Killer Smile (4 page)

Familiar odors of fresh basil, homemade tomato sauce, and lemon Pine-Sol filled the tiny kitchen, and crackling palm fronds and dog-eared Mass cards remained stuck behind an ancient cast-iron switchplate. Colorized photos of Pope John, Jesus Christ, and JFK were still taped to the wall with yellowed off-brand tape, and the slop basket sat tucked in its customary corner of the white porcelain sink. Nothing would ever change in the DiNunzio house, which was still mourning the demise of the Latin Mass. Mary missed the Latin Mass, too, although when Mike was murdered, she realized that she and God didn’t speak the same language anyway.

“Maria, Maria!” Vita DiNunzio gave her daughter a hug, wrapping herself around Mary’s waist in the kitchen, but her embrace didn’t feel as strong as it always did. Her grip was loose, and her arms as delicate as the wings of a wren. She seemed thinner, and the softness in her back had vanished. She was wearing her favorite flowered housedress, but it hung on newly knobby shoulders.

“Ma, you okay?” Mary hugged her closer, burying her face in her mother’s stiff pink-gray hair, teased like cotton candy to hide her bald spot. Her coif smelled wonderfully of dried oregano and Aqua Net but reached only as high as Mary’s chin. Three weeks ago, it had reached to her nose. When did her mother shrink?
Can
you afford to shrink if you’re only four eleven? Mary broke their clinch. “Ma, really, are you okay?”

“So pretty, my Maria,” she purred, her round brown eyes smiling behind her impossibly thick glasses. Her nose was strong and smile soft, and she patted Mary’s arm with fingerpads pasty from pilled flour. “It’s so nice, you come viz,” she said. Born in Italy, she usually dropped her last syllables, unwittingly proving they were superfluous. But Mary noticed that she hadn’t answered the question.

“Ma, I’m serious, did you…lose weight?” Mary didn’t want to say
evaporate
.

“No, no, no, a little.”

“How much? Maybe you’re doing too much, taking care of Gabrielle?” Her mother had been baby-sitting part-time, helping out the receptionist from Rosato & Associates. Mary had thought it was renewing her energy, but maybe she’d been wrong. “Ma?”

“I’m fine, fine. Sit.” Her pasty hand slid down Mary’s arm and she led her to the kitchen table. Her mother had been making gnocchi, and sifted flour dusted the Formica table, covering stains and knife marks Mary knew by heart. Homemade pasta dough lay in long, skinny ropes, covered with the soft indentures of her mother’s fingers. Later her mother would cut the fresh dough into tiny pillows, then pinch each pillow in two, roll it with her fingertips, and send it skidding across the floured table with a
shhhppp
. Mary eased into the padded chair, and her mother looked happily down at her. “You have coff’. You and Jud’. I put onna pot.”

“Ma, I want to know why you’re so skinny.” Mary couldn’t hide her dismay. Here, in the House of Things That Stayed the Same, something had
changed
. The most important thing.

“MRS. D, I’M STARVING!” Judy shouted. She would get away with it because Mary’s parents adored her. Also because she got away with everything, even with bringing her golden retriever here for a visit. Mercifully small for a golden, Penny went everywhere with Judy and had better manners. “Help me, Mrs. D! I need food. Feed me!”

“Jud’, Jud’!” Laughing, Mary’s mother fluttered over to Judy and gave her a big hug, while Penny lapped water noisily from a chipped bowl that Mary’s father had set on the linoleum floor. Her father was all-business now, having greeted Mary at the door with a hug that crushed her cheek to his white shirt, stiff with baked-in spray-starch. Although Matty DiNunzio had long ago retired as a tile setter, he always wore his short-sleeved shirt, black Bermuda shorts, and his hearing aid when Mary came home. He also loved seeing Judy, who was now hamming it up:

“Mrs. D, Mary wouldn’t go out to eat with me and you know why? Because she’s
working too hard
!”

“Maria,” her mother said, waving a gnarled index finger. “Maria, I tella you, no work so hard! I tella you and Bennie! She no listen?
You
no listen?”

“I listened, she listened, we all listened.” Mary felt vaguely as if she had just conjugated something. “Don’t start, Ma. It’s for Amadeo Brandolini, and there’s a lot to be done.”

“BUT FIRST WE EAT!” Judy said, hugging her mother again. “How can I help, Mrs. D?”

