abhaile Chapter 2: two, a fargo fanfic

A/N: hey guys! just a few things to clear up: firstly the fadda women are not shown extensively in the show, especially mrs fadda so i took some liberties and i wanted more scenes with her so gave her an imagined personality (for both her and the two minutes we saw of maxia). hope you all don't mind but hey, they weren't shown that much. secondly eabha is pronounced like ava if you aren't familiar with irish pronunication. thirdly no place called kilneety exists in ireland as far as i could find, totally made it up because i didn't want to use a real town lol fourthly...hope you enjoyed the newest episode. i will say nothing because i don't want to spoil. all i will say is that i sure liked it. i mean.. hahah anyway, i hope you are all staying safe and have a great week! x

two

then

The two bodies lay limp in the mud, looking at the colourless clouds that drifted overhead. I watched my mother slip down the slope and stand above my father. She made awful, hard sounds with her chest like she was choking on her own blood. She was flapping her hands like a bird flaps its wings, flapping and flapping. The rain had turned her hair to frizz and springing curls, black strands lashing against her pale face as she looked back and forth, taking in the brownish lump that was Lynch and then, at her boots, the bluer tones of my father. One strap of his suspenders had slipped off in his fall and curled awkwardly beneath his arm, like it held him down against the soil.

I watched my mother bend down and pull up his legs to drag him around the house; not into it, but around it.

Hoarsely, I called, "What are you doin'?"

"Help me with him," she said. "Take his legs for me."

I never understood what pushed me to cross the sodden garden and heave his ankles up and hold his boots against my chest while my mother shifted around and gripped him under his arms. His head lolled. The shot had gotten him in the throat where little rivers of red flooded from an engorged black dot – one tiny and miniscule dot that had taken down a man like my father, who I had always admired for his brute strength and hardiness, toiling on the land, the land which had belonged to his father and his father before him and his father before him –…

The land which was now muddy and streaked in weak, watery puddles of blood that splashed beneath our shoes.

"The other fellas that work for Abbott will come lookin' for Lynch," she breathed out. "And they'll want to know what happened."

There was spittle on her chin. Her eyes rolled madly around, her teeth drawing at her lip. Neither of us were thinking like we should have been, taking in the horror of it, the sheer distortion of what had earlier been a calm and quiet day like all others. She was jumping ahead of herself in her speech and babbling in a way that was not like her.

She had always been quiet, docile. She sat in that bedroom with my brother for nights on end, watching over him, wiping his mouth and cheeks of sweat and changing his sheets and bringing him water. She had been so silent sometimes that I had sometimes forgotten she was in the cottage at all.

But here, in front of me, she was wide-eyed and cold and smearing a bloodied hand against her mouth.

"Then we tell them," I said. "It was Da who shot him and Lynch who shot back."

"They'll want us out. End of the week, Lynch said. How would your brother survive that?"

"They would understand."

"No," she said. "They would blame us – want us out. Who would take us? No-one. We bury them."

"It's not fair." I felt a hot welling behind my eyes. "Not right."

"No such thing as fair and right," she told me. "Only what's happenin'."

His boots were slippery and I had to grip the laces. I was pleading with her while we placed my father near the wall that had been drawn behind our house to separate it from the wild fields. She wiped her mouth again; it stained her lips in a colour that was not naturally hers, given she had lost it all in the climb and haul of bringing my father this far.

I felt so dazed that it hardly occurred to me that this was all so strange, so surreal, not what could happen around these parts and even if it could happen around these parts, it could not happen to us.

Yet I could not bring myself, even in that hazy state, to look down at my father lain in the dirt.

"Go inside and watch your brother for me. I'll come for you later," she said. "Not married, Lynch. No wife. Who would notice him missin'?"

She was not speaking to me anymore. She was speaking to herself, white puffs slipping from between her lips. I went into the house and breathed in its sour blend of sawdust and hay, a scent which I once loved, but that I suddenly hated with all of my being.

James was in his bed, soft and pliant. I settled on the stool beside him and brought him fresh water, which only stirred some dormant cough in his throat. I held a tissue against his mouth and saw that already my hands had been stained a rusted colour.

The world outside had turned a murky purple. There was a rustling at the door and my mother came through into the bedroom. She was like a beast about to be slaughtered. The whites of her eyes showed more and more in a strange roll from one end of the room to the other. She called for me and I followed her out into the garden and neither of the bodies was there.

