Page 7 of Broken Trust

5

GIA

Did I really hear what I thought I heard?

Are my eyes deceiving me?

We were at it like animals. I haven't done that much exercise since I did a spinning class with Mia five years ago, and it took me nearly five years to recover.

This question keeps circulating in my mind.

As soon as he left this morning, I did the same and followed him, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I roamed around trying to make sense of it. Day became night, and with my crazy thoughts I decided to come back home and have it out with him.

Someone is here. Dante’s car isn’t outside, so there are only two people that can be here, as I see the coats hanging near the doorway. My parents. I knew I never should have given Mamma a key.

“Mamma,” I call out as I head to the kitchen.

She's standing in the middle of my kitchen, lipstick on, hair set exactly like that woman off the television she's decided to become in her sixties, and behind her at my own table sits Papa, coat still buttoned to the throat, both broad hands flat on the wood on either side of a glass of my Barolo he hasn't touched.

“There she is.” Mamma turns from the counter with a hand pressed to her chest. “You gave your father a fright, tearing about in the dark like a madwoman. Why are you looking at me like you've seen a ghost?”

She's the one who looks at it. She's done something new to her face again, something tight around the eyes, refusing to acknowledge her age. She has no idea what I've just stood outside a window and watched. And still, God help me, the second I see her the whole night comes up my throat, because I've never once in my life managed to think straight in front of my mother. I know better than to say a word. I say it anyway.

“I saw Dante. With Mia. At her apartment.” My voice is shaking and I can't stop it. “I think they're having an affair, Mamma….”

“Shh.” She waves it off like there’s some bug in front of her face. “You've worked yourself into a state over nothing. You're exhausted, look at your face. You asked your sister to carry this baby and she's carrying it. That's all you saw. You should be down on your knees grateful to her.”

“What?” I hear myself. “For fucking my husband.”

“For giving your husband the one thing you couldn't, cara. Be honest for once.” She comes a step closer and drops her voice, letting me in on a kindness. “And if she's warming his bed a little now, so what. When the baby comes she'll drop him and move on to the next one, you know your sister. She keeps nothing. This will pass, and you'll still have a husband and a child, and no one will be any the wiser.”

“Do you think before you speak?”

“Do you?” she says, and smiles at me.

Pa's chair scrapes back. He stands slow, the way he stands now that his knees have gone, and he comes around the table with both hands open in front of him, the way a man crosses a field toward a spooked animal, and when he speaks there's real feeling in it, which is the worst part, because he believes every word.

“Sit down, cara. We came because your sister called us in tears, saying you'd been spying on her. So we're here. We're trying to help you.”

“You're not.” I heat toward the foot of the stairs, out of his reach. “You're doing exactly what he does. Ignoring what I'm saying, because you don’t want a family scandal.”

“What would you have us do?” Mamma's voice sharpens for the first time. “Do you have any idea how many women would give their right arm for a man like Dante? For this house, this name, this life you stand inside and cannot see?”

“He made something of himself. Something I didn’t think was possible at first.” Papa has stopped below me, one hand on the newel post, and he shakes his head slowly. “That boy came from nothing and made this family proud by doing it. He gave you a life half this city would trade places for. You were about to have everything, cara. A husband people respect, a child on the way, all of us whole under one roof. Are you certain you want to set fire to the whole of it over something this small?”

Something this small. I feel sick knowing that they’ve been lying to me.

I keep climbing. I want Nella. The sensible one, the only rock I've ever been given. She's the one I should have called from that freezing landing, and the only thing that stopped me is knowing what her face would do first, before the love came, that flicker of I told you so, because she did tell me, years ago, and I married him anyway.

Mamma comes up the stairs behind me, of course she does, she has never once let a door close on her before she's had the last word.

“You know your sister has always been jealous of you,” she calls up, and then, because she can't help herself, “It's a wonder anyone can tell the two of you apart at all.” A little laugh follows it up the steps. “Though they could, mind, if you dropped forty pounds.”

My sister is ready to give birth. I stop with my hand on the banister and let that hang in the stairwell between us, and she doesn't even hear it land. That's the thing about Mamma. She never once hears herself.

“And you,” she goes on, warming to it, reaching the landing a breath short from the climb she won't admit is hard on her, “if you did something with your hair, took a little care over your body, your home, no man would look sideways to begin with. But you let yourself go, Gia. You never did take after your sister that way.”

And for one second the years drop away and I'm fifteen again, home with the report card full of the marks Mia never brought home, watching them pin Mia's photograph to the wall instead, because Mia was the beautiful one and I was the clever one, and everyone knows what clever girls are for. Clever girls are used.