“No, no, you sit! Sit!” her mother replied, waving her off as she always did, because the kitchen was her exclusive territory and offers to help were construed as insults. “Sit!”

“Talked me into it.” Judy took a seat across from Mary. Meanwhile, Penny, who had finished drinking, ran a dripping pink tongue over her chops and trotted over to the kitchen table, her black nose in the air, undoubtedly sniffing for Aquanet.

“Okay, I make gnocchi for you, and coff’!” her mother said.

Mary scrutinized her mother as she picked up a plate of gnocchi layered with waxed paper for freezing, carried it to the counter, and set it down. Her mother seemed to move nimbly enough as she filled the dented spaghetti pot with water, took it to the burner, and twisted the knob to HI for the flame. Mary had to find out what was going on, but she needed a secret plan. Italian mothers had force fields that deflected the fears of their children, even when their children reached thirty years old. Actually, the force field got older, too.

“Ma,” Mary began, talking to her mother’s flowered back, “so what’s the matter with Mrs. DiGiuseppe? I saw her outside and hardly recognized her.”

“She’s got the cancer,” her father interrupted. He evidently didn’t understand about the force field and the secret plan. He scuffed in black slippers to the cabinet and retrieved two cups and saucers, which he brought to the table and clunked down in front of Mary and Judy. Mary straightened her cup in the chipped saucer, happily mismatched, and took another shot.

“What kind of cancer, Ma?”

“Liver,” her father interrupted again, but he missed the dirty look Mary shot him. He turned around and headed for the silverware drawer, retrieved two forks and two spoons, then brought them to the table. “How she suffered, with the chemo. It’s a sin.”

“She looks so thin, Ma.” Mary would need Kryptonite to crack this force field. Or her father would have to shut up. “She even looks shorter. Smaller. What could make her shrink, Ma?”

“It happens when you get older,” her father said, coming to the table with two dishes. Mary caught his eye with a meaningful glare, and he met her gaze, his milky brown and a little sad behind his bifocals. And then she knew. Her father wasn’t being dumb, he was playing dumb. He was hiding something.

“Dad?” Mary said, involuntarily, but he waved her off.

“Nothing to worry about.”

“For real?” Mary’s heart lodged somewhere in her throat. They both knew they weren’t talking about Mrs. DiGiuseppe.

“Not now,” he said firmly, easing into his seat at the tiny round table.

Mary’s gaze shifted to her mother at the stove, where she was shaking salt into the gnocchi water and stirring it with her wooden spoon. Then she turned on the burners under the pot of gravy and the old-fashioned coffeepot they had used forever. In a few minutes, everything would boil, bubble, and perco-late, and Mary would pretend everything was all right, at least for the time being. On the sidelines, a mystified Judy looked from Mary to her father, staying silent. She had been around the DiNunzios long enough to know that English was their second language and their first was Meaningful Eye Contact.

“So how’s Angie?” Mary asked, about her sister. A former nun, Angie had gone on a mission in Tajikistan, teaching English and helping build homes for poor people. Because of Angie’s life and works, the entire DiNunzio family had an E-ZPass to heaven. The girl took pro bono to a new level, and Mary couldn’t help but miss her. “You hear anything lately?”

“Not since last month,” her father answered. “Tell us about Brandolini’s case. They been askin’ at church.”

“I haven’t gotten anywhere. I haven’t even found his file yet.” Mary filled him in against the throaty gurgling of the coffee, and in the next moment, its aroma scented the already fragrant kitchen. And just when the room was too small to fit even one more smell, the tomato sauce started to bubble.

“Brandolini was sent to a camp in
Montana
?” Her father’s eyes widened. The DiNunzios never left the house, much less traveled, and their only summer vacations had been to Bellevue Avenue, in an Atlantic City that no longer existed. “Montana?
That
where they shipped him? Why?”

“I don’t know, not without the file, anyway. There were forty-something internment camps around the country, and I haven’t figured out the reason for who went where.”

“But
Montana
!” Her father smacked his bald head, as if she’d said Pluto. “That’s
way
out. That’s
cowboy
country!”

“They packed the internees on trains, and when they got to Missoula, they called it
bella vista
.”

“Beautiful sight,” her father translated, undoubtedly for Judy’s benefit.

