“Born,” Father Dominic finished, and he sat down heavily on the top step of my porch with the wooden box on his knee. “Rosa, Leonard wanted you to know what he swore in the chapel of the hospital that night. He swore to God that his son would never want for anything. He wrote that he kept the oath so well he ruined the boy.” The old priest lifted the lid. Inside lay a letter in the shaky hand of my husband, a thick bundle of savings bonds tied with string, and a small brass key. Whitney had gone very still.
I read the letter aloud, because the priest asked me to, and my voice would not stay level. “Rosa, my love. I made one promise at the hospital and kept it too well. I gave Andrew everything and asked him for nothing, and I made a son who believes that love is a payment. I did that, not you. If he has turned his back on you, I failed him as much as he failed you. The bonds come from the sale of the land of my father. Sixty four thousand dollars. I did not tell you because you would have given every cent to Andrew. Keep it. Spend it on yourself.”
There was more. “Go to Naples,” the letter went on. “Your sister Carmela has asked you for forty years, and you have always said the money was needed at home. It is not needed at home. It is needed in Naples, in the sun, with a glass of wine and a sister who loves you. Take Dylan, if he will go. And Rosa, do not forgive Andrew too fast. A boy forgiven in an hour learns nothing. Forgive him over years, when he has earned it. With all my heart, Leonard.” I folded the page. The wooden box smelled of cedar and old rosary beads.
A promise to give a child everything can leave him with nothing, until somebody finally says enough.
By the curb, the young woman from the red sports car had pulled off her sunglasses. She was perhaps twenty eight, with kind, frightened eyes. “Mrs. Romano,” she said, “my name is Brooke. I did not know he was married until this morning. I did not know the lease carried your name as guarantor.” She held out a set of keys on a silver ring. “I want to give these back. The car is parked around the corner. I am so ashamed.” Whitney stared at her husband. Her tidy smile had finally fallen off her face and shattered on the pavement.
Andrew did not defend himself. I noticed that. For a man who had talked his way out of everything since kindergarten, he stood remarkably quiet on the lawn, with his phone hanging forgotten at his side. Then he knelt in the grass in front of me, in his rumpled shirt, and said, “Mama, I do not know when I became this.” I had no answer, and I did not pretend to. I took the watering can from the porch rail, because the lemon tree needed water, and I told him to go home with his wife.
The consequences were not mine to arrange, so I did not arrange them. The bank called the loan on the forever home, since the down payment had been mine and the payments had stopped. The house went on the market within the month. Whitney, to her credit, left it with the dignity of a woman who has learned something late. She and Andrew rented a small duplex across town. She took a job at a dental office. She no longer wore the diamond earrings, and I never learned where they went.
Andrew took a job loading trucks at a distribution warehouse. Five in the morning, every weekday, with a union card in his pocket just like the one his father had carried. He came to my table on Sundays after Mass, smelling of cardboard and sweat, and ate everything I put in front of him. He did not ask for money. He did not speak of forever homes. One Sunday in October, I found a plain envelope under the sugar bowl. Inside was a check for forty two dollars, with a note: First payment. The rest to follow. I tucked it into my Bible, beside the rosary of Leonard.
Dylan moved in with me in November, to finish his degree at the community college. He fixed my gutters and mended the screen door and cooked eggs better than anyone since Leonard. In December, over the last of the lemonade, he asked me what I wanted to do with the bonds. I told him about Naples. He put down his glass. “Grandma, I have never even been on a plane.” I said that made two of us. We bought two tickets that afternoon at the travel agency on Main Street, and the clerk had to hold my hand while I signed.
Carmela was waiting at the airport in Naples, eighty years old and four feet eleven inches tall, in a black dress and sensible shoes. She did not say a word. She simply walked straight into my arms and held on, and I felt forty years dissolve on the marble floor of the terminal. For three weeks we sat in her sunny courtyard under a lemon tree older than both of us. Dylan ate pasta until he had to loosen his belt. I wore a hat. I drank the wine. I wept for Leonard once, into the sea.
When I came home in the spring, the lemon tree I had bought for Andrew stood on my porch, green and thriving, with three small fruits. Andrew had watered it every day. He stood at the foot of my steps in a clean shirt, with his hands in his pockets, waiting. “Mama,” he said, “the first lemons.” I picked one and held it to my nose. It smelled of sunlight and summer and a long stubborn hope. “Come inside,” I said, “and I will show you how to make lemonade, the way your father liked it.” That was the beginning of the forgiving.