I followed her further up the hill and down its other side closest to the creak and we crossed its wet stones in the dark. I looked behind at the orange glow of the windows in the house, unaware of just when I had risen from that stool to light the candles myself.

There were furrows in the field where she brought me, great long lines of soil turned and deepened, which my father had been doing for a while before his sudden death in the garden. It had been close to wintertime, he had had no reason to turn that soil like he did, but there was something that gripped my father about touching the ground and toiling on it. He had been working at it for weeks, spending wasted hours out there.

My mother had put the bodies, together, in the same row. I wished she had put them apart. I marvelled at her strength, her hardiness. There was a wheel-barrow nearby that she had used to haul them up and down but Lynch had rolled out, she told me, into the creek, gotten wet and smashed his head on a rock.

Don't look at his face, she said. Not a face anymore.

She needed me to help turn more soil on them – to bury them, put them beneath the earth where no-one would find them. I wanted to ask what she was thinking but no words came. I helped her. I helped her without knowing why, without trying to talk sense into her again. I turned the soil, more soil, great mashed-up lumps of soil which lifted and splattered them and I thought, half-bent over the body of my father, that he blinked. He was blinking, the hole in his throat was rippling, pouring down into the mud. Weak, watery streaks.

Clumps of soil spattered his eyelids, fluttered, then closed. He had not been fully gone until that last toss of soil onto his chest.

And all the while we walked back to the cottage, I thought to myself, had she known that he was not yet dead? Could we not have called for someone to help him? Could we not have done something differently? Why did we do that, why did she want him buried –…

The purple shade of night lifted and brought a feebler white to the clouds. The goldfinches stirred in their nests and started to call to one another, bringing about dawn in their flitting and singing, repeating motions over and over like they always had done through some innate instinct within themselves to do it, without ever thinking why they did it, only knowing that they would do it and had to do it.

now

At six-thirty, the pipes rattled and the neighbours wandered between their rooms, their footsteps flat and dense against the wooden floorboards that then creaked and stirred me from sleep. I looked across the creased bedsheets and stared blankly at the wall for a moment before I remembered Rabbi would come soon enough.

I hauled myself into the bathroom to brush the knots in my hair and pat some colour onto my cheeks. I had already packed the few clothes that I owned and wore a powder-blue dress. I had placed the book about birds atop all the other stuff and clipped shut the suitcase, hauling it toward the door.

Then, I went downstairs and stuffed an envelope of rent through the letter-box for Mr Woolridge and signed it Eabha because I felt I had to hold onto something that had not yet gotten left behind on the ship the day I arrived, something that otherwise would have slid down between the port and the gangplank, plopping sadly into the water without my noticing it.

I had stared at the letters long enough for them to sizzle into my mind and linger still while I sat waiting for Rabbi, my suitcase tucked alongside me.

There was no clock in the hallway and I had no watch. The small little clock that had sat on the bedside table belonged to Mr Woolridge and so I had left it there. I waited and waited so much that I worried he had forgotten, or that his plum-coloured car had broken down someplace.

Then I heard two short taps against the door. Stood on the footpath outside, Rabbi looked first at me and second at my suitcase. He leaned forward, took it from me and, soft and flat like he had said in the car the night beforehand, said again, "No gettin' out of it."

"No gettin' out of it," I repeated, smiling at him.

He lifted his head, tilting his hat back against his dark hair. "D'you remember what I told you?"

"Do the job, keep to myself." I followed him out into the street and saw that he had driven here in a green car instead. Rabbi placed the suitcase into the boot and rounded the car, slipping into the front. I sat beside him and finished, "No-one will bother me, that way."

Rabbit started the engine. "Good," he said. "'Cause Mrs Fadda is waitin' for you already."

The car rolled into the driveway and crushed gravel beneath its wheels, a crunch that rocked us gently back and forth toward the front of the house where we slowed to a halt. Rabbi turned off the engine and watched out the windows lined in dying frost, melting down into white pearls that slithered further along the glass and longed to touch the tweed of his coat.

He shifted his elbow too quickly. The pearls shimmered into nothingness. He was looking at me and there was no sound between us because the windows cut off the noise from the house and all the neighbourhood around us, like we lived in our own little cocoon.

"I want to tell you somethin'," he said. "Supposed to be helpin' you, so I want to tell you. The sisters'll be here later. Not all of 'em today, but prob'ly Maxia."

I stared at him. "Sisters?"

"You got Alma, the oldest girl. Then Maxia in the middle and Lidia is the last," he said. "Maxia should be 'round the most, like I told you. Movin' back in this week, she is. Comes back now and then."

