Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving Page A

relatives twice . “Let this be a lesson to you, Dom,” the teenager’s mother told him. “We are not going to judge poor Rosie for her unfortunate condition—we are going to love her, like nothing was the matter.”
    While Annunziata should be commended for her spirit of forgiveness—especially in 1940, when unwed mothers could generally be counted among America’s most unforgiven souls—it was both reckless and unnecessary to tell her sixteen-year-old son that he was going to love his second cousin “like nothing was