Chapter 9 - THE HEAD OF THE TABLE
Six months can change the entire geography of a house.
For twenty-six years after his mother died, Luca Moretti’s mansion on the Gold Coast had looked like a museum—cold Italian marble, locked third-floor studies, and thirty-person crystal chandeliers that only got turned on for city councilmen and bankers who smiled to your face while checking the silverware.
By April, the velvet ropes were gone.
Arthur Sterling and his brother, Dr. Sterling, never even went to trial; faced with the 2000 evidence-sealed digitalis bottle bearing Arthur’s thumbprint, the Belmont Harbor security logs, and Dante Rossi’s full federal confession in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, the Sterling brothers pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy in February.
Vanessa tried to claim she had been coerced by her father until the prosecutor played the recording from Leo’s iPad—and showed the jury her signature on the American Express receipt that had turned off the fume alarm on Marco’s boat. She received thirty-five years at the federal correctional institution in Pekin without the possibility of parole.
And the twelve-thousand-dollar engagement cake?
Luca had the kitchen staff donate it to the St. Jude’s shelter the morning after the party, right after he threw Vanessa’s clothes onto the front driveway.
On the first warm Sunday of May, the iron gates of the Moretti mansion stood wide open to the lake breeze.
I wasn’t wearing a black maid’s uniform anymore.
I wore a soft cream knit dress—and pinned to my collar was the delicate silver and mother-of-pearl rosary that had belonged to Elena Moretti, which Rosa had placed in my hands the day my father was discharged from Northwestern’s stroke recovery unit.
Out in the sunny Victorian greenhouse behind the garden, where my mother Clara and Luca’s mother Elena had stood together for that Polaroid twenty-eight years ago, a new ramp of smooth cedar planks led straight up to the double glass doors.
My father sat there in his new lightweight chair in the afternoon sun, a wool cap unnecessary in the May warmth, watching eight-year-old Leo carefully water a row of newly planted Honeycrisp apple saplings with a green tin watering can.
With six months of daily speech and occupational therapy—paid for by the restitution fund Luca had forced the hospital board to establish for every patient Dr. Sterling had neglected—my dad could walk thirty feet with a quad cane now, and he spoke in clear, steady sentences.
“Grandpa Tom,” Leo called out, holding up a muddy earthworm on the tip of his trowel with eight-year-old pride. “Look how big this one is! Can we take him to the harbor tomorrow for perch?”
My dad smiled, his weathered face fuller and brighter than I had seen it since I was a child. “Put him in the coffee can, buddy. Uncle Luca says the boat goes out at seven sharp.”
I stood on the stone terrace watching them, a dish towel still tucked out of habit over my wrist, until footsteps sounded on the flagstones behind me.
Luca walked out of the French doors carrying two glasses of lemonade and a warm ceramic pie dish wrapped in a checkered linen cloth. He wasn’t wearing a tuxedo or a charcoal power suit; he had on a navy sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms and a smudge of flour on his jawline from the kitchen.
“You’re smiling,” Luca said, stopping beside me at the terrace railing and handing me a glass. “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about the night you stood up in that dining hall and called a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a blue bus coat Mama Rosa in front of thirty millionaires,” I said honestly.
Luca looked down at the greenhouse where my father and our nephew were laughing over the tin coffee can of worms.
“My mother wrote that letter twenty-six years ago because she knew who my father’s friends were,” Luca said quietly. “She knew that if I grew up in this house alone, I’d eventually mistake polish for character. If you had obeyed Vanessa that night and put Rosa in the staff kitchen, Emma, I would have married the woman who killed my brother, and Leo would have grown up never knowing the grandfather who almost died trying to protect him.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a heavy brass key—not a safe-deposit key this time, but the front door key to the brownstone next door that Luca had bought and renovated last month into the Elena & Clara Moretti Foundation for Stroke Recovery and Family Care, where I had just started my first week as Executive Director.
“Though,” Luca added, a rare, warm smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he looked at me, “Mama Rosa says if I let you move into the apartment above the foundation next door instead of staying here in the main house, she’s going to start taking the city bus again just to spite me.”
From inside the open kitchen window behind us, Rosa’s voice rang out right on cue.
“Luca! Stop talking business on the porch and bring Emma and your father inside before the crust gets cold!”
We walked into the sunny kitchen together—not the crystal banquet hall, which Luca had turned into a playroom for Leo’s Lego sets and cello lessons, but the big oak table in the center of the kitchen where Rosa had fed Luca when he was seven years old.
Rosa sat at the head of the table in her favorite cardigan, the silver cake server in her hand.
My father rolled his chair up to her right side, Leo climbed onto the bench between Luca and me, and as Rosa cut the first steaming slice of homemade apple pie and placed it on my plate, Leo reached under the table and slipped his small hand into mine.
May you like
No one in that room was staff anymore.
We were home.