"What for?"

Rabbi rested his hands on the wheel of a car not in motion, his head tilted back against the rest. "Mrs Fadda gets funny moods, sometimes. Started a while back and hasn't stopped. Wakes up fine for months on end – then one day, she'll not get out of bed for hours and Maxia has to be called 'round to look after her. Black moods, I call 'em. Nothin' to be done for her."

"She's rich, isn't she? Can't she visit those shrinks who talk about heads and dreams and the lot?"

The pearly drops rippled down along the window behind him again. "Not their way," he said simply. "You understand what I mean by those black moods, don't you?"

I had known black moods well; had done what Maxia did and cared for my own mother between her shifting colours and I wondered if Mrs Fadda would do what mine did and wander rooms, talking to herself, looking for things that were already in her hand and then laying down in bed and not rising again until she had grown stale and creased like the sheets beneath her. I had known black moods. I had known them well.

I let my eyes drift to the house. "I understand," I said. "I know they had a German girl and she – well, she had to leave. Maybe Don Fadda wanted another housekeeper to fill her spot and spare Mrs Fadda and her daughter more stress at the same time."

There was a soft crack in his voice. "Dunno. He didn't tell her 'bout you 'til last night."

"You're tellin' me Mrs Fadda never even knew he was hirin'?"

Rabbi clucked his tongue against his teeth. "Don Fadda got into the habit of not tellin' his wife matters that about his business – got into the habit then of tellin' her nothin' at all. Only tells her what's happenin' right before it happens, so she can't react too bad to it, y'know, with them moods she has. Not too sure sometimes how she'll take things, is all. But the girls were there. Said they'd come 'round to see this new housekeeper, see what you're about. Heard 'em talkin'."

"You weren't eatin' with them then?"

"No. I don't eat with them. And you won't be eatin' with them either. You'll be eatin' with me, after the family finishes and only in the kitchen, not in the dinin' room. Or in your own room if you prefer it."

Though I had imagined that for myself, I had never thought that Rabbi would be confined to the kitchen or his room in the same manner because he had been around so long. He was not allowed at their dinner-table, not allowed even in their dining-room. I had the image of him, hunched against a kitchen countertop, poking at one sparse plate of dried-up leftovers while the Faddas bunkered down someplace else where they would not notice him. He would be unseen, slouching up to his room like a child scolded and sent away. But Rabbi was no child.

I had been too quiet, because Rabbi asked, "Hardly thought you'd be eatin' with them, did you?"

I shook my head. "No. But I thought you might, livin' in the house like you do. I'll eat with you. If it doesn't bother you."

Rabbi looked down at that space between us; it was hard to tell what he thought and harder still to tell if he thought anything about it at all. "Doesn't bother me," he said shortly. "Nothin' bothers me."

He shifted in his seat and his door clicked.

Quietly, I called out, "Rabbi?"

His door swung, half-open.

"Thanks," I said. "Again – for helpin' me, I mean."

"Don't thank me," he said. "I'm only tellin' you what you'll learn for yourself soon enough."

Though his door was still ajar, he had not gotten out of the car. It seemed he was studying something on the ground or his shoes. Then, suddenly, he moved.

He walked to the boot, pulling out my suitcase. I climbed from the car and started the short walk toward the house. The grass was damp and swayed in a light breeze. Somewhere from the trees came a light, delicate little whistle that sang out and settled, sang out and settled; a song which made me think of wet soil and sinking into mud with tired, aching bones.

"Goldfinch," I said.

"What?"

Rabbi was walking alongside me, one hand around the handle of my suitcase and the other in his pocket, still taller than me even if he slouched. He had been distracted, watching the Italian men who sat on that porch ahead of us, posed like figures in a painting who were smoking the same cigarettes and throwing the same cards between them that they had been yesterday evening when I had left with Rabbi.

"American goldfinch," I told him.

His eyes rose to the blend of trees overhead, blind, unseeing of the little bodies hidden on the branches and singing to one another. He had been so focused on those Italians that he had not noticed the trees and the grass and the birdsong. He was blind to everything but what was in and around that house.

"Seems to be a lot of them 'round," I said.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Seems to be."

He had forgotten about those little birds because one of the Italian men had stood from his seat on the porch and wandered to the steps we would have to take. He stretched out his arms and waved with one hand at us, though it was clear that this was not some friendly greeting. Rabbi had unknowingly drawn his brows together like he often seemed to do, so deep in his thinking that he also seemed to bunker further into his pale green coat.

