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AMELIA
“Keep your voice down, Mamma.”
“Stop evading my questions!” Nemma, Lorenzo’s mom, hisses at him, but she’s notably quieter than before.
I keep still as they speak, afraid my moving shadow may give me away. My arms are wrapped around my knees, and my back is against the cabin. The porch light illuminates me, but Lorenzo and his mother are at the side of the cabin and out of sight. They’re not, however, out of earshot.
The crickets are loud, but they’re background noise. All my focus is on Lorenzo and Nemma.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Thetruth, Enzo.”
I bite my lip and wait for his response.
Dinner was actually kind of nice, and I like Lorenzo’s mom. At first, I thought she didn’t like me, but it became increasingly clear throughout the evening that it was Lorenzo she was disappointed with.
While he was in the shower, she drilled me with questions, although I don’t know if she intended to come off so strong.
Where did I go to college?
What agency did I work for?
How did I like being a nurse?
It kind of seemed like she didn’t think I was good enough to take care of her precious boy, but then the other questions followed.
How has Lorenzo been treating me?
Has he been nice?
He’s always had a hard demeanor, you know. Even when he was a little boy, he was a little different, but he’s a good man. He has a big heart.
Her words started sounding more for her own benefit than for mine, and she continued with her justification for her son’s behavior.
She knew. She knew I wasn’t a nurse and that there was something far more sinister going on here. I’d have been upset with her for going along with it if she didn’t have such obvious sympathy for me.
She eased up when Lorenzo was out of the shower and then appeared to even relax at dinner. She went on and on, telling stories and talking about everything she could think of. I now know more about Italy than I learned in the summer I spent in Europe when I was twenty. Nemma grew up in Amalfi, and by the way she talks about it, it’s in the most romantic part of the world and she misses it dearly.
She moved when she was eighteen to the States and married Lorenzo’s father. She’d never met the man until the wedding night, and I didn’t miss how she never said his name. He was either “Lorenzo’s father” or “my husband”. The woman has a way of saying so much yet nothing at all.
But she’s nice. She asks a lot of questions and seems genuinely interested in the answers. If I weren’t sitting here listening to her and her son speaking about me, I would think she liked me.
Even Lorenzo was polite. He opened up each of our doors and smiled at me as I spoke with Nemma. It’s too bad it was fake.
This whole situation has thrown a giant wrench into the hatred and betrayal we should be feeling from earlier, but instead it just feels awkward.
“I made a mistake.”
My chest squeezes, and I shrink into myself.
“Oh,figlio.” Her voice drops several octaves, and I can picture her deflating. She says something else, and I strain to hear. It’s in Italian, and I only catch clippings.
“Perche…Padre e fratello…”
I know enough from my trip to decipher she’s saying something about his father and brother.
Lorenzo says something back in Italian, and I don’t pick it up. I spent all my time learning French, and now I’m regretting it.
