”
“I have a house because a dead woman wrote my name on a photograph.” She looked at him. “That isn’t the same as having something to do.”
So he gave her one. Not a maid’s job — an actual one, with an office and a title and a salary, running the foundation he set up in his mother’s name, the Bianca Moretti Fund, which took the money out of the shell companies and the properties and the routes and put it into a scholarship program for kids on the west side who wanted to go to nursing school.
The first scholarship went to a girl from Little Village. Her name was Marisol. Allesia met her at the orientation and shook her hand and did not tell her anything about how the fund had come to exist.
Some things you keep.
Some things you give away.
The anniversary came around again in the fall.
Allesia went with him this time. They drove out to the cemetery on the north side and walked up the gravel drive past the mausoleum where she had stood in the rain, and they stopped at the low slab of gray granite under the elms.
Dante stood there for a while and did not say anything.
Then he took the medallion out of his pocket.
He had kept it since the day at the hospital — she had given it to him the night before the funeral, and he had not asked for it, and she had put it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, the way her father had done for her.
He opened it.
The tiny key was still inside.
“You should keep it,” he said.
“I did keep it. I gave it to you.”
May you like
“Then I’m giving it back.” He held it out. “It was your father’s. It’s the reason we found the book. It’s the reason I know what my mother wrote about me.”
Allesia looked at the medallion in his palm.
