The Sun and Other Stars by Brigid Pasulka Read Free Book Online Page B

they’d tell me off like they used to. Just once I’d like to hear it.
    I keep walking, crossing over to the top half of the hill. On the bottom half are the nicer villas, the ones with iron fences dropped in plumb lines straight from the sky and brick paths swept as clean as the floor in the shop. These are the people who spend most afternoons and weekends cleaning their land, spitting on and smoothing nature’s cowlicks, and waxing the new growth as aggressively as the Eastern European women who work in all the salons in town. It’s not until you get above Via Partigiani that the villas start to get more dilapidated, the people more insane. The walls crumble, the cisterns bubble out of nowhere, and the generators growl. These are the people who train their guard dogs to kill, who loudly refuse the services of the comune, who stockpile gold and root vegetables in their cellars, and talk about the cataclysm as if they can’t wait.
    Pia used to live with her parents on the bottom half of the hill until she married Nello and moved above Via Partigiani. Through the rickety gate, I can see her sitting on the edge of the garden hammock with her sunglasses on. She’s trying to pretend she spends the entire afternoon break on this hammock, but I know she only comes outside so she won’t have to answer the door in her sunglasses. Someday I’ll tell her she’s not fooling anyone, that the purple bruise is pooling past the edge of the frames.
    “Ciao, Etto.”
    “Ciao, signora.”
    “What’s this ‘signora’?” she says. “Call me Pia.”
    Pia has brought her purse out to the garden, too. She counts out the money and gives me a little tip as if I’m ten.
    “It isn’t necessary, Pia.”
    “Take it. Please, Etto, for your trouble.”
    “It’s no trouble at all.” I hand it back to her. “And you know Papà would kill me if I took a tip.”
    She flinches. Maybe this is your first instinct if you live with a guy like Nello. Maybe it’s because of the word kill. People will go around entire verbal mountain ranges to avoid particular words with me now. Kill. Death. Drown. Crash. Even Fede with all his cazzate and vulgarity will never say a curse that has to do with mothers or brothers even though it castrates half his usable vocabulary.
    “You know, signora . . . Pia,” I say, “if you ever need me to bring you anything from town . . . if you ever need anything else, anything at all . . .”
    Her dark eyebrows twitch above her sunglasses, slashing my sentence out of the air like Zorro.
    “If I need anything, Nello will get it for me,” she says sharply.
    “Sorry. I was only offering. . . .”
    She stays silent, and as I leave through the gate, I can feel her eyes trying to follow me out. Everyone in San Benedetto knew Pia was doomed even before she herself knew it, but Mamma was one of the only women to befriend her. One time when Luca and I were ten or maybe eleven, she even convinced Pia to leave Nello, and Pia stayed at our house for a few nights while Mamma sorted something else out for her. I remember, as a bribe, Mamma told Luca and me we could stay up and watch television if we gave Pia our room, so we were downstairs watching Supercar in our sleeping bags when the intercom rang.
    I think Mamma and Papà were expecting it, but they both went immediately quiet, so all you could hear was KITT’s fake voice saying, “One man can make a difference, Michael,” or whatever it was he used to say. Mamma and Papà whispered for a minute, until the intercom rang again. But instead of answering it, Papà went out through the other apartment, which belonged to Nonna and Nonno back then. We heard their door bang, and then Nello’s and Papà’s voices out on the street, arguing so loudly that lights started to go on in the palazzo next to ours. And just when we thought Papà was winning, Pia came floating down the stairs like a ghost, as if the heavy jacket and small suitcase she’d come with were