Chapter Seven: The Father

She woke at 7:40 to the sound of a snowblower.

She went to the window. A man in a brown coat was clearing the long driveway. The sun was just coming up over the lake. The light on the snow was pale pink.

There was a knock on her door.

“Yes.”

“Breakfast is downstairs when you are ready, señorita.“

“Rosa, I’ll be down in a minute. Thank you.”

She showered. She put on a pair of jeans and a sweater that she found folded in the wardrobe. Her size to within an inch. She brushed her hair. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was tired. But not broken.

She went downstairs.

Lorenzo was in the kitchen at the same end of the butcher block. Reading a newspaper. A real newspaper. Paper.

He looked up.

“Good morning.”

“Morning.”

“Coffee, please.”

Rosa at the stove poured her a cup without being asked. Black. Strong.

There was fruit on the table. A plate of small pastries. Butter in a dish. A jar of honey. And, inexplicably, a bowl of olives.

“Olives?” Isabella said.

“Rosa is from the south,” Lorenzo said. “She believes olives are a breakfast food.”

“Olives are a breakfast food,” Rosa said without turning around.

“I did not say they weren’t. I am only explaining.”

Isabella sat. She drank her coffee. She ate a pastry. She listened to the snowblower in the distance. She watched Lorenzo turn the page of his newspaper.

And she thought, in a small, strange, neutral way: I live here now.

Apparently.

“Lorenzo.”

“Yes.”

“The courthouse. Is it really next week?”

“Tuesday.”

“And it’s—it’s real.”

“Yes. No priest. No dress. Just a judge. A piece of paper.”

“Yes. Just a piece of paper.”

“The kind of marriage my mother would have called a cheap one.”

“Was your first one?”

“Yes. In a church.”

“Okay.”

She put the pastry down.

“Lorenzo.”

“Yes.”

“I want to go see my father today.”

He folded the newspaper.

“All right.”

“And I want to go alone.”

He considered this.

“All right.”

“Don’t send Matteo. I’ll take an Uber.”

“Isabella.”

“No. I want to walk into my father’s house by myself. The way I have walked into my father’s house my entire life. I do not want to pull up in a black car with a driver. That is not how I am going to tell him this. I will not do that to him.”

Lorenzo looked at her for a long moment.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. But one thing.”

“What?”

“You take a phone. A phone I give you. It has one number in it. Mine. If anything—anything—happens, you call, and Matteo is at the house in fifteen minutes. Not because I do not trust you. Because I do not trust the city on the morning after a wedding like last night’s.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

Rosa at the stove made a small sound. Almost approving.

Isabella ate two more pastries. She drank a second cup of coffee.

At 9:15, she stood up.

---

Her aunt’s house was a yellow brick two-story on a side street in Beverly.

Small fenced yard. Concrete driveway. A statue of a saint in the corner by the rose bush.

Isabella stood on the sidewalk for a full minute before she walked up the drive. It had been plowed already. Badly. By her father.

The plowing was bad because his knees were bad. He would have done it at six in the morning with the small shovel. Slowly. Refusing to ask her aunt’s son to help. Because her aunt’s son was, in her father’s private and unspoken opinion, a lazy man.

She had grown up watching him plow driveways.

She rang the bell.

Her aunt opened the door.

Tía Mari. A small woman with gray hair and a fondness for brightly colored cardigans. Today’s was pink.

“Mija.“

“Hi, Tía.”

“Hi.”

Her aunt looked at her. Her aunt looked at her for a long, long time.

“You come inside.”

“Tía Mari—”

“Your father is in the kitchen. He is reading the paper. He has not—he has not said anything. But I think he has seen.”

“Okay.”

“Ven. Come.”

She hung her coat on the hook. She took off her boots. The house smelled, as it always did, of coffee and bleach and the faint sweet smell of the air freshener her aunt refused to give up.

She walked through the living room. Past the big television. Past the photograph of her first communion. Past the photograph of her mother that her father had moved to her aunt’s house without asking when he had moved in.

She pushed open the kitchen door.

Her father was at the kitchen table.

He had the Tribune open in front of him. He had his reading glasses on. He had a cup of coffee at his elbow. He was, when she walked in, looking at page four.

He did not look up.

“Papi.“

“Mija.“

“Papi—”

“Sit down.”

She sat down across from him. The way she had sat across from him every morning of her life from the age of four until the age of eighteen. And many mornings since.

He turned a page. Slowly. Deliberately.

“Mija.“

“Yes, Papi.”

“You are in this paper, Isabella.”

“I figured.”

“Not on page one. Page two. A picture from outside the hotel. You are in silver. You look—you look beautiful, mija. I will say that.”

“Thank you.”

“Your mother would have loved this dress.”

“Papi—”

“My friend Louise,” her father said, still not looking up, “called me last night at 11:42. He said—Alberto, I have to tell you something. I was at a wedding in the city tonight. I saw your daughter. I saw who she was with.“

“He was quiet. I did not sleep. I sat in this chair. I read this paper when it came. I am on my fourth cup of coffee. I have not cried, mija, because I am too old to cry. But I thought about it. I will tell you honestly—I thought about it.”

“Papi—”

“No. Let me talk.”

“Okay.”

He closed the paper. He took off his glasses. He set them carefully on the closed paper. He folded his hands in front of him on the table.

His hands had big knuckles. They always had. She had loved, as a child, his knuckles.

“Isabella,” he said. “I have been a police officer for thirty-one years. I know the name of the man in this picture with you. I know his father’s name. I know his grandfather’s name. I know the names of the houses they live in. The names of the places they eat. The names of certain streets where certain things have happened that I was not always able to prove.”

