The Shoemaker's Wife Read Free

nutmeg. She stirred the ingredients evenly with a large enamel spoon. Ciro watched the creamy folds of custard, now speckled with stars, lap over one another as the mixture thickened. Sister poured the custard into ceramic cups on a metal tray without spilling a drop. “Are you visiting?”
    “We’ve been sent here to work because we’re poor.”
    “Everyone in Vilminore di Scalve is poor. Even the nuns.”
    “We’re really poor. We don’t have a house anymore. We ate all the chickens, and Mama sold the cow. She sold a painting and all the books. Didn’t get much. And that money has almost run out.”
    “It’s the same story in every village in the Alps.”
    “We won’t stay long. My mother is going to the city, and she’ll come and get us this summer.” Ciro looked over at the deep wood-burning oven and figured that he would have to stoke and clean it until his mother returned. He wondered how many fireplaces there were in the convent. He imagined there were lots of them. He’d probably spend every hour of daylight chopping wood and building fires.
    “What brought you to the convent?”
    “Mama can’t stop crying.”
    “Why?”
    “She misses Papa.”
    Sister lifted the tray of custard cups and placed them in the oven. She checked the surface of several other baked custard cups on a cooling rack. What a lovely thing, to work in a warm kitchen in the cold winter and make food. Ciro imagined that people who work in kitchens are never hungry.
    “Where did your father go?”
    “They say he died, but I don’t think so,” Ciro said.
    “Why don’t you believe them?” Sister wiped her hands on a moppeen and leaned on the table so she might be eye to eye with the boy.
    “Eduardo read the letter that was sent to Mama from America. They say Papa died in a mine, but they never found his body. That’s why I don’t think Papa is dead.”
    “Sometimes—,” she began.
    Ciro interrupted her. “I know all about it—sometimes a man dies, and there’s no body. Dynamite can go off in a mine and people inside blow up, or a body can burn in a fire or disappear down a hole, or drown in a slag river inside the mountain. Or you get hurt and you can’t walk and you get stuck underground and you die of starvation because nobody came to find you and animals eat you and nothing is left but bones. I know every which way there is to die—but my papa would not die like that. He was strong. He could beat up anyone, and he could lift more than any man in Vilminore di Scalve. He’s not dead.”
    “Well, I’d like to meet him someday.”
    “You will. He’ll come back. You’ll see.” Ciro hoped his father was alive, and his heart ached at the possibility that he might never see him again. He remembered how he could always find his father easily in a crowd because he was so tall, he towered over everyone in the village. Carlo Lazzari was so strong he was able to carry both sons simultaneously, one on each hip, like sacks of flour up and down the steep mountain trails. He felled trees with an ax, and cut lumber as easily as Sister cut the dough. He built a dam at the base of the Vertova waterfall. Other men helped, but Carlo Lazzari was the leader.
    Sister Teresa broke a fresh egg into a cup and added a teaspoon of sugar. She poured fresh cream into the cup and whisked it until there was a creamy foam on the surface. “Here.” She gave it to Ciro. He sipped it, then drank it down until the cup was empty.
    “How’s that stomach now?”
    “Full.” Ciro smiled.
    “Would you like to help me cook sometime?”
    “Boys don’t cook.”
    “That’s not true. All the great chefs in Paris are men. Women are not allowed in the Cordon Bleu. That’s a famous cooking school in France,” Sister Teresa told him.
    Eduardo burst into the kitchen. “Come on, Ciro. We have to go!”
    Sister Teresa smiled at him. “You must be Eduardo.”
    “Yes, I am.”
    “She’s a nun,” Ciro told his brother.
    Eduardo bowed his head.