Brutal Prince (Brutal Birthright)

While her back is turned, Nero steals one of her orange rolls and stuffs it in his mouth.

Sensing misbehavior, she whips around again and gives him a hard stare. Nero tries to keep his face perfectly still, despite the fact that his cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk’s.

“Those are for lunch!” Greta shouts.

“Eh esh lunsh,” Nero says, around an entire orange roll.

“No, it isn’t! And don’t eat without your father.”

Nero swallows hard.

“He’s not gonna eat. You know how he is today.”

“Well don’t make it worse!” Greta says. “And you,” she points a finger at Sebastian. “Get out of here before you break something important.”

“Alright, alright.” Sebastian slots his crutches back under his armpits and wheels around for the living room, just barely missing Greta’s kettle, while knocking over the broom.

Nero catches the handle neatly in his right hand, snitching another orange roll with his left. He passes the broom to Greta, keeping the roll hidden behind his back.

“Here, Greta,” he says. “You know I only want to help.”

“You’d help yourself to the shirt off my back, you devil.”

“Depends. What size is it?”

She tries to whip him with a tea towel, and he bolts out of the kitchen, pushing his way past Sebastian, who almost topples over.

Dante follows at a more leisurely pace. I leave last of all, eyeing the freshly-glazed orange rolls, but not wanting to risk Greta’s wrath.

Eventually, we do lure Papa down by bringing out his old mahjong set and opening the bottle of wine Dante brought. We play a rotating tournament, in which Nero eventually emerges victorious, but not without accusations of cheating and demands to recount all the pieces in case some were “misplaced” in the course of the game.

When lunch is ready, we physically force Greta to sit down and eat with us, instead of working the whole time. Nero convinces her to drink one, and then several glasses of wine, at which point she starts to tell us stories about a famous writer she used to know, who she might have slept with “once or twice,” until he wrote a character based on her that offended her terribly.

“Was it Kurt Vonnegut?” Sebastian says.

“No.” Greta shakes her head. “And I’m not telling you his name, he was married some of the time.”

“Was it Steinbeck?” Nero says, grinning wickedly.

“No! How old do you think I am?” Greta says, outraged.

“Maya Angelou,” I say, with an expression of innocence.

“No! Stop guessing, you disrespectful little beasts.”

“That’s not disrespectful,” Dante says. “Those are all excellent authors. Now, if we said Dan Brown . . .”

Greta, who loves The DaVinci Code, has had enough of all of us.

“That’s it!” she says, rising threateningly from her seat. “I’m throwing your dessert in the trash.”

Nero makes a frantic signal to me to go rescue the semifreddo from the freezer before Greta can wreak her revenge.

All in all, the day is as cheerful as I could hope for, given the occasion. The only person who isn’t in as good of spirits as usual is Sebastian. He’s doing his best to smile and participate in games and conversation with the rest of us, but I can tell that the weeks of inactivity, and the loss of his favorite thing in the world, is wearing on him. He looks thin and tired. His face is pale, like he hasn’t been sleeping much.

I know he doesn’t want me to apologize again. But watching him try to navigate the narrow hallways and numerous staircases of the house on those damn crutches is killing me.

Even with that unhappy reminder, the afternoon ends too soon. Once we’ve all eaten and cleared the table, Dante and Nero have to get back to the Oak Street Tower project, and Sebastian has a biology class.