Read The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club for Free Online Page B

to be wrapped, readied for shipping, all the while talking to the man working next to him and, in the time it took for that man to turn around and talk to the person next to him on the line, then turn back to Nilo, Nilo was already dead. Slumped in a heap on the spot where he’d been standing and laughing two minutes before. That was sword number one.
    â€˜The second sword came after the mass, the funeral mass. The coffin had been carried out to the hearse and I should have followed it but, instead, I’d wanted to stay a while alone. Giorgia wouldn’t leave me, though, my sister, Giorgia. Shadowing me, insisting I was too weak to kneel another time. So I just stood there, my back to the altar, facing the main aisle, remembering how I’d minced along its length on my father’s arm and in my mother’s ivory satin, never minding how the dress strangled me about my bosoms or that it barely reached my ankles rather than sweeping the floor as it was meant to. When I arrived beside him, the first thing Nilo whispered was, “
Amore mio, sei in attesa di un diluvio?
Were you expecting a flood, my love?” That always made me laugh, him saying that, and so I stood there playing the scene over and over, willing it to paint over the fresh red hole where my life once was.
    â€˜And then I noticed a child. A small, thin boy striding toward me from the main door of the church. He was pallid, weeping, maybe ten years old, maybe less. Even from a distance his eyes shackled mine. I waited for him. When we were toe to toe, I thought I must be dreaming, for it was Nilo. There before me was my husband as a boy. Skin so white I could see his veins, deep black pools, the eyes. Even his mouth, the point of his chin, it was Nilo. I stayed silent and the boy, save trying to stave his weeping, he was quiet, too. And then I felt it, like something falling away. From my eyes, from my throat, my body, some kind of veneer shattering. Glass, ice. Something that had been gently suffocating me for so long that I’d learned to breathe through it. All of it gone. I knew it before he told me. Sober as Abraham, that little boy, I knew it was true before he could say it:
Sono figlio di Nilo
. I am Nilo’s son.
    â€˜I think the boy neither expected me to speak nor wished me to, it being enough for him to say the words aloud. Out of the dark, revealed. By then it was I who was keeping Giorgia upright, bending to soothe her, telling her I was fine, and when I looked back at the boy, there stood behind him a girl.
Another one
, I thought.
Two children. Jesus help me
. The girl stepped closer. “
Io sono l’altra
. I’m the other one,” she said. “Of course you are,” I whispered. White-skinned, red-haired, just like the boy. But not like the boy. Not like Nilo. In the yellow light of the church she might have been a statue, sculpted, serene. “
Io sono l’altra
,” she said again. “
L’altra
, the other one,” she repeated and, though I tried to make her eyes slide off mine, she held them there until she was sure I’d understood.
The other woman
. The second sword. I never said a word.
    â€˜There was nothing to do but take her by the hand, the boy with my other hand, walk down the aisle and out the door, down the steps where all the mourners were lined up on either side, waiting to console the widow.
We were both widows
, I kept thinking that. We just kept walking. I could hear Giorgia muttering behind me. Someone folded us into the long black funeral car, smelling of lilies. Even now, lilies bring me to a faint, a frenzy. I don’t recall much after that. The boy’s weeping, I remember that. And that we never did let go of one another’s hands all morning long. The girl, she never cried or spoke; taut as a palace guard, she stayed. They let go first, mother and son, they let go of my hands when it was over. Half a nod, they turned, began walking away. I