Read Children in the Morning for Free Online

say. Anybody would know, looking at the boy, whose son he is,” Giacomo said. Then he caught sight of Father Burke, and glared at him, then looked back at the baby. Father Burke stood up, because it’s polite to do that if somebody comes in the room, but he was giving Giacomo a dirty look.
    Then Giacomo finally saw me. “Oh! Mi dispiace , Normie, buonasera! ”
    “Buonasera, Giacomo,” I answered, because he had taught us a few words of Italian.
    “Giacomo Fornino, this is Brennan Burke. Brennan, Giacomo.”
    The two of them shook hands, but they did not look happy to be meeting one another.
    “Sit down and have something to eat, Giacomo. We’ll talk later.”
    He didn’t want to eat. He wanted to argue. But he sat down.
    Father Burke pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to Giacomo. He took one, and Mum went over and opened up the buffet table, and brought out two old ashtrays. She usually growls if anyone tries to smoke in the house, but that night she didn’t bother.
    Father Burke leaned way over and lit Giacomo’s cigarette, glaring through the flame at him the whole time.
    Giacomo sucked back on the cigarette and spoke up. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said to Father Burke, but he didn’t mean it.
    “Where are you from, Giacomo?” Father Burke sounded friendly.
    “I am from Rome.” He talked a bit about Rome, and Father Burke asked him a couple of questions in Italian, which he really speaks, unlike me and Tommy who only know a few words. Giacomo answered sometimes in English and sometimes in Italian.
    When he wound down, Father Burke said: “But seriously, now, where are you from?”
    “Roma.”
    “No, you can’t be from Rome.” Father Burke took a deep drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke away from the table. “I know you’re just having us on. So? Di dov’è? ”
    Mummy looked at Father, wondering what was going on.
    19

    ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 20
    Giacomo finally said: “I am from a small village originally, of course, but I came to Rome to study and I stayed there until I came to Canada to work for three years.”
    He was mad and got up and left the room. Went to the bathroom.
    Mum gave Father Burke kind of a dirty look. “All right. Give.
    How the hell did you know he wasn’t from Rome?”
    “He just said he paid cinquecentomila lire for something.
    Chinkweh-chento, not shinkweh-shento the way the Romans say it.
    So, a bit of a dissembler you have there, darlin’.”
    “Hearing the gospel truth was not my main motivation for seeing Giacomo. If I want gospel, I’ll get up early on a Sunday morning and go hear you.”
    “Sounds as if you’re more in need of a lawyer right now than a priest.”
    “I’ll send him packing. He’s got no proof —”
    “But a child’s father certainly can claim a right —”
    Mum used a big word, and I came up with a sneaky question the next day to find out what it was: “hypothetically.” I did that a lot while this was going on. It wasn’t really a lie when I told her I was trying to “build up my vocabulary,” because that’s something they want us to do at school.
    Anyway, what Mum said this time was: “If, hypothetically, a child has a father who lives here in the city of Halifax, or even in the province of Nova Scotia, a mother might be more inclined to see those hypothetical rights exercised. But if a child has someone claiming to be the father, and that individual wants to take the child four thousand miles across the ocean, then that individual is never going to succeed in establishing his claim.”
    Giacomo came back then and said he wanted to get to know his son. Our baby! Then he started going on about his parents in Italy.
    That’s when Mum interrupted him and said: “Normie, you have lessons to do for tomorrow. Time to go up to your room.”
    But going to your room in our house is not the end of it, because there’s a secret listening post upstairs in the hallway. It’s an old