“I know you understand.”

“I understand.”

“I have spent my whole life on one side of a line, mija. And that man has spent his life on the other side of it. I did not put handcuffs on him personally. We did not get that close. But I put handcuffs on men who worked for him. I sat across from mothers whose sons had died because of men like him.”

“I have opinions, mija. I have many opinions.”

“I know.”

“And last night, I spent four hours thinking about those opinions. Four hours in this chair. And then I thought about something else.”

“What?”

“I thought about the night you came home from that house. From that—that apartment you had with that animal two years ago. You called me. It was two in the morning. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“You were not crying. That was the part that made me afraid. You were not crying. You said to me very calmly—Papi, I need to come home for a few days. And I said—Come. And you came.”

“You slept for three days. Three days, mija. You barely got out of bed. And when I brought you soup on the third night, you looked at me and you said—”

He stopped.

“I remember.”

“You said—Papi, I don’t know how I am supposed to be a person anymore.“

She looked down at the table.

“I remember that now. I remember it every day. Every day for two years. Every day I have watched you go to work and smile at strangers and do your job and come home. And every day I have thought—She is not a person. She is pretending to be a person. My daughter is still in that bed.“

Her eyes filled.

She did not fight it this time.

“Mija.“

“Last night—” He tapped the paper. “Last night I looked at this picture and I saw you. Mi hija. I do not like what I saw. I do not approve of what I saw. I think you are going to make my life very complicated in ways I do not want.”

“But I saw Isabella in that picture. In your face. I saw my daughter again for the first time in two years. I saw my daughter.”

She was crying now. Openly. Not dramatically. Just water on her face.

“I do not know this man,” her father said. “I do not want to know this man. But I will tell you something I did not think I would ever tell you about a man like him.”

“What?”

“If he is the one who put my daughter back in her own face—then he is either the best thing that ever happened to you or the worst. And I am too old to know which. I am only her father. I am not the one who gets to decide anymore.”

“Mija.“

“Listen to me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“If this is real—if you stay with him—you will call me once a week. No less. You will come to this house for dinner once a month. You will let your tía Mari make you her mole. You will sit at this table in this kitchen in this ugly yellow house, and you will be my daughter. Mija, whatever else you become, you will also still be my daughter. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Papi.”

“And if he ever—ever—lays a hand on you—lays a hand, mija—you come home. You come to this door. I do not care what his name is. I do not care who he knows. You come to this door.”

“He won’t.”

“You do not know that.”

“I—I think I do, actually, Papi. I know it doesn’t make sense. I only just met him. But I think I know that.”

Her father looked at her across the table for a long time.

His face was tired and very old. She had not noticed, until this morning, how much older he had gotten in the last two years.

Then he nodded once. Slowly.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Okay, mija. Okay. I’m going to get you some coffee.”

“Ven. Bring a cup for your niece.”

Her aunt, who had clearly been listening from the hallway and was not even pretending otherwise, came bustling in with a mug. She put it in front of Isabella. She put a plate of pan dulce in front of Isabella. She put a hand on Isabella’s shoulder briefly and left it there for a count of three, and then took it away.

“Eat,” Tía Mari said. “Platica.“

“Everybody keeps telling me I’m too thin.”

“Because you are, mija.“

Isabella laughed. It came out wet. But it came out real.

She picked up a concha. She tore off the sweet yellow top. She ate it the way she had eaten them in her mother’s kitchen when she was small.

Her father opened the paper again. He put on his glasses. But he did not read. He was watching her eat over the top of the page. Watching her eat in his sister’s kitchen. Watching his daughter eat bread and drink coffee and be—for a few minutes—simply a person in a chair in his house.

After a long time, he said without looking up:

“Tell the man he can come for dinner. Not this week. Next week. Thursday. Tía Mari makes albóndigas on Thursdays.”

“Papi—”

“Don’t thank me. I’m not doing him a favor. I’m doing it because I want to look in his face. I want to see his face, mija, when I ask him certain things. Tell him that. Tell him Alberto Cruz wants to look at his face.”

“Okay. I’ll tell him.”

“Good.”

He turned another page. Casually. Like the conversation was over. Like the ceiling of her life had not just reformed, wrong side up, over her head.

She sat at her father’s kitchen table.

She drank her coffee.

She understood, in a slow, quiet, almost embarrassing way, that the things she had come here afraid of had not happened. Her father had not told her to leave. Her father had, in his stubborn, complicated, cop-shaped way, told her he saw her. Told her he loved her. Told her he would sit across a table from a man he had spent his whole life on the other side of—because she had asked him to.

She thought, for a second, about Lorenzo. Standing in the kitchen of his own house the night before. Saying, A father who will not sit will not sit. But he will know the offer was made.

She thought also that Lorenzo had been more right than he knew.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

The new phone. The one with one number in it.

She pulled it out under the table.

A single line on the screen:

Tell me when you are ready, and Matteo will come. Take your time.

She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she typed back with her thumb. Very slowly.

Not yet. I’m going to stay for lunch. My aunt is making mole.

She slipped the phone back in her pocket.

She took another piece of concha.

Her father across the table grunted. His father’s grunt. A grunt that had meant fine her whole life.

Outside, the snow kept falling on Beverly. On the small yellow house. On the statue of the saint by the rose bush. On the whole ordinary Sunday morning of a whole ordinary neighborhood that had, overnight and without knowing it, become the in-law family of a man whose name nobody on this block would ever out loud agree to say.

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