Chapter 2

My father comes up the stairs from the catering kitchen, and I hear him before I see him. He climbs the way he does everything now, with the distracted gravity of a man whose body is in one place and his mind is in ten others, all of them on fire. He is sixty-one years old, and the last three years have carved lines into his face that I do not remember from before. When he reaches the kitchen doorway, he stops and looks at me, then at Enzo, then at the pan of burned eggs.

"You're burning the eggs," he says.

"I know," Enzo says.

My father does not say anything else. He crosses to the table and sits down across from me, and I can smell the kitchen on him, the garlic and the fry oil and the clean sharp scent of the bleach he uses on the counters at the end of every shift. He folds his hands on the table. His knuckles are swollen, the way they get in winter, but it is June and the heat is already pressing against the window glass.

"You're working," he says. It is not a question.

"Sicilian land deeds. A firm in Manhattan needs them translated for a property dispute."

"Good. That's good." He nods, and the nod is too slow, too deliberate, the way a man nods when he is trying to convince himself of something. "Steady work."

I watch him. He does not ask me for money. He has never asked me for money, not once, not even last winter when the heating bill came and he sat at this same table with the envelope in his hands for forty minutes before he opened it. I had the money. I would have given it to him. He did not ask.

The mail slot clatters in the front hall, and Enzo flinches. It is a small thing, a twitch of his shoulders, and then he is moving toward the hallway before either of us can stand. I hear him sorting through the envelopes, the familiar rustle of paper and the heavier thump of a package, and then he is back in the kitchen doorway holding a thick cream-colored envelope in one hand.

"It's for you," he says. "From some place in Manhattan."

I take the envelope. The return address is a law firm on Madison Avenue, the kind of firm that bills in six-minute increments and has a lobby with a fountain. I do not know anyone at a firm like that. I open the envelope and pull out the letter inside, and the paper is heavy, the kind of weight that costs money.

The letter is from a mediator representing an American heir who has inherited a masseria in Puglia, a remote estate in the heel of Italy, and who requires a translator to catalogue the archives on site over the summer. The archives are extensive, the letter says. Land deeds, correspondence, municipal records. The work is confidential, the estate is private, and the stipend is generous enough that I read the number twice.

I read the confidentiality clause three times. It is broad. It covers everything I would see, everything I would touch, everything I would learn. It binds me to silence about the estate and its contents for a period of five years after the contract ends. It should give me pause. It does not. What it reads as, to a twenty-six-year-old translator who has spent her whole life in a Brooklyn apartment above a catering kitchen, is prestige. A firm on Madison Avenue does not send a letter like this to someone who is not worth trusting.

I look up. My father is watching me with an expression I cannot quite name. It is not hope, exactly. It is the thing that comes before hope, the shape hope makes in a man's face before he lets himself feel it.

"What is it?" he asks.

"A job. A summer assignment. Cataloguing archives at an estate in Italy."

"Italy," he says, and the word comes out of him like a breath he has been holding. "Where in Italy?"

"Puglia. The heel of the boot."

Enzo is still standing in the doorway. He has not moved since he handed me the envelope, and his face has gone very still, the way it does when he is doing math in his head and the numbers are not adding up. "Who's the client?"

"An American heir. The mediator's letter doesn't give a name. Just the firm."

"And they're just sending you to some estate in the middle of nowhere? Just like that?"

"They are sending me to catalogue archives. It is what I do."

"You don't even know who owns the place."

I fold the letter and slide it back into the envelope. "I know the law firm that represents them. That is enough."

Enzo opens his mouth and closes it. He looks at our father, and something passes between them that I do not catch, a glance that lasts half a second too long. Then my father clears his throat and pushes himself up from the table.

"It sounds like a good opportunity," he says. His voice is careful, the way a man's voice is careful when he is holding something back. "Steady work. Respected."

He does not say what I can hear underneath the words. He does not say that a generous stipend from a Manhattan law firm might be enough to keep the catering kitchen running through the end of the year, that a daughter who is earning good money is a daughter who does not need to be asked for help because the help is already there, already offered, already on its way. He does not say any of this. He does not have to.

I reach for my pen. The contract is five pages, dense with legal language that I translate in my head as I read it, the clauses folding themselves into plain meaning the way they always do. The confidentiality provision. The term of engagement. The stipend, the travel arrangements, the provision that I will surrender my passport and mobile phone upon arrival for the duration of the assignment due to the sensitivity of the materials.

I pause at that one. Surrender my phone. Surrender my passport.

The letter calls it a standard security measure for private collections. I turn the phrase over in my mind, and it fits. It fits the way the Madison Avenue address fits, the way the heavy paper fits. Wealthy families have rules. Old estates have protocols. I am being hired to handle documents that someone considers valuable enough to protect, and that kind of trust is the thing I have been working toward since I was nineteen years old and translating shipping manifests for twelve dollars an hour.

I sign the contract at the kitchen table, my pen moving across the signature line with the same precision I use on the land deeds. My father watches me sign. Enzo watches me sign. The eggs are still burning on the stove, and the garlic smell from downstairs is stronger now, the lunch prep beginning, the rhythm of the kitchen that has been the soundtrack of my entire life.

"I'll need to pack," I say.

My father nods. He does not say anything. He reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of mine, very briefly, and then he gets up and goes back down the stairs to the kitchen. I hear his footsteps on the linoleum, the familiar creak of the third stair from the bottom, the swing of the door.

Enzo is still in the doorway. "Fina."

"What."

"You don't have to do this."

"I want to do this."

He cracks his knuckles. Left hand, then right. "There are things you don't know. About the business. About some stuff that's been going on."

"Then tell me."

He looks at me, and I can see the words lining up behind his teeth, the three different versions of the sentence he is about to start. He opens his mouth. He closes it. "Just be careful, okay? Italy's not Brooklyn."

"I know it is not Brooklyn. That is the point."

I leave him in the kitchen and walk down the narrow hallway to the room I have slept in since I was a child. The walls are still the same pale yellow my mother painted them the summer before she left, and I have stopped noticing the color years ago, but today I notice it. I notice the way the morning light catches the paint and makes it look almost warm, almost like a room someone chose with care.

I pack a canvas bag. Two blouses, clean and pressed. A notebook, the kind with a sewn binding that will not fall apart. My camera, the small one I bought secondhand three years ago and have never taken anywhere that mattered. The contract, folded into the inside pocket. My passport, still valid for another four years. I do not pack much. I have never needed much.

When I am done, I stand at the window in the living room and look out at the parking lot below. It is the same view I have looked at every day of my life, the same cracked asphalt and the same dumpster by the back fence and the same white van with Bellini Catering lettered on the side in red script that is starting to peel. The van needs a new paint job. It needs new tires. It needs a lot of things, and my father has been not asking me for them for months.

I feel it then, standing at the window with my packed bag on the floor behind me. It is a small clean thrill, the kind of feeling that starts somewhere in the center of the chest and spreads outward, quiet and certain. I am going somewhere. I am going somewhere on my own terms, with my own skills, with a contract signed by a firm on Madison Avenue that believes I am worth the paper it is printed on. I am twenty-six years old, and I have built a life out of being useful without being needed, and for the first time it feels like enough.

It is the first wrong assumption the summer will make of me.

I do not know that yet. I stand at the window and watch a pigeon settle on the edge of the dumpster, and I let myself believe that I am in control of what comes next.