“I … overslept.”
Mrs. Martinelli nodded. “Follow me.”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Martinelli took the vegetables from her basket and laid them on the table: plump red tomatoes, yellow onions, green herbs, clumps of garlic. Elsa had never seen so much garlic at one time.
“What can you cook?” she asked Elsa, tying an apron on.
“C-coffee.”
Mrs. Martinelli stopped. “You can’t cook? At your age?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Martinelli. No, but—”
“Can you clean?”
“Well … I’m sure I can learn to.”
Mrs. Martinelli crossed her arms. “What can you do?”
“Sew. Embroider. Darn. Read.”
“A lady. Madonna mia.” She looked around the spotless kitchen. “Fine. Then I will teach you to cook. We will start with arancini. And call me Rose.”
* * *
THE WEDDING WAS A hushed, hurried affair with no celebration before or after. Rafe slipped a plain band on Elsa’s finger and said, “I do,” and that was pretty much that. He looked to be in physical pain throughout the brief ceremony.
On their wedding night, they came together in the darkness and sealed their vows with their bodies, just as they had done with their words, their passion as silent as the night around them.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, he tried to be a good husband and she tried to be a good wife.
At first, in Rose’s eyes at least, Elsa seemed unable to do anything right. She cut her finger when chopping tomatoes and burned her wrist taking freshly baked bread out of the oven. She couldn’t tell a ripe squash from an unripe one. Stuffing zucchini flowers was nearly impossible for someone as clumsy as Elsa. She converted to Catholicism and listened to Mass in Latin, not understanding a word but finding a s
trange comfort in the beautiful sound of it all; she memorized prayers and learned the rosaries and kept one always in her apron pocket. She took confession and sat in a small, dark closet and told Father Michael her sins and he prayed for her and absolved her. At first none of this made much sense to her, but in time it became both familiar and routine, a part of her new life, like no meat on Fridays or the myriad saints’ days that they celebrated.
Elsa learned—to her surprise and to her mother-in-law’s—that she wasn’t a quitter. She woke up each morning well before her husband and got into the kitchen in time to make coffee. She learned to make and eat and love food she had never heard of, made from ingredients she’d never seen—olive oil, fettuccine, arancini, pancetta. She learned how to disappear on a farm: work harder than anyone else and don’t complain.
In time, a new and unexpected feeling of belonging began to creep in. She spent hours in the garden kneeling in the dirt, watching seeds she planted sprout and push up from the earth and turn green, and each one felt like a new beginning. A promise for the future. She learned to pick the rich purple Nero d’Avola grapes and turn them into a wine that Tony swore was as good as his father could make. She learned the peace that came with looking out at a newly tilled field and the hope those fields inspired.
Here, she sometimes thought, standing on land she cared for, here her child would flourish, would run and play and learn the stories told by the ground and the grapes and the wheat.
* * *
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER, SNOW fell, and they hunkered down in the farmhouse, settling into a new routine; the women spent long hours cleaning, sewing, darning, and knitting, while the men took care of the animals and readied the farm equipment for the coming spring. On snowy evenings they huddled around the fire and Elsa read stories aloud and Tony played his fiddle. Elsa learned little things about her husband—that he snored loudly and was restless in his sleep, that he often woke with a cry in the middle of the night, shaken by nightmares.
It’s quiet enough on this land to make you mad, he said sometimes, and Elsa tried to understand what he meant. Mostly she just let him talk and waited for him to reach out for her, which he did, but rarely and always in the dark. She knew the sight of her growing belly frightened him. When he did talk to her, he usually smelled of wine or whiskey; he would smile then, spin stories of their imagined, someday life in Hollywood or New York. In truth, Elsa never knew quite what to say to the handsome, quicksilver man she’d married, but spoken words had never been her forte and she didn’t have the courage to tell him how she felt anyway, that she’d found an unexpected strength in herself on this farm, and in her love for both her husband and his parents she’d become almost fierce. Instead, she did what she’d always done in the face of a painful rejection: she disappeared and held her tongue and waited—sometimes desperately—for her husband to see the woman she’d become.
In February, rain came to the Great Plains, nourishing the seeds planted in the soil. By March, the land was vibrant with new growth—green for miles. Tony stood by his fields in the evening, staring out at the growing wheat.
On this particularly blue, sunlit day, Elsa had opened every window in the house. A cool breeze moved through, carrying the scent of new life with it.
She stood at the stove, browning bread crumbs in the delicious, nutty-flavored, imported olive oil they purchased at the general store. The pungent aroma of garlic browning in hot oil filled the kitchen. They used these bread crumbs, mixed with cheese and fresh parsley, on everything from vegetables to pasta.
On the table behind her, a crockery bowl full of flour, ground from last year’s abundant crop, waited to be turned into bread dough. The Victrola in the sitting room played a “Santa Lucia” record loudly enough that Elsa felt compelled to sing along, even though she didn’t understand the words.
A pain came without warning, stabbed her deep in the abdomen, doubling her over. She tried to be still, held her stomach, waited it out.
But another pain came, minutes later, worse than the first. “Rose!”