“Right, because there were mountains and all. Or at least that’s the propaganda the government was putting out.” Mary had researched Fort Missoula, read a book about its history, and pieced together what she could from the other internee files. “Most of the Italian internees at Fort Missoula were from cruise ships that were at sea when war broke out. Some had been waiters at the Italy Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York. Amadeo was one of the ones from Philly.”

“How did they keep the records?” Her father was a smart man, albeit uneducated. Mary, who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and its law school, didn’t think she’d ever be as smart. In fact, lately she’d considered asking for a refund.

“I think they were kept at Fort Missoula, and when the camps were opened and the internees released, the files ended up in the National Archives.”

“So maybe not all the files made it.”

Mary shrugged. The coffee was done. She wanted to get it herself, but that was against the rules. Her father was already on his slippers, fetching the pot and bearing it back to the table. Simultaneously, her mother reached over and turned off the burner, one of the smoothest moves in their kitchen dance. Mariano and Vita DiNunzio had been married forever, and it showed.

“Maybe his file got taken out, because he died in the camp.” Her father poured hot coffee into Judy’s cup in a glistening brown arc. She thanked him and dumped in three spoons of sugar, followed with the light cream that was always on the table after dinner, next to a plastic napkin dispenser of the Praying Hands. “Maybe it got sent somewhere when he died and didn’t end up in the same place as the others. Did anybody else die in the camp?”

“From my research, three other Italian internees, all of natural causes. None by suicide except for Amadeo.” Behind her, Mary heard the hiss of fresh gnocchi hitting the boiling water and the gurgling of the gravy in the pot next to it, bubbling its heady brew of ripe tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, and bits of chicken cooked until it melted off the bone. As delicious as she knew the meal would be, none of it tempted her. Between her mother and Amadeo, she was too bummed to be hungry. “I’m double-checking the files for references to him. Maybe that will lead me to whatever happened to his boats and business.”

“Poor guy.” Her father poured Mary’s coffee, and she thanked him. “So what else is new, girls?”

“Mary has another date coming up,” Judy chirped. “With a lawyer, a friend of Anne’s.”

“That’s nice,” her father said, before Mary could start whining. “It is about time, you know, Mare? If Anna likes this young man, you should give him a chance.” Her father returned to the stove with the coffeepot, and as soon as he turned his back, Mary flipped Judy the bird. Judy flashed her an L for loser. They were really good friends.

“I am, Pop. I will.” Mary nodded. She knew when she was beat. Her parents had loved Mike as much as she did, but lately even they were trying to fix her up, most recently with an accountant who lived with his mother on Ritner Street. Her father returned to the table and eased into his chair, his movements stiffer than before the subject of Mike came up. Behind him, her mother was pouring cooked gnocchi into the colander, then shaking it to drain off the excess water.
Slap, slap, slap.
Steam billowed out of the sink. Nobody said anything, letting the empty moment pass.

“Is ready!” Mary’s mother turned from the counter with a steaming plate of gnocchi, then picked up a metal ladle and poured gravy in a tomatoey ring on top. Everyone brightened at the sight of the meal, and her mother bore it to the table and set it in front of Judy with pride. “Alla fresh for Jud’! Cheese onna table!”

“Thank you, Mrs. D!” Judy said, grabbing her tablespoon and digging into the hot gnocchi. She would burn her mouth, but nobody warned her because she wouldn’t listen anyway. In the next minute, her mother was setting a plate in front of Mary.

“This looks great, Ma,” she said. Her mother looked so happy that Mary swore she’d eat, hungry or not. “Thanks.”

“Okay!” Her mother stroked her back, then segued into scratching it like she always did. It made Mary feel like a treasured kitten, and she looked down at her gnocchi, speared a forkful, and ate, causing third-degree burns to the roof of her mouth. Her mother kept scratching her back. “Maria, you pray to Saint Anthony for the paper?”

“Paper?”

“Brandolini. You look for his paper.” Her mother made an arthritic circle in the air, and Mary understood. She hadn’t realized her mother had been listening to the conversation, but she should have known better. In addition to force fields, Italian mothers had sonar.

“You mean Amadeo’s file.”

“
Sì.
You pray to Saint Anthony to find?”

“Well, yes,” Mary admitted, breathing gnocchi fire. She’d learned the prayer in grade school:
Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around. For something is lost and cannot be found.
To be on the safe side, she had prayed to Saint Jude, too, because she wasn’t sure who had jurisdiction.