"Irish girl," the Italian called out. It was the Italian who had been sitting in the room with me yesterday, smoking his cigarette, bobbing his shoe, humming his old folk song. "Back for more!"

I heard no goldfinches. He had frightened them off. I had never learned his name because he had never offered it and he did not offer it then, either, when we took the few steps onto the porch. He sidled in front of myself and Rabbi, blocking the front door, cocking his head and pursing his lips as he looked between us.

What seemed more strange to me was that Rabbi had not reacted like it was all that odd to be blocked and corralled like we were children in a playground.

Instead, he spoke coarsely and calmly and looked at the door while he did it. "Mrs Fadda is waitin' on her," he said. "Wants to show her 'round."

Tossing another card onto the table, another Italian spoke up from behind the man who blocked us and said one short, blunt sentence in his own tongue that made the others snort. Rabbi watched him and shifted from foot to foot, tugging the front of his coat closer around him. He sniffed and motioned toward the door again.

The Italian who stood in front of us did not laugh. He simply arched his brow and nodded in return.

"Of course," he drawled, his accent smooth and clicking. "Mrs Fadda cannot be kept waiting."

He reached out and held open the door. Rabbi took another long look at him before striding forward with a purpose I had not yet seen in him. I shuffled past that Italian man who smiled mockingly at me. I had done nothing to him other than come from another country and that was all there was to it, so I tried to let it slide but it was settling in my stomach like a hardened pebble had dislodged itself from the driveway and had somehow gotten into me, churning and churning.

I had needed the job and Nell had done a lot for me and so there was really no turning around, no asking Rabbi if he might know of someplace else that would take an Irish girl, no slinking away with my tail tucked between my legs, red-faced and begging Mr Woolridge to rent me my old flat.

No gettin' out of it.

I said weakly, "Another joke from those guys on the porch, huh?"

Rabbi looked down at me, unsmiling and curt. "Another joke," he said.

It struck me that I made too many assumptions about him. I imagined him quiet and meek, but he had seemed prepared to defend himself. It would have been wrong to think him afraid of those Italians on the porch; it was not fear but rather some kind of strange anticipation, like he had already envisioned how things would unfold and he was simply moving through each motion because none of it was new to him, none of it particularly different than what it had been for him every other day in this house.

But if that was the truth, why would he stay in a house where he felt unwelcome? Was he like me, in need of money and lodgings and willing to swallow insults and jibes if it meant somewhere to sleep?

Rabbi loosened his lanky frame from its tight hold and spoke a little more like he usually did – calmly, more understanding. He seemed much more at ease without others around him. He was only accepting of me, I thought, because I was no threat to him and certainly no comparison to those Italian men on the porch. I toddled behind him like a lost infant, thrown into some foreign and frightening place. But it was much simpler than that.

I was nothing but a housekeeper.

"C'mon," he said finally. "Mrs Fadda should be 'round the house somewhere."

Rabbi allowed me to walk ahead of him.

The house was sombre. Its curtains were so heavy that sunlight was muffled and pale, drawing out the dark green wallpaper and heavy red drapes that hung around the windows. It felt more like a funeral home with long, miserable halls that swallowed light and breathed shadows. Rabbi was so familiar with these halls that he seemed much more comfortable in its inky spots than he had on the porch where he could be seen so clearly.

From the kitchen, a woman called, "Is this her?"

Rabbi went through an arch and pulled off his hat. "It is, Mrs Fadda," he said, motioning behind himself at me. "This is Ava McCarthy."

Furthest from where we stood was a rounded wall dotted in windows that showed the garden through the doily folds of the curtains. The circular table was dressed for a breakfast that had not been served and which seemed would not be served either. The air was stale, bitter.

Mrs Fadda sat and sipped at coffee. She looked through those curtains, into the garden. She had gaunt cheekbones, like Rabbi. Her hair had been pinned and curled at this hour and she wore a beige dress, her wrists and hands adorned in bracelets and rings that sparked against the light. I thought of silver, shining dully.

"Ava," she repeated distantly. "Come, sit. I want to speak with you."

I stepped forward and gingerly moved a chair aside to sit across from her. I glanced behind at Rabbi, whose tall frame stood slanted and awkward in the arch, one sliver of a silhouette that blended into the heavy tones of the hall.

"Rabbi, bring her suitcase to her new room, would you?"

