Page 164 of Lorenzo

“How about you?” he asks.

“What about me?” I toy with the food on my plate, not sure I’m in the mood to eat anymore.

“Do you remember your mother much?”

“I was ten,” I say. “Older than Edoardo was.”

Lorenzo waits.

“Yes, I remember her.”

My fork presses into the eggs without lifting any.

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

His expression changes into one of sympathy, but he does not ask the obvious question.

I am grateful for that.

The memories I have of my mother are good ones. That is part of the problem. They make everything that came after so much worse by comparison.

“What about your father?”

“He…” I clear my throat. “How did you put it? He simply disappeared. When my mom told him she was pregnant. Just… poof. Neat trick, huh?”

“Coward.”

The word is absolute and full of menace.

I look up at him.

There is anger in his face now, but none of it is directed at me.

“My mother said we were better off without him,” I say.

But then she died and left me alone.

He seems to read my mind.

“What happened after she passed? You had no other family?”

“No, I did. Big Italian family.” I take a bite to give myself something to do. I taste none of it. “But I was a difficult child. I got into trouble a lot.”

“You were grieving.”

“I was inconvenient,” I say. “There is a difference when you are the one being passed around.”

His fork goes still.

“Passed around?”

“An aunt for a while. Then an uncle. A cousin after that.” I force myself to swallow. “Everyone meant well, at least in the beginning. After a while, everyone decided someone else might be better equipped to handle me.”

“They passed you from one relative to another?”

I give him a small, humorless smile. “Big families are useful that way. There is always another house.”

His expression hardens.