“Why is she my second cousin?” the boy asked his mom.
“Maybe that’s not what she is-maybe she’s called your cousin once-removed, or something,” Nunzi said. When Dominic looked confused, his mother said: “Whatever she’s called, she’s not really your cousin-not a first cousin, anyway.”
This information (or misinformation) posed an unknown danger to a crippled sixteen-year-old boy. His accident, his rehabilitation, his homeschooling, not to mention his reinvention as a cook-all these-had deprived him of friends his own age. And “little” Dom had a fulltime job; he already saw himself as a young man. Now Nunzi had told him that the twenty-three-year-old Rosie Calogero was “not really” his cousin.
As for Rosie, when she arrived, she was not yet “showing;” that she soon would be posed another problem.
Rosie had a B.S. in education from the teachers’ college; at that time, frankly, she was overqualified to teach at a Berlin elementary school. But when the young woman started to look pregnant, she would need to temporarily quit her job. “Or else we’ll have to come up with a husband for you, either real or imaginary,” Annunziata told her. Rosie was certainly pretty enough to find a husband, a real one-Dominic thought she was absolutely beautiful-but the poor girl wasn’t about to sally forth on the requisite social adventures necessary for meeting available young men, not when she was expecting!
FOR FOUR YEARS, the boy had cooked with his mother. In some ways, because he wrote every recipe down-not to mention each variation of the recipes he would make, occasionally, without her-he was surpassing her, even as he learned. As it happened, on that life-changing night, Dominic was making dinner for the two women and himself. He was on his way to becoming famous at the breakfast place in Berlin, and he got home from work well before Rosie and his mom came home from school; except on weekends, when Nunzi liked to cook, Dominic was becoming the principal cook in their small household. Stirring his marinara sauce, he said: “Well, I could marry Rosie, or I could pretend to be her husband-until she finds someone more suitable. I mean, who needs to know?”
To Annunziata, it seemed like such a sweet and innocent offer; she laughed and gave her son a hug. But young Dom couldn’t imagine anyone “more suitable” for Rosie than himself-he had been faking the pretend part. He would have married Rosie for real; the difference in their ages, or that they were vaguely related, was no stumbling block for him.
As for Rosie, it didn’t matter that the sixteen-year-old’s proposal, which was both sweet and not-so-innocent, was unrealistic-and probably illegal, even in northern New Hampshire. What affected the poor girl, who was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy, was that the lout who’d knocked her up had not offered to marry her-not even under what had amounted to considerable duress.
Given the predilections of the male members of both the Saetta and Calogero families, this “duress” took the form of multiple threats of castration ending with death by drowning. Whether it was Naples or Palermo the lout sailed back to was not made clear, but no marriage proposal was ever forthcoming. Dominic’s spontaneous and heartfelt offer was the first time anyone had proposed to Rosie; overcome, she burst into tears at the kitchen table before Dominic could poach the shrimp in his marinara sauce. Sobbing, the distraught young woman went to bed without her dinner.
In the night, Annunziata awoke to the confusing sounds of Rosie’s miscarriage-“confusing” because, at that moment, Nunzi didn’t know if the loss of the baby was a blessing or a curse. Dominic Baciagalupo lay in his bed, listening to his second or once-removed cousin crying. The toilet kept flushing, the bathtub was filling-there must have been blood-and, over it all, came the sympathetic crooning of his mother’s most consoling voice. “Rosie, maybe it’s better this way. Now you don’t need to quit your job-not even temporarily! Now we don’t have to come up with a husband for you-not a real one or the imaginary kind! Listen to me, Rosie-it wasn’t a baby, not yet.”
But Dominic lay wondering, What have I done? Even an imaginary marriage to Rosie gave the boy a nearly constant erection. (Well, he was sixteen years old-no wonder!) When he heard that Rosie had stopped crying, young Dom held his breath. “Did Dominic hear me-did I wake him up, do you think?” the boy heard the girl ask his mother.
“Well, he sleeps like the dead,” Nunzi said, “but you did make quite a ruckus-understandably, of course.”
“He must have heard me!” the girl cried. “I have to talk to him!” she said. Dominic could hear her step out of the tub. There was the vigorous rubbing of a towel, and the sound of her bare feet on the bathroom floor.
“I can explain to Dom in the morning,” his mother was saying, but his not-really-a-cousin’s bare feet were already padding down the hall to the spare room.
“No! I have something to tell him!” Rosie called. Dominic could hear a drawer open; a coat hanger fell in her closet. Then the girl was in his room-she just opened his door, without knocking, and lay down on the bed beside him. He could feel her wet hair touch his face.
“I heard you,” he told her.
“I’m going to be fine,” Rosie began. “I’ll have a baby, some other day.”
“Does it hurt?” he asked her. He kept his face turned away from her on the pillow, because he had brushed his teeth too long ago-he was afraid his breath was bad.
“I didn’t think I wanted the baby until I lost it,” Rosie was saying. He couldn’t think of what to say, but she went on. “What you said to me, Dominic, was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me-I’ll never forget it.”
“I would marry you, you know-I wasn’t just saying it,” the boy said.
She hugged him and kissed his ear. She was on top of the covers, and he was under them, but he could still feel her body pressing against his back. “I’ll never have a nicer offer-I know it,” his not-really-a-cousin said.
“Maybe we could get married when I’m a little older,” Dominic suggested.
“Maybe we will!” the girl cried, hugging him again.
Did she mean it, the sixteen-year-old wondered, or was she just being nice?
From the bathroom, where Annunziata was draining and scrubbing the tub, their voices were audible but indistinct. What surprised Nunzi was that Dominic was talking; the boy rarely spoke. His voice was still changing-it was getting lower. But from the moment Annunziata had heard Rosie say, “Maybe we will!”-well, Dominic began to talk and talk, and the girl’s interjections grew fainter but lengthier. What they said was indecipherable, but they were whispering as breathlessly as lovers.
As she went on compulsively cleaning the bathtub, Annunziata no longer wondered if the miscarriage had been a blessing or a curse; the miscarriage was no longer the point. It was Rosie Calogero herself-was she a blessing or a curse? What had Nunzi been thinking? She’d opened her house to a pretty, intelligent (and clearly emotional) young woman-one who’d been rejected by her lover and banished from home by her family-without realizing what an irresistible temptation the twenty-three-year-old would be for a lonely boy coming of age.
Annunziata got off her knees in the bathroom and went down the hall to the kitchen, noting that the door to her son’s bedroom was partially open and the whispering went on and on. In the kitchen, Nunzi took a pinch of salt and threw it over her shoulder. She resisted the impulse to intrude on the two of them, but-first stepping back into the hall-she raised her voice.