His footsteps disappeared into the hallway. I heard the carpet on the staircase sigh and rub; the only sign that he had even been here at all. Mrs Fadda sipped delicately at her coffee and kept her focus on that garden where two or three Italians seemed to walk in a slow march around the garden furniture still speckled in dew, passing between the trees, ignoring the gentle trill of the goldfinches overhead.

"Do you have children?"

I was surprised. "No, Mrs Fadda."

"I have children," she said airily. "Three boys, three girls. Balanced, three of each. You should want girls. Girls will stay with you, care for you, when you are old. Boys will kiss your cheek and leave. Did you know this?"

Her accent, much like the other Italians in the house, was strong and ticked at her words.

I smoothed down my skirt and said, "No, Mrs Fadda."

She hummed. "My mother warned me," she said. "Somehow, I imagined it would be different for me. What about your mother? Is she alive?"

There was a stillness in the room that matched the mahogany walls around her, contrasting the cold yellow light that filtered down and harshened the worn lines of her face. I thought about what Rabbi had said, in the car, with the frost creeping up along the windows; about her moods, her husband.

"No," I said, clearing my throat. "Died many years ago."

"Shame," she said. "I tell my boys that they should visit their mother, love their mother. I heard a story that I think about now. I heard that mothers should raise their boys to be coffin-makers. Then, when she dies, her son will make her a beautiful coffin. He will put all his love into it, all his attention. He will understand. You know who told me that story?"

"Who?"

"A grandmother in my village," she replied. "Old lady. She used to slice apples and make me eat them. I taste them now. So bitter. Not like the apples here."

She was a strange woman and nothing like what I had envisioned. She showed that Italian strength and care for her children yet her eyes had a blankness to them. I had seen it in my mother. Her shoulders rose and remained hunched around her as she leaned forward with her elbows on the table.

"I want you to do the rugs on Thursday morning," she said. "Every Thursday, the ladies come to play bridge and I want those rugs looking wonderful. Brought over from the old country, those rugs. Some belonged to my great-grandmother. You won't cook. I don't want that Irish food, I want real food – Italian food. You will make only sandwiches for my youngest son for his lunch, but you will not make anything more than that. You can eat with Rabbi, in the kitchen. There will be leftovers for you."

Throughout her sudden, much longer speech, I had bobbed my head like a little doll knocked back and forth and she had not done anything with herself other than stay in that stonelike pose.

"Did Rabbi tell you about my daughters?"

"Only their names."

She licked her lips. "Maxia wants to stay here for a few weeks," she said. "Married her husband a few years ago but still needs help from her mother, you understand."

I remembered how Rabbi had looked at me in the car when he talked about her black moods and Maxia and how Don Fadda hardly told his wife anything about his business and even less about himself. Mrs Fadda was saving face.

Suddenly, the size of the house struck me and I imagined it at night, those long halls stretching onward, those drapes turning liquid and black and cutting off all the moonlight that could soften her world. Had she intentionally made her house so dark or had it developed like that in some natural, unthought-of mirror of what Rabbi had called her moods?

"I understand," I said gently.

"You're Catholic?"

"Yes, Mrs Fadda."

She studied me with the first semblance of awareness in her eyes. "We attend church on Sundays. You will come with us."

"Yes, Mrs Fadda."

"I want you to polish those frames," she said, nodding at the handful of paintings along the wall of Saints with serene faces and hands clasped in prayer. "Italians brought art to this world, you know. All the techniques, the methods – Italians made them first. I want the photographs dusted, silverware cleaned. Have you cleaned silverware?"

"Yes," I said. "I'll be very careful, Mrs Fadda."

She was scrutinising me with a tightness in her expression that suddenly dropped.

"Don't spend too long on them. A gift from my mother-in-law, one of many after my marriage to Donatello. I hate them." Her bluntness startled me. She brushed at some lint that clung to the folds of her dress. She added, like an afterthought, "May she rest in peace."

I nodded slowly and still did not speak simply because I could not gauge what she wanted from me. It was almost like she would have talked whether I was in the room with her or not. I wondered if she was not simply very lonely and if that was the root of her moods and her dark furniture and her strange mannerisms.

"I would like for you to wash and change the sheets, too," she continued. "Even for the guest rooms. Our family visits often, I want them to feel welcomed with clean sheets. I want you to air the rooms upstairs. Those rooms need fresh air in the morning but you must remember to close the windows in the evening or it will start to become too damp. This weather – nothing like what I had as a little girl in my country."

"Yes, Mrs Fadda."

