Page 54 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

“Have you not seen?”

“No. I’ve been out shopping with Daniela.”

“Well, it is only a matter of time. They’ve done it.”

“They’ve done what?”

“The board has decided, in their infinite pettiness, to publish my mother’s greatest secret.”

“Oh...”

And admittedly, she didn’t understand why that was a problem. She couldn’t say that to him, not while he looked like the very angel of death, but Rocco was amazing for what he had been through. For coming out of the life that he had been brought up in as well as he had.

He shouldn’t bear any embarrassment or shame because of it.

She could see, though, that he did not feel that way.

“Rocco...”

“They published pictures of the house. The inside of the house. Of all the things. All the horrible, disgusting things, piled up past the windows. You couldn’t even see outside anymore. It blocked the daylight. My mother’s staff... They betrayed her. They were complicit in it. They lived in it. They enabled her, and now they have gone and exposed her. Exposed me.”

“Rocco, none of it had anything to do with you. You were just a child.”

“I lived in it,” he said. “And you scrub your skin, and try to clean yourself, but the smell will not come out. It still doesn’t. I can still... Feel it, on me like a film. Don’t you understand? Nobody that lived in that house was separate from it. I am not separate from it.”

“But it isn’t... None of it was your fault.”

“She was my mother. And... There is nothing half so horrible as hating a person for what they do to you and loving them just as fiercely. Wanting to protect them. Because even if she didn’t know the full scale of how ashamed she should be, I did. I did, and I took it all on myself, onto my own shoulders. I know how wrong it was. I know how... How sick she was. But it was never out. It was not her legacy. I took that all into myself, onto myself, to avoid ever having it be something that marred her name forever, and now they have just done it.”

She took her phone out, and she googled it. And there it was. Pictures. This beautiful, stately manner home, with piles of garbage as if it were a bespoke landfill.

There were rooms that had semblances of order to the stacks. Books, magazines, newspapers. But others that were simply... Indistinct mounds of trash. The kitchen... There was food everywhere. On every surface. She could imagine the smell. Why it had been so difficult for him to eat, why he couldn’t just trust anything.

He was so fastidious, so clean, so perfect.

It was an assault to think of him living this way. To think of how he’d had to bear that. And even though she didn’t think he should carry any of the shame, she could see that he did.

Perhaps it was very like her own shame. This feeling of not being enough to make her mother happy. Maybe he felt that too.

Because for all that he was this creature of order and authority, he had been helpless then.

The kind of man he was... It no doubt aided him.

He likely thought the world saw this and saw his failure.

“I have lived with you for nearly a month,” she said. “And you do not allow me total control of your space. It is yours. You have very clear boundaries.”

“Yes,” he said.

“In her way, so did your mother. You could no more sweep in and control everything than I can now.”

“I’m not like my mother,” he said.

Horror burst in her chest. “I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant—”

“Do not seek to give advice on something you can’t possibly understand. You are upset because your parents had the same sort of issues that everyone has the world over. A minor infidelity, the ache of suburban ennui. Your childhood was happy. Your parents managed to hide it from you. You have any idea what I would give to have had my mother hide her psychosis from me? Rather than including me in the middle of it? Do not try to understand me. Do not seek to compare. It is an absolute injustice.”

He stepped away, going into his room and closing the door firmly behind him.

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