A Prayer for Sorrow

Her husband died in his sleep on the hottest day of the summer. He spent the day before out on the job, some building on the good side of town, and returned home with a large jar of red peppers. Lucia didn’t like red peppers, neither did their grown sons. Yet Gio bought them anyway for when his brothers would come in from Philly that Saturday. He snuck a few from a jar that night as Lucia cleaned the dishes from dinner. He sat at the yellow kitchen table and stared out the window out into the yard where dandelions were taking over. The record player was playing Vieni Sul Mar from a scratchy 45 rpm record, but neither of them paid it any mind. Lucia’s back pulsed in pain as she bent over the scalding sink, scrubbing in silence.

“I’m going to bed, Lucy,” he said.

She turned to watch him go up the stairs, his big olive-complected hands brushed the oversized wooden rosary that hung from a hook on the wall.

“Good night,” she said and went back to the dishes.

***

When she woke to find that he wasn’t breathing, he shook him and her lip trembled at the thought of the days to come.

“Giovanni,” she said on the phone. “Your father died in his sleep.”

“I’ll be right there,” he said in a half-sleep.

“Phillip,” she said on the next phone call. “Your father died in his sleep.”

“Are you okay, ma?” he asked.

“Just get over here,” she said.

There was silence for a moment.

“Phillip,” she said. She wasn’t asking if he was still there. She was demanding his presence with a single word.

“Just let me call work. Then I’ll be over,” Phil said.

***

Giovanni dealt with the doctor and Lucia sat with her aunt, her mother, her sister, and her daughter-in-law in the kitchen, who had already begun what would be a parade of dishes coming into the house.

“I can’t afford to bury him,” Lucia said as she sipped black coffee.

“You know we’ll take care of it,” said Tracy, Giovanni’s wife.

The ceiling fan hardly did anything for the heavy heat in the kitchen. The air smelled of coffee and sauce and bread. Tears streaked the faces of the women, all except Lucia. She was both deep inside and months away. There would not be any doubt of what was to come. She would have to sell the house. She would have to take double shifts at the plant, where Gio was too embarrassed to let her work. Where she could have been working all along and they wouldn’t be one crisis away from financial catastrophe. It was all she had feared all rolled into one stinking hot day.

Right outside the kitchen, the steps rattled as the paramedics brought down Gio’s body on a litter. Giovanni followed, solemn and tightlipped. Nearly identical to Gio at his age. As they opened the front door Lucia asked them to stop. The heat and humidity of the day spilled in, making it hard to breathe. She pulled down the cloth to see his face. It seemed swollen, yet deflated. Black stubble was on his face. He still smelled like peppers.

As the ambulance pulled up, Phil’s car pulled in.

“Did I miss the body?” he said with a cigarette in his mouth.

“You should’ve been here an hour ago, you dumb bastard,” Giovanni said.

“Nobody would cover me, I had to go talk to my boss myself. And who are you calling dumb?” Phil said.

“Don’t you two start now, of all days,” said Tracy.

Lucia turned back into the kitchen, where her sister Maria looked at her in the eyes.

“What are you thinking?” Maria said.

“I’m not thinking anything,” Lucia said.

“Lucia, what are you thinking?” Maria said once again. “You haven’t cried once.”

“I’m thinking that it’s too hot for this.”

***

They all asked Lucia to stay at one of their houses, or for them to stay at hers, but she refused. She knelt at her bedside, fingers intertwined with rosary beads, lips silently mouthing the Hail Mary. Yet her mind was elsewhere.

She thought about her wedding, and how he said he didn’t have the money for a suit so he had to borrow his brother Bobby’s tux. How her ring stained her finger green a year into their marriage. She thought about how every Sunday he cleared his throat as she put a quarter into the basket at church. How when the boys were little the most extravagant Santa could get was an orange in each of their patchworked stockings.

She still had yet to cry, and she wasn’t exactly sure why. She did love him, after all. She thought back to when Maria’s husband Guiseppe died, and how she wanted to jump into the casket at the funeral. She was so hysterical that their son had to restrain her. This was not that by any stretch of the imagination. She closed her eyes and began to pray a prayer for sorrow, for tears, for mourning.

***

In later days, she would say that she didn’t remember the funeral. Like something in her mind just blocked it all out. Too traumatic, she would say. She would be right, too. She hardly remembered it at all. She knew there was a mass where her cousin Percy sang Amazing Grace. She knew that Philip was late to both the viewing and the funeral. She knew that the house was so busy for three days that she could hardly breathe with the heat and the food and the underlying incessant din of the family. She knew that Giovanni cried like he was a boy again. She knew she didn’t.