"You'll finish most days by six if you get all the chores finished. Weekends are yours, except for one hour on Saturday to fetch the little things I need from the store and two hours on Sunday for church. You can take care of the laundry. But you must be aware, my eldest, Josto – he's very particular about how his shirts are ironed," she said. "He will instruct you. It used to be that I did all these things, when we first came to America."

Then again came that film across her eyes that made her seem distant, like she floated far from this room, in another place.

"One suitcase," she mumbled. "Only one suitcase you had with you."

"Had not much else to bring with me," I said.

"I only had one suitcase, too," she murmured airily. "One suitcase with me on the boat, coming here, with Donatello. Italians, we face hardship – we live it. But always we make something from it. What do they say here, in America, about lemons and lemonade? Italians, we do the same thing. We make fertile land from dead soil, we make one little house into an empire."

She paused and touched her pearl necklace.

"You're a pretty girl," she said. "The last girl was pretty too. Stupid, though. She ended up pregnant because she believed an Italian man would leave his wife for her. Stupid, I told you. Italian men like to chase pretty girls, but they never leave their wives – never, never. You ignore them. No good for you, for any of them either. Now, for the plants –…"

From the hall, the sound of the front-door clacking shut cracked through the house and startled me; so quiet was her home that the noise seemed violent. There was a great hustle-and-bustle in that hall which filled up that emptiness and something seemed to breathe life into Mrs Fadda, who stood from her chair, swept up her cup and brought it to the sink. I was not sure what should be done on my part and pushed out my chair to follow her.

"Maxia," she called out, "come to the kitchen. The Irish girl is here."

Bustling through the arch, shuffling two children ahead of her and holding another in her arms, was Maxia, the middle daughter. Behind her, a tall man towered, ducking his head at the doorway. He carried several suitcases in both hands, dropping them alongside the cabinet. He tugged off his hat and politely nodded at myself and Mrs Fadda, who moved around to kiss his cheeks before kissing those of her daughter, tinged red from cold.

"And here I was expecting a redhead," Maxia said lightly, glancing at me.

"Ava, this is my daughter, Maxia," Mrs Fadda told me. "She takes care of me – like daughters should. What did I tell you? You must have daughters."

Maxia neither held her hand out to me nor seemed to notice what her mother had said. Instead, she turned to that large man and clucked, "Antoon, darling, could you bring the bags upstairs?"

Antoon glanced at Maxia and reluctantly hiked the straps of the suitcases around his hands again, carting them back into the hall. Unlike Rabbi, whose footsteps seemed to blend into the silence of the house and melt away, Antoon made quite a racket of banging bags against walls and thumping into the bannister. Maxia smiled tightly at the spot where he had been and then spun toward me.

"Well, I should probably tell you how things are around here," she said. "I don't know how you Irish do it, but it won't be that way here. Did you tell her about the rugs, Mama?"

"Yes, Maxia."

"The rugs must be cleaned on Thursday mornings," Maxia continued, as if Mrs Fadda had not spoken from her place behind the countertop. "Mama has bridge on Thursday evenings with her girlfriends. My father collects little figurines and those must be dusted daily. He can't bare for them to become dusty. Have you met Rabbi already? I heard you Irish flock together. He'll show you around, I bet."

I swallowed. "I met him yesterday. He's been very kind."

"Kind," Maxia repeated, smiling at me like she had smiled at that spot where her husband had been; yet the difference was that I was still standing in front of her but she smiled like I was not. "Yes, well, just be careful – no funny business. We already had that German girl! Never imagined that sort of behaviour from the Germans, but you Irish – well, we know how large Irish families can be, even larger than ours. Like rabbits!"

I flushed a dreadful pink and I felt so embarrassed for something that I had not even done, like a child who had been scolded, caught being awful and bold and now awaiting punishment for it, in the form of a belt lashed at bare legs or the harsh smack of a wooden spoon or whatever else was lined up for me and which simmered in her eyes.

"Catholic girl," Mrs Fadda said, nodding at me. "The German was Protestant."

Maxia paused, cocking her head. "You are?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm Catholic."

Mrs Fadda brushed a strand of hair from her face. "I told you, it makes all the difference."

"Yes, you were right, Mama." Maxia smiled. "Always are."

"Do you think I would let that German girl polish the paintings in the hall? The paintings of the Madonna? No! Nonna would turn in her grave."

"Oh, no," Maxia tutted. She sighed and peeled off her gloves. "Ava, perhaps we can start you off with a quick sweep of our room – second floor, I'll show you."

