She looks at me with Alessandro’s eyes and the expression of a woman prepared to challenge my jurisdiction. She’s two years old. This doesn’t stop her.
“No,” I repeat.
Lucia considers the leaf. Then me. Then the leaf again. Sofia, seated beside her on the blanket, watches the entire exchange with grave interest. She doesn’t interfere. Sofia rarely interferes before she understands the full shape of a thing.
That came from me. Poor child.
Lucia drops the rosemary. Sofia immediately picks it up and hands it to me.
“Traitor,” Lucia says. It comes out closer to “tay tah,” but the intent is clear.
Alessandro, standing near the fountain with his morning espresso, lowers the cup. “She has your tone.”
“She has your disregard for authority,” I retort.
“I am authority.”
“Exactly.”
He looks at Lucia. Lucia looks back. There are moments when I see the future trying to assemble itself in miniature and feel a very specific terror.
Then Lucia smiles. Not sweetly. Strategically.
Alessandro exhales through his nose. “She will be impossible.”
I huff a laugh. “She already is.”
Sofia leans against my side and places one hand on my knee. Not for comfort. For contact. Verification. I’m here. She’s here. The world continues.
I brush my fingers over her dark hair. The garden is too beautiful this morning.
Still…
Even after all this time, I distrust beauty that has been trimmed into obedience. Hedges cut clean. White stone washed. Cypresses aligned like witnesses who know better than to speak unless summoned.
Very Vitale.
Very ours now, too, which remains inconvenient.
Two years change the surface of things. Furniture moves. Rooms collect evidence. Children leave impossible objects in dangerous places. A wooden horse appears in Alessandro’s study and remains there because Lucia screamed for eleven minutes when Marco attempted to remove it. Sofia’s picturebooks occupy space beside council reports. My shawl hangs over a chair that once looked designed to intimidate men into agreement.
Life leaves marks where strategy never would. That may be the difference. Strategy arranges. Life accumulates. Alessandro still dislikes disorder, but he tolerates more of it now. Not cheerfully. Never cheerfully.
Before espresso, he remains a hostile political entity.
This morning, he came into the nursery, stared at the carnage of blocks, blankets, one missing shoe, two wooden animals, and a doll with no dress, and said, “This is avoidable.”
Lucia handed him the naked doll. Sofia handed him the missing shoe. He stood there, holding both like evidence in a trial he had already lost.
I shouldn’t have found it as attractive as I did.
Marriage was never the word we used for our pairing. Not formally. Not legally. Not with white fabric and speeches and men pretending blood can be sanctified if enough flowers are present. The families call me “Donna” now. I objected for six months. Then I became too tired to correct people who were less asking than acknowledging a structure they had already adjusted themselves around.
Teresa said this was growth. I said it was administrative fatigue. Both can be true.
Many things can be true. That has become the most inconvenient lesson of my life.
My father is still dead.
