Page 6 of Two Chances With You

“How’s Mamma?”

“Fine.”

“What do you mean by fine?”

“And what do you mean by ‘how is she’?”

“Oh, what a pain in the ass you’re being. Is she happy? Is she seeing anyone? Do you talk to her? Does she see Papà? Does she talk to him?”

I can’t bring myself to ask him the last, unasked question: Has she asked about me?

“She asks me about you all the time.” It’s the only question he answers. “She wanted to know if I’d talked to you on the phone from New York, how your classes were going, and so on and so forth.”

“So what did you tell her?”

“I told her the little I did know. That your classes were going well, that strangely you didn’t seem to have gotten into any fights with anyone, and then I invented a few other things.”

“Such as?”

“That you’d been dating a girl for two months, but that she’s Italian. If I’d said she was American, she would have figured out immediately that I was making it up because you wouldn’t have been able to understand each other.”

“Ha, ha. Let me know when it’s time to laugh. Was that one of your ‘dumbcracks’?”

“Then I told her that you were having fun, that you went out every night, but you weren’t doing drugs, and you had a bunch of friends down there. In other words, you had no intention of coming back but that you were doing fine. How’d I do?”

“More or less.”

“Namely?”

“I dated two American girls, and we understood each other perfectly.”

He doesn’t even have a chance to laugh, I downshift and veer off to the right, down the exit ramp. Off the beltway, I accelerate into the curve as the tires screech, and an old car honks behind me. I continue into the curve nonchalantly, and I pull into the straightaway.

Paolo sits upright again. He pulls his jacket down and into place. Then he tries to point something out. “You forgot to use your turn indicator.”

“Right.”

I drive for a while in silence. Paolo looks out the window frequently and then again toward me, trying to catch my attention.

“What is it?”

“What ever happened with the trial?”

“I was granted a pardon.”

“How is that?” He looks at me, curiosity aroused. I turn and meet his gaze for a while. He remains silent. He looks at me calmly. Untroubled. I don’t think he’s lying. Or else he’s a formidable actor. Paolo is a good brother, but I can’t say that among his finer qualities I can think of anything that qualifies as formidable.

I turn my eyes back to the road. “Nothing, just that I was granted a pardon, period. Full stop.”

He smiles. “You know, I’ve been wondering for a long, long time now why you would have wanted to beat up a guy who lived across the street from us.”

“And yet you’ve managed to survive with this agonizing doubt gnawing at you all this time?”

“Sure, but I had other things to do with my time.”

“In America, you wouldn’t last a single day. There’s no time to wonder about things.”

“Okay, but since I was living in Rome, between a cappuccino and aperitif, I thought about it. And I even came to a conclusion.”

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