When the Moon was Ours(57)

It had been one of his favorites before they moved here, orange and olive salad. Once it had made him think of his father, of the little town he came from on the Gulf of Salerno. The stories his mother passed on. Groves of hundred-year-old olive trees and orchards of figs that smelled of caramel when they fell. Lemons in blue-glazed bowls. Hillsides so steep that from the water they looked like straight drops into the sea.

He wondered how his mother thought of his father now, maybe as some vibrant, shimmering visitor who stopped by a few times for dinner and then disappeared. A man who belonged to them so little she did not miss him.

But then that wondering got crowded out, and all he could think of was the whispers in their old town. Even if he was so small he only half-understood what they were saying, he caught the tone. The glances toward him as if he could not see them looking, even when he was staring back.

His mother snapped the stems off the oranges. “Are you going to tell me or are you going make me ask?”

Sam pushed at one of the oranges, letting it roll away and then back.

“Something happened with Miel,” his mother said. “At the lighting.” No hint of a question in her voice.

The lighting. He wondered how much of this town was whispering about Miel rushing into the water, tearing the lids off the lanterns, or if they had been too busy helping their children give the current the pumpkins they’d carved together.

Whenever the weather turned cold, people grabbed at gossip quicker, as though they could spin it like wool, wrap themselves in it. Back in their old town, it had been a bare-branched winter when his mother had made the mistake of talking about Sam’s father. With a trusted friend, she’d shrug off the story like flicking cigarette ash away from her fingertips.

But that friend couldn’t resist telling a few of her friends, and soon the town had hummed with whispers.

“I don’t think Miel and I are friends anymore,” he said. “I don’t think we’re anything anymore.”

His mother snapped off the last stem and set down the orange. “I doubt that.”

She cut the tops off the oranges, and set each one on its flat base.

“Your father taught me to make this,” she said.

“With fennel,” Sam said. “I know.”

Most of what they made in this kitchen was from his grandmother’s recipes. Aloo baingan made with almost-blue eggplant. The warmth of a half-dozen spices lacing under the saffron and rose in Kashmiri chai. But a few his mother had learned from his Campania-born father. Dishes with lemon leaves, and wild arugula so sharp it felt cold on his tongue. They set their peaches and plums in a bowl Sam’s father had given his mother, ceramic glazed as deep blue as a cloudless sky. His mother hadn’t wanted to accept it, this piece that had been in his family for three generations. But his father thought it was meant to be with her, that blue he considered a darker shade of her eyes, so he’d hidden it at the top of her closet, knowing she’d find it only after he’d gone.

But the gossip in their old town had reduced all this to something as cold as trading olive oil or raw marble. You want a green card, and I want a baby. They called it a bargain his mother made to sleep with a man she didn’t love, as many times as it took to have the child she wanted. How they were married for only a couple of years, how she was the only divorcing woman who, seven months pregnant, wished her husband well as he left her.

How Sam existed because his mother and his father thought little of trading things others considered sacred.

By the time they moved here, his mother knew better. She kept quiet about a story she always considered proof of how much she loved Sam, how much she had wanted a child even if there was no man she wanted as her husband.

But he never forgot. He existed because his mother set out to make him exist.

Sam turned one of the oranges in his hand. The flush of deep red thinned along the peel, and then faded.

“I made a mistake, didn’t I?” he asked.

“Probably,” his mother said. “We all make them every day.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, coming near her that day. When the water tower came down.”

His mother ran her knife over a row of olives. “You don’t really believe that.”

She held out a knife, her fingers cupping the blade, handle toward him.

As a child, this had been one of his favorite tasks, the first thing his mother had let him do with a knife on his own. Slicing away the pith. Using the tip of the knife to nick the seeds away. Making rounds of deep red fruit so thin they were almost translucent, while his mother sliced olives as purple as tiny plums.

“Do you know what kind of child you were?” his mother said, a laugh under her words. “To say there needed to be a man of the house and that you were going to be that man? To declare you were going to be a whole new person so that everyone would know there was a son taking care of his mother?”

Sam set the knife against the orange. He could do this. If he could do nothing right with Miel, at least he could do this for his mother. Slice perfect rounds of blood orange. Arrange them on the plate like the bright tiles of their roof, and know he had managed this one small thing.

“And just think.” His mother smiled, and the wrinkles around her eyes looked as fine as the silver necklace his father had given her. She wore it only with her good dresses. “You wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for that squid.”