Briskly she clacked down the hall in those heels, all business and floral perfume wafting behind her, so that I scrambled to catch up with her. She walked with a swing in her hips and her hands were always moving to pick at imagined creases in her skirt or fluff her hair or move aside scattered toys and dolls that her children had taken from their luggage and which were already being thrown around the hall.

"What part of Ireland are you from?"

"Place called Kilneety. Small town near Cork, in the South," I answered. "Probably never heard of it."

"No," she said. "Never heard of it. But then I know most of your country is a backwater if you go outside of Dublin, right? The Morenos have an Irish girl working for them, too. Adrianna tells me she has the funniest little accent. Yours is much stronger than how Rabbi speaks, too. You say cat-lick. Not Catholic. Just the funniest thing."

I was simmering into that pink shade which seemed permanent on my skin now, so that it licked at my ears and I felt aware of my feet sloshing in my shoes and my dress sticking to my body and the rubbing grind of my stockings. She was right that Rabbi spoke differently. I told myself that I would learn to talk like him – though Rabbi barely talked at all around these Italians, cutting his sentences even more shortly than he did with me.

Turning into a bedroom on the second floor with lavish bed-sheets and a mountainous pile of pillows posed against the headrest, Maxia held out her arms and sighed. She crossed the room toward the luggage thrown onto the bed, torn apart by the ravenous hands of her children, the dresses and shoes and coats dragged out in a messy lump. She sorted them out herself and I was hesitant to touch her things without permission. I had worked with families a lot less richer than the Faddas and even they had turned mean and nasty about their necklaces, bracelets and rings, their finery touched by un-fine hands.

Maxia modelled a pearl necklace against her throat and watched herself in the mirror on the vanity. "Really, Antoon spoils me," she said. "Ever since he first courted me – if it sparkled, he bought it for me. Of course, I would tell him that I didn't need such things, but he was so insistent."

I imagined that mute in the kitchen, hulking so tall that he had to crouch through the arch; the idea of him being insistent on anything made that pink on my cheeks lighten and fade because it seemed so funny.

"Italian men understand what their ladies want, you know," she continued. "An intuition, almost. Are Irish men like that?"

"Depends on the Irishman," I said.

Maxia puckered her lips and pulled away the necklace. "I brought what could fit in my suitcases but Antoon said he would have someone watch the house. These days, you just never know – even your neighbours could notice you were gone a few days and who knows what they might do. I heard the most dreadful stories of houses robbed not a few streets away."

I doubted that anyone would ever take one look at the Fadda house and consider robbing from it. I nodded and shook my head and nodded again, movements which were based more on her tone than what she said, the highs and lows of her speech that prattled on and on while she darted around the room like a sparrow and plucked this dress or that from her suitcases.

"Ava?"

I tilted my head – not quite a nod and not quite a shake. "Yes, Mrs Fadda?"

She tittered. "Not quite a Fadda anymore."

"Oh, I forgot – I'm sorry –…"

"Mrs Dumini is fine. Ma'am, too, I suppose." She smiled with her lips peeled tightly against her teeth, where a smudge of red lipstick shone at the front. "Let's start with how I like my dresses organised. For me, I always think ordering them based on season is a smart idea – but then, perhaps colour would be a little less work for me in the morning – what do you think?"

It mattered very little what I thought because she went right on talking, anyway.

Suddenly it hit me that I was nodding and shaking and nodding my head once more, like I had done in my homeland and which I did now again in a foreign room, in a foreign country with a foreign woman. Sometimes I felt that America was nothing more than a ladder and I had unknowingly landed on its bottom rung when I fell off the ship that first day and all above me were the other immigrants who had come here ahead of me and who boosted themselves up much quicker than I could, shouting down that if I simply worked harder, I would be where they were, it was just that easy.

But then I looked at Rabbi and I wondered if that ladder was not shaking madly and tipping back and forth and losing some rungs while it did so, because it seemed we would not – could not – climb any further without pushing ourselves up by stepping on the heads of those below, so it was an endless struggle of reaching and pushing and shoving and hoping.

That was just how I felt, sometimes. Other times, I craned my neck and thought that it must look pretty swell, all that way up that ladder, right at the top. But so far, I figured if I was sitting on the same rung as Rabbi, then that wasn't so bad.

Maxia smiled again. "What do you think, Ava?"

I was nodding my head, shaking my head, nodding my head, over and over.

Outside, the goldfinches sang and sang. Inside, I was doing the same damned thing.