***

Lucia found that death wasn’t much different than getting married. Not in the joking way that bachelors and bachelorettes talk about the metaphorical death of their engaged friends. Rather, it’s that all the relatives gather for this one unforgettable moment, maybe a few of the faithful linger for a few days, and then you are left to your own devices.

The food stopped coming before Lucia was ready to cook again. She wasn’t sure she would ever be ready to cook again. She remembered two things about food when it came to Gio. One, the grocery bills were always too expensive for him, no matter how tightly she budgeted and how cheap the food items she selected were. Two, he said her cooking lacked the flavor of proper Italian cooking. Pasta e fagioli, rigatoni and meatballs, the seven fishes on Christmas Eve, he would always nod and don a placid smile as he ate.

Giovanni and Tracy looked at her finances with her. Her fears were not exaggerated. Without Gio’s income, she was not able to stay. They pleaded with her to live with them, no rent or anything. Yet the thought of leaving the old neighborhood and moving to the upscale Pineview Hills neighborhood seemed more of a loss than Gio.

***

On a Saturday morning when the weather began to cool, Lucia called Giovanni and Phil to go through their father’s things and take what they want. She was tired of seeing his suits in the closet and his tools in the garage. Phil arrived a half-hour before Giovanni.

She sat in the living room on her tangerine-colored velvet couch staring at nothing. The ceiling creaked with the footsteps of her sons. A muffled argument echoed down the hall.

Her mind went to the Abruzzi Argument. Her father was at the end of his life thanks to the cancer that saturated his body. All he wanted to do was see his hometown in Italy once more. Gio refused to help pay for the plane ticket. Lucia told him that she didn’t know where the money was going. That they did nothing but pay their bills and survive. They didn’t even have a savings of more than five hundred dollars. But he refused to say a word. Her father died two weeks later.

“Mom?” said Giovanni from the top of the stairs.

“What is it, Giovanni?” she said in a daze.

“You need to see this.”

She walked up the stairs and into her bedroom. They had separated his clothes into two fairly even piles. She imagined that Phil’s pile was a bit higher just so Giovanni didn’t have to argue anymore. Yet in the middle of it all was a worn green shoebox. Giovanni opened the lid, where stacks upon stacks of bills were tightly packed. In the front was a small black notebook that had a whittled-down yellow pencil jutting out from the top.

Lucia couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.

“What is that?” she said, her breath shortening.

“It was dad’s,” Phil said.

“Where,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed, now holding the box. “Where was it?”

“He cut out a little compartment in the way back of the closet. Covered it up with a small hatch,” Giovanni said.

Lucia pulled out the notebook. It had a well-maintained cover with a material band around it. She opened it, to see “Deposits” in Gio’s handwriting. For over sixty, seventy pages, every line was filled.

“Leftover after electric bill - $19.”

“Christmas bonus - ‘62 - $25.”

“Difference after payraise - $17.45.”

Countless line entries, chronicling to before they were even married. She thumbed to the last entry. It was only a week before he died, for nearly forty dollars.

“There’s nearly $20,000 there, mom,” Giovanni said, eyes beaming.

Yet Phil’s eyes wouldn’t stop staring at the box of green bills, slackjawed and bright-eyed. Giovanni caught his gaze and clenched his jaw.

“Phil, let me speak to you down in the kitchen. Let mom take this all in,” he said.

“Wait, G, I want to see,” Phil said.

“Now, Phil,” Giovanni said.

They left the room and Lucia looked at the notebook and thought about the hand that filled it all in. If she wasn’t lost before, she certainly was now. On one hand, she would be able to stay in the house. On the other, and this would be where her mind would spend most of its quiet time until the end of their days, she thought about what could have been. Instead of compiling a hoard for someday, they could have lived more. They wouldn’t have traveled the globe or even dined at the Grayson Hotel downtown, but the quality could have been better.

“We could have lived so much more,” she said aloud, looking at the piles of clothes and belongings. Artifacts from a cautious life.

Then, without realizing it, her face was hot and wet with a stream of tears. It was all coming out now, and all coming back. The laughs, the fights, the long talks, and, apparently, the secrets kept. Her spirit was empty now. All she could think about was what her life could have transcended.

***

The record player played old Italian songs from a new record. She thumbed through an old family cookbook for Christmas cookie recipes. Ricotta had always been her favorite and that year, she tried the unforeseen twist of buying lemons to add zest on top. She pulled out the black notebook. The page after Gio’s last entry now said “Withdraws” in Lucia’s handwriting. She then turned the page, wrote down an entry, and said a prayer for Gio under her breath.