Chapter Text
Carmela remembered the town in Sicily where she was born in the same indistinct way she might recall fragments of a dream in the morning. Vivid images, some of them making no sense, remained, but the rest of the story was lost. She had been six years old when her father had decided they would go to America to seek a better life. Before that, she remembers sweltering heat in the summer, the mouth-watering smell of the food her own Mama made over the wood burning stove in a tiny kitchen, church bells ringing in deep tones on Sunday, like the voice of God. She remembers an orange cat who would sleep on the windowsill, lazing in the sun. Behind the little crooked house, in the spring, plumeria would bloom, soaking the air in perfume. She remembers that smell as the emblem of the best part of her childhood, believing it smelled the way heaven would someday. The worst parts of that long ago time, her freezing bare feet in the winter, the screams and gunshots in the night, the way Mama never smiled, the death of her older brother Marco from a stray bullet in the vendettas, she doesn’t like to remember those things. A loaded gun had always stood behind the front door. Other than those little bursts of memory, life for her began in America.
Vito had been a nice, quiet man, intelligent and handsome. She was fifteen years old when she met him, wearing a pretty white dress at the Santa Lucia church bazaar. He had offered to buy her a dish of ice cream. She had swished her skirt nervously, but nodded, and he smiled. She was charmed. Later, Mama and Papa had talked about him. She had heard every word since the apartment walls were thin as paper. He had no family, poor man, his parents were both dead, and he had come to America all alone when he was only a little boy. Now, he was respected, making a good wage, no reports of drunkenness or carousing with bad women. It was almost too good to be true. They approved of him, and a year later, she became Mrs. Corleone, one less mouth for them to feed, married and settled and safe.
They were wrong about being safe, of course. Vito was always kind to her, but he never told her anything about what he did. Any fool knew what that meant. She learned early that women did not ask certain questions. There were things she was not supposed to know, or at least things she was not supposed to let the men know that she knew, so she was quiet and kept the apartment clean and filled with the good smells of food cooking, and soon, the sound of a baby crying.
Then, something changed. She saw a new shotgun standing behind the apartment door, a shadow from long ago that matched the distant gunshots and shouts she could hear at night. It stood there, like an omen of death, silent but unable to be denied.
She never mentioned a word about it to Vito.