Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

that he must have crept back upstairs to his bedroom, and fallen asleep, when he smelled the lamb hash in addition to all the baking; he’d not been aware of his dad opening the difficult outer door to the cookhouse kitchen and getting the ground lamb from the cooler. The boy lay in his bed with his eyes still closed, savoring all the smells. He wanted to ask Ketchum if his mom had been faceup in the water when he’d first spotted her, or if he’d found her in the spillway facedown.
    Danny got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen; only then did he realize that his father had found the time to come upstairs and get dressed, probably after Ketchum had passed out on the cot. Dan watched his dad working at the stove; when the cook was concentrating on three or four tasks that were all in close proximity to one another, his limp was almost undetectable. At such moments, Danny could imagine his father at the age of twelve—before the ankle accident. At twelve, Danny Baciagalupo was a lonely kid; he had no friends. He often wished that he could have known his dad when they were both twelve-year-olds.
    WHEN YOU’RE TWELVE , four years seems like a long time. Annunziata Saetta knew that it wouldn’t take her little Dom’s ankle four years to heal; Nunzi’s beloved Kiss of the Wolf was off the crutches in four months , and he was reading as well as any fifteen-year-old by the time he was only thirteen. The homeschooling worked. In the first place, Annunziata was an elementary-school teacher; she knew how much of the school day was wasted on discipline, recess, and snacks. The boy did his homework, and double-checked it, during what amounted to Nunzi’s school day; Dominic had time for lots of extra reading, and he kept a journal of the recipes he was learning, too.
    The boy’s cooking skills were more slowly acquired, and—after the accident—Annunziata made her own child-labor laws. She would not permit young Dominic to go off to work at a breakfast place in Berlin until the boy really knew his way around a kitchen, and he had to wait until he’d turned sixteen; in those four years, Dom became an extremely well-read sixteen-year-old, and an accomplished cook, who was less experienced at shaving than he was at walking with a limp.
    It was 1940 when Dominic Baciagalupo met Danny’s mom. She was a twenty-three-year-old teaching in the same elementary school as Annunziata Saetta; in fact, the cook’s mother introduced her sixteen-year-old son to the new teacher.
    Nunzi had no choice in the matter. Her cousin Maria, another Saetta, had married a Calogero—a common Sicilian surname. “After some Greek saint who died there—the name has something to do with children in general, I think, or maybe orphans in particular,” Nunzi had explained to Dominic. She pronounced the name cah-LOH-ger-roh. It was used as a first name, too, his mother explained—“frequently for bastards.”
    At sixteen, Dominic was sensitive to the subject of illegitimacy—not that Annunziata wasn’t. Her cousin had sent her pregnant daughter away to the wilds of New Hampshire, bemoaning the fact that the daughter was the first woman in the Calogero family to have graduated from college. “It was only a teachers’ college, and a lot of good it did her—she still got knocked up!” the poor girl’s mother told Nunzi, who repeated this insensitivity to Dom. The boy understood without further detail that the pregnant twenty-three-year-old was being sent to them because Annunziata and her bastard were considered in the same boat. Her name was Rosina, but—given Nunzi’s fondness for abbreviations—the banished girl was already a Rosie before she made the trip from Boston to Berlin.
    As was often the way “back then”—not only in the North End, and by no means limited to Italian or Catholic families—the Saettas and the Calogeros were sending one family scandal to live with another. Thus Annunziata was given a reason to resent her Boston