Page 159 of Ruthless Sin
I don’t answer. I open my door. Sofia opens hers. I get out. I don’t look back.
Sofia takes my hand on the steps. We walk into the lobby together.
The new reception man. He says.
“Good morning,signora.”
I don’t answer. He’s been vetted. He knows not to expect me to.
Sofia and I walk down the corridor to the music room.
The music room.
Someone has moved the chairs to the walls and pushed the tables together in the center. There are flowers, yellow and white, the kind Cassia orders when she wants a room to feel like spring.
A tablecloth Nonna embroidered. Plates of food down the center. Cabbage rolls in the big ceramic dish, still warm. Bread. Honey cake. Fruit cut into wedges. A stack of wrapped gifts at the far end of the table with ribbons in every color Oksana apparently requested specifically.
The women from Tuesday group are already here.
Cassia is at the door. She sees me.
She doesn’t say anything. She puts her hand briefly on my arm and squeezes once.
I nod.
I look at the room. The Vietnamese woman has her hair down for the first time I have seen. The blonde woman is in a yellow dress. The other women from the clinic, faces I know from the corridor, from the garden, twelve women, maybefifteen, talking, filling plates, laughing at something near the window.
The Romanian girl isn’t here.
I don’t say anything. Neither does anyone else.
Sofia and I sit near the window.
The food is good. The cabbage rolls are Oksana’s grandmother’s recipe, which she told the Casa Lucia kitchen staff about in such specific detail that Cassia said the head cook wept. I eat one. It is very good. I eat another.
The Vietnamese woman catches my eye across the table and lifts her chin. I lift mine back.
Then the door opens.
Oksana.
She is wearing a white sash across the man’s button-down shirt that reads MAMA in gold letters someone has glued on in sequins. Her hair is piled higher than usual. The mother’s ring on the chain. She has a cup of something in each hand and she is already talking before she is fully through the door.
“I am here. I am enormous. The sash was Cassia’s idea and I love it. Someone take one of these cups, my hands are full,Bozhe moy,someone?—”
The blonde woman takes one of the cups. Oksana surveys the room. Her eyes find me at the window.
“Mila.” She crosses directly to me, the belly arriving two seconds before the rest of her. “You came. I knew you would come. I told Cassia you would come and she said maybe and I said no, she will come, and I was right.” She drops into the chair beside me. The belly settles.
She takes her cup back from the blonde woman. “Now. We are going to eat Babusya’s cabbage rolls and we are going to open the gifts and someone is going to make me cry and I am going to blame the hormones. Yes? Yes.”
The room laughs.
The gifts. Someone has organized it so each woman brings something small: a hand-sewn blanket, a wooden rattle, a jar of honey from the garden, a pair of knitted socks in yellow, a book with the pages worn soft from reading.
Oksana holds each one and says something about it, something real, not a performance. The blanket: she runs her thumb across the stitching and saysmy grandmother had one like this. The book: she opens to the first page and reads the first line aloud in Ukrainian and closes it against her chest.
The Vietnamese woman gives her a small embroidered cloth with a bird on it. Red thread on white.
