Chapter 10 - The Third Generation
The child was born on a Tuesday morning in late October, while the autumn rain was turning the lake into the color of lead and the smoke from the woodstoves in Gandria drifted low over the water like white lace.
It was a girl.
She had a thick tuft of dark hair, long fingers that curled tightly around anything they touched, and a small dark mole just behind her left ear—the same mark that Ana’s mother had carried, and her mother before her.
They named her Vittoria.
Nico sat on the edge of the iron bed in the corner bedroom, holding the small bundle in arms that looked too big, too scarred, too heavy for something that weighed less than six pounds.
Ana lay against two big feather pillows, her face pale, her dark hair damp and spread out across the white linen like seaweed on sand.
Julian stood by the window, a glass of sweet wine in his hand, looking out at the rain falling on the olive trees.
"She doesn't look like a Casaro," Julian said, coming over to look down at his niece's face. "She's too quiet. Real Casaros start screaming the second they hit the air because they think someone's trying to steal their soup."
"She's not a Casaro," Ana said softly from the bed.
Nico looked up. His amber eyes were soft now—so soft they looked like honey in the light of the single candle burning on the nightstand.
"What is she then?" he asked.
"She's Vittoria," Ana said. She reached out, her pale hand touching the baby's tiny cheek. "She doesn't have a ledger. She doesn't have a key. And she doesn't owe anybody five hundred thousand lira for dockworkers in Bari."
Nico looked down at the child for a long moment.
Then he reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the small leather box he had carried from Chicago, and set it on the blanket beside Ana's hip.
Inside was the silver rosary, polished now until it shone like new moonlight, and beside it lay a small piece of parchment—the official deed to the stone house on the hill, registered in the canton of Ticino under the name of Vittoria Hayes.
Not Casaro. Not Gallo.
Hayes.
"It's done," Nico whispered. "The Genoa accounts are closed. The business in Chicago was sold to the Genovese yesterday morning. I don't have a company anymore, Elena. I don't have an office, and I don't have three Suburbans waiting in the alley."
He looked at her, his big hand reaching out to cover hers where it lay against the baby's blanket.
"I just have this house," he said. "And two people who don't know how to sing the folk song properly."
Ana looked at him—at the scars on his forearms, the grey at his temples, the dark, iron eyes that had watched her across a crowded dining room in Chicago four hundred miles and sixteen months ago.
She didn't answer with words.
She leaned back against the feather pillows, closed her eyes, and began to hum softly under her breath.
It was the Neapolitan song—the old variant, with the small, strange half-step that her father had stolen from the house in Naples thirty years before.
May you like
She didn't stop at the second verse.
She sang it all the way to the end, her voice low and clear in the warm room, while outside the rain fell softly onto the lake, washing away the last dust of the old world from the stone steps below.
