“Girls, girls,” their mother said, her tone a warning.
Mary bit her tongue. Her chest felt tight. She didn’t know how to reach Angie, though they’d been so close as kids. Mary had always treasured their twinness, seeing it as unique and special, but the bond that Mary viewed as security, like moorings to a boat, Angie saw as confinement, the tether to the puppy. Angie had spent most of her adult life tugging at that leash, fighting to slip free of it completely. Mary regretted the loss, and the wound had been reopened by the Connolly case; Bennie was embracing a twin she had never known, just as Angie was pushing her away.
“Judy,” Angie said, “put the spoon down and pick up some spaghetti on your fork. Pick up just a little and twirl it against the side of the plate.”
Judy pierced a few strands of spaghetti with her fork, her expression grimmer than anybody’s eating spaghetti should be. “I’m a Stanford grad. I should be able to do this.”
“But you can’t,” Mary told her. “Because you won’t use the spoon.”
“Mary,” Angie warned, in the same tone their mother had used.
Mary’s face flushed. She felt suddenly warm in the tiny kitchen. Hot tomato sauce-“gravy” in the vernacular-bubbled in the dented metal saucepan on the stove and residual steam from a pot of spaghetti water curled into the air. The aroma filling the small kitchen-sharp with oregano, sweet with basil, chunky with sausage-that seemed so fragrant when Mary first came home now smelled cloying. “You know,” she said, “some people don’t eat spaghetti when it’s hot out. They think it makes them hotter to eat spaghetti.”
Mary’s mother looked over, squinting behind her glasses. “What you mean, no spaghett’?”
“No spaghetti in summer. If we ate cold things for dinner, we’d feel cooler.”
“Drink your water,” said her mother, and beside her, her father frowned deeply, his forehead fairly cleaving in two.
“What are you talkin’, a cold dinner? Cold isn’t dinner. If it’s cold, it can’t be dinner.”
“That’s not true, Pop,” Mary said, not sure why she was pressing such an inane point. She loved spaghetti in any weather. She would’ve eaten it in a steambath. “In restaurants they have cold dinners, like cold salmon with a salad. Sometimes they serve the salad warm.”
“Cold fish, warm salad?” Her father’s hand flew to check his hearing aid, a gift from Mary. She’d been so thrilled when he agreed to wear it that she suggested eating in the dining room, but had been roundly rebuffed. “You sayin’ cold fish, warm salad, Mare? Where’s this at?”
“Downtown.”
“What kinda thing is that? How they make the salad warm?”
“I don’t know. Either they don’t chill it or they heat it, I guess. It says on the menu, ‘A warm salad of wilted greens.’ ”
“Wilted? Wilted means spoiled. They don’t serve it like that.”
“Yes, they do. Put it right in front of you.”
Her father snorted. “They should be ashamed of themselves! Crooks! Cold fish, warm salad! That’s ass-backwards.”
“Watch your language, Matty,” said Mary’s mother, but her father pretended not to hear with alarming accuracy.
“People pay good money for that? That’s cocka-mamie!”
Mary caught her twin’s eye across the tight circle of the table and to her surprise, Angie was smiling over her water glass. Mary sighed inwardly. She used to be able to read her sister’s mind.
“I did it!” Judy yelped suddenly. “Look!” Grinning, she held up a forkful of spaghetti balled like yarn.
Mary laughed, and her father set down his fork and clapped, his dry, rough palms smacking thickly together. “Brava, Judy!” he said.
“So tell us about your day, girls,” her mother said, and Mary hesitated. She didn’t want to tell her parents she was working on the Connolly case, but she didn’t want to lie, either. Like a good lawyer, she avoided the question.
“You remind me of when we were little, Ma, and you’d ask what we learned in school that day.”
“I’ll tell you what we learned,” Judy chirped up, finishing her forkful of pasta. “We learned that boxers have bad manners.”
“Boxers?” Vita frowned, and Mary looked down at her plate. Oh, no.
Matty DiNunzio’s face lit up. “You gotta case about boxing? What you gotta do with boxing?”
“We had to question a witness today,” Judy answered, launching into what happened at the gym, apparently heedless of Mary’s kicks under the table. Matty DiNunzio hunched over the table on his elbows, his eyes widening as his wife’s narrowed. Mary knew her mother’s suspicions would be slow-cooking like tomato sauce. Thick bubbles popping on a steamy red surface.
“You met Star Harald?” her father said, oblivious in his excitement. “He’s a heavyweight. I seen him box a couple months ago. He was on the cable. Madonne, whatta jab.”
Mary leapt to shift the subject. “You watch boxing, Pop? I thought you were a baseball fan.”
“I like the fights. I boxed when I was young. Way back when.”
“Tell us about it,” Mary asked, but her mother’s face told her she was only postponing the inevitable, which was still better than nothing. Every lawyer likes an extension of time.
“Not much to tell. Not like Golden Gloves or nothin’. A lot of us fought, from the neighborhood. Cooch, Johnnie, Freddie. You met them guys, Mare. I could hit hard, take a punch, too. But I wasn’t quick enough. My feet.”
“Maria,” her mother interrupted. She touched her husband’s forearm, which was Italian code for shut up now. “What kinda case she got you workin’ on?”
Mary didn’t have to ask her mother who “she” was. Bennie Rosato had become the Antichrist in the DiNunzio household last year. “Just a case. A normal case.”
“What you mean, normal?”
“I just have to do some research, is all. Talk to witnesses, work in the library. Today I met with one of my old classmates, she’s teaching handicapped children-”
“Witnesses. What kinda witnesses?”
Mary sipped some water. The kitchen was sweltering. Nobody could cross-examine like a mother. “You know, regular witnesses. Trial witnesses.”
“What kinda trial?”
“You know, a trial. It’s not my trial. I’m not trying the case or anything.” Mary glanced at Judy for help, but she’d become suspiciously reabsorbed in her spaghetti. “I’m also finishing a brief in that First Amendment case I told you about, remember? That’s my main case, in federal court. It’s for the Third Circuit, the federal court of appeals. Very important stuff, Ma. This is where you say you’re so proud of me. That I’m a genius, that they’re lucky to have me.”
“She got you on a murder case, don’t she?” Vita DiNunzio set down her fork, and Mary knew she was in trouble.
“Just this one.”
“I knew it!” She slammed the table with a palm that only looked fragile. The table wiggled, the plates jumped, and water pooled in the jelly glasses.
“It’s not on Bennie, it’s on me. If you want to blame anybody, blame me.”
“She almost got you killed!” her mother shouted, her voice quivering with age and emotion.
“I’m fine, Ma. Everything’s fine.”
Across the table, Angie looked grave. “Relax, Ma. Mary will be very careful. She’ll take care of herself. She won’t do anything risky. Will you, Mare?”
“No, absolutely not,” Mary said, on cue. “I’m very careful. Not doing anything dangerous at all.” Leave it to Angie to know how to handle her mother. Growing up, the twins had worked as a tag team and in the unspoken division of parents, Angie had gotten their mother and Mary their father. “Last year was a one-time thing, Ma. This is just a run-of-the-mill criminal trial. I’ll be very careful.”