“I’m ready.”
He turned and pushed, but the door didn’t budge. I laughed. He stepped back and assessed the door before laughing with me.
“Thwarted,” I said. “Can you pick the lock?”
“I don’t have tools.” He pointed to a chair with a busted wicker seat. “Stand over there. I’ll knock it down.”
“Hang on,” I said. “In this entire house, there’s no side door?”
He smirked and picked up the bolt cutters. “Always the sensible one.”
I took the hand he offered and we walked around the veranda to the side. That door was boarded completely.
“I have a crowbar in the car,” he said. “But we check the back first, no?”
“See? You can be sensible too.”
He put his arm around me and we walked to the back. As we turned the corner, the orchard opened before us. The trees were planted in orderly rows starting about fifty feet from the house, but the ground beneath them was overgrown with bushes and grass. The back garden was rutted, broken, with tables and chairs cracked and overturned. All except one.
It was a white plastic picnic chair set up next to a tree stump. I broke away from Antonio and walked down wooden steps. The stump had darkened grease spots on the top surface.
“Someone’s been eating here,” I said. I could feel Antonio’s senses tingling as he scanned the area for more signs of life.
“You should go back to the car.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and he pointed to a trodden path of grass that began near the house and extended to the orchard.
“These stains could be years old,” I said softly. My skin tingled with anticipation. I didn’t want to go to the car. “And it’s someone eating. Not someone shooting.”
Everything jumped out at me now. The plywood plank next to the back door, not nailed against the frame. The baskets piled by it didn’t have any growth. The water spigot dripped into a half-empty bucket. Three tomato plants hidden in the grass were caged.
“I’ll take you back to the car.” He reached for my arm, but I dodged him.
“Stay back!” I said as I hopped up the back steps.
“Theresa!” he barked, getting behind a tree.
I turned the knob, threw the door open and ducked behind the wall.
Nothing. No gunshots. No voices. Just the birds and the rustling of leaves in the breeze. Antonio hopped over the fence around the back veranda and joined me.
“You’re impossible,” he whispered.
“I’m only hiding here to appease you.” When I looked back at him, I saw real worry for the first time since we touched the ground. “I ran your empire while you were in prison, Antonio. It’s fine. I can feel it.”
He stared at me—into me—for a moment, as if reminding himself why he married me in the first place.
“I go first,” he said.
“Come vuoi tu.”
As he came around me to get close to the door, he said, “Your accent, Contessa.”
Then he was gone, around the corner and into the house. Something made a scuffing noise and water splashed. Antonio cursed.
“Antonio?”
“It’s nothing.”
I went inside. With the windows boarded and the sun rising over the front of the house, the kitchen was poorly lit. Antonio stood by a table covered in stones, surrounded by tall buckets full of water.
My eyes adjusted and I saw the table wasn’t covered in stones, but olives on a tray. The buckets were full of liquid.
“Olives brining,” I said.
“Si.” A female voice came from somewhere, paired with the loud clack of a rifle being cocked. Antonio held his hand toward me to signal that I should stay still, as if I hadn’t frozen in place already.
“Who’s there?” Antonio asked in Italian. “We won’t hurt you.”
“No, you won’t.” The English was halting and thick with an Italian accent. The voice was young, clear, confident.
Another voice uttered a few sentences from the cabinet below the sink, which was ajar. Female and tiny, it belonged to a child. I didn’t understand a word.
But Antonio laughed.
“Basta, Simona.” A boy came through the doorway with his rifle pointed at us. He was about twelve years old, with shoulder-length dirty brown hair down and one blue eye open so he could aim.
“Where did you get this?” Antonio asked, drawing his finger from the side of his mouth and along his cheek. I put together their conversation based on the little Italian I knew and their gestures.
“Where did you get yours?” The kid jerked the gun to indicate Antonio’s forehead.
“Bullet.”
“I won’t miss.”
Antonio shrugged.
“Shoot them!” Simona cried from under the sink. I couldn’t tell how old she was or what she looked like, but I could tell she was scared.
Slowly, I crouched to the ground.
“What you doing?” the kid demanded in English. I kept crouching, putting my hand on the floor, then my hip.
“Contessa. Stop,” Antonio hissed. I ignored him, lying on the dirty floor, my legs on either side of a brining bucket, and spread my arms out.
“Senora! I will shoot you!”
The minute he moved the rifle to aim it at me, Antonio would take it. If the kid kept it on Antonio, we were okay. If he moved it, we were also okay.
“I’m dead.” I closed my arms and lolled my tongue out.
Silence.
I opened one eye. At that level, I could see Simona in the crack of light through the ajar cabinet door. She was about six. She wore a pink T-shirt with a crown on it. Her hair was black and her eyes were as blue as the boy’s.
She giggled. “You’re not dead.”
“Hush. I’m dead.”
I closed my eye and stuck my tongue out again.
The cabinet door squeaked. Rustling. The creak of floorboards.
“Simona!” The boy scolded.
A light pressure on my forehead, then the tug of fingers through my hair. The soft notes of a little girl humming a sweet song.
Then, the clack and thump of a scuffle above us.
I didn’t need to look to know Antonio had the gun.
I didn’t move. Simona kept stroking my hair and humming as if she and I, and Antonio and the boy, were locked in two separate worlds.
The boy’s name was Nevio. His eyes constantly darted around as if looking for a hidden army. He sat in the white plastic chair with his legs spread so he could spring forward if necessary. A greasy lock of hair fell in front of one eye, and he jerked his head to move it. He was a cocky little bastard with a heart full of well-earned rage.
Antonio didn’t bother keeping the gun on him. He’d unloaded it and slung it over his shoulder.
They barked at each other in Italian so quickly I couldn’t keep up. I sat on the broken back steps and watched Simona pluck the stems from a bucket of olives. I reached a hand in the bucket and she froze. I took an olive, pinched the stem off and put it on the porch rail, next to hers.
She relaxed and pointed to it. “Quindici.” She started at the first. “Uno. Due. Tre. Quattro…” and on to fifteen. Quindici. I clapped.
“Bene! Allora.” I put another olive at the end. “Sedici.”
“Se-DI-ci.” She corrected my pronunciation, of course, and produced another olive. “Diciassette.” Seventeen. I wasn’t even going to try it.
Behind me, the conversation between Antonio and Nevio had gotten gentler. Less barking. I turned to see if they were biting.
Nevio was telling a story. Antonio leaned on a barrel with his arms crossed, nodding and adding the occasional, “Si, si.”
I wondered why he wasn’t worried someone else was going to show up with more than a rifle.
“Simona,” I said. “Where’s your mother?”
The girl didn’t look at me. Didn’t answer with a word or a gesture. She just hummed, plucking stems off olives, making a new row on the edge of the railing without counting.
She was humming the same tune she did when she’d stroked my hair.
“Put me the fuck down!” I beat Antonio’s back, elbowed the back of his head and aimed at his face when I kicked, but he held me over his shoulder and walked me the length of the estate’s driveway like the caveman he was.