Later that afternoon, I climbed the winding staircase and went to the room that had become mine. I closed the door behind me and noticed a sliding latch that had not been there before. It was bulky and gold and clicked flatly if I pushed it down, but I kept it unlatched, the door itself already closed. I was tired, worn out from hanging dresses and dusting and sweeping already. Maxia had brought me around the house like I had imagined would happen did that first day that Don Fadda had hired me but never did.

Mrs Fadda had not been in the kitchen and not in the bedrooms, either. She had been sitting in the back-garden, in a white chair, looking out at the grass.

Maxia asked me to bring her mother blankets when she did that. Maxia had prepared a whole closet of soft, warm blankets for her mother and I wondered if this was something Mrs Fadda often did on her own. I nestled against my pillow, drifting off until two light taps on the door drew me out from my dreamlike world.

I thought that Maxia had come looking for me. No-one pushed from the other side – Maxia did not seem like the kind of woman who would wait for an answer – and so I slouched off the bed myself.

Rabbi stood on the other side. He had his hat pulled low, hands in his pockets. "Supposed to eat," he said hoarsely. "Family had theirs, now we have ours."

"Does your door have a latch like mine?"

He licked his lips and shook his head.

"Did Don Fadda want that? Worried or – …"

"I put it there," he said. "Can take it down if you don't like it."

"No," I said. "No, I like it."

Rabbi took the stairs two at a time and walked easily to the kitchen once at the bottom. I heard noise around the house that filled it and left it warmer than it had been that morning. There was the crackle of the television in the sitting-room and I paused at the doorway to look in, spotting Maxia and her children watching some fellow on the screen talking and waving his hands about so that the audience laughed and the children laughed along with them.

Rabbi made a short, quiet whistle that drew my eyes back to him. He said nothing, yet I understood what he meant all the same, trailing him into the kitchen where two plates remained on the countertop, lathered in a helping of pasta and heavy sauce. He brought them to the table where I had met Mrs Fadda that morning. He sat in the cool light that came through the old, thick curtains.

"I thought I would have to cook," I said. "When I first got the job, I mean. Don Fadda asked if I could."

Rabbi shook his head. "No. Maxia does it whenever she stays," he replied. "Takes pride in it, makin' the traditional recipes passed down from her grandparents."

I stirred my pasta and ate in small bites. He ate much faster and seemed not to like sitting in the kitchen; it had not escaped me that he had taken the chair that faced the arch and let him watch whoever passed in the hall. I thought about what Maxia had mentioned about my accent and my fork lowered.

"Rabbi? What religion are you?"

He eyed me warily. "I ain't nothin'," he said shortly. "Why?"

"Well, what were your family then?"

"What does it matter?"

"Just wonderin' if you say cat-lick," I mumbled, my lips betraying me with a smile. "Just somethin' Maxia told me – that I say cat-lick and not Catholic."

"Oh." His shoulders loosened. "Doesn't matter. Don't think on it."

"Don't think on it," I repeated. Again, his stare was sharp, like he thought I was mocking him, so I added, "Well, I gotta start talkin' a little more like you do."

"Most folk still say I sound Irish."

I smiled even more. "But you're American."

"That's right," he said, shifting in his chair. "I'm American."

"If I want to do anythin' with myself, that's what people tell me I gotta be, over here," I said. "But while they're tellin' me that, they keep tellin' me too 'bout their old country. Seems like somehow I need to be both, but never one more than the other."

He stirred his food without ever eating it. "Hard to let go, I suppose. Some folk can't ever let go."

Down the hall, the light from the television bloomed and canned laughter rang through the house. For once, his eyes never strayed from mine; he looked right at me, unflinchingly, so that it was me who lowered my eyes, once again thinking that he was bolder than I had first thought him to be.

Stepping into my bedroom, I turned to look at Rabbi who balanced on that small scrap of carpet that separated our doors. The hall was bleak and dark without a lightbulb at the top, blurring his features. He pushed open his own door and I almost closed mine but the sound of voice in the blackness forced me into stillness.

He said, "Keep that latch down and don't answer knockin' unless you know who's on the other side. I'll only ever tap twice."

I felt the staircase below us stretch down and down into one faint splotch of light. "Okay."

He lingered. Then, he murmured, "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Rabbi."

He closed his door and I closed mine. There was no sound from his room. I had the oddest sense that he was waiting for the click of that golden latch. I quickly slid it into place and waited a moment longer. His shoes creaked against his floorboards. He had been waiting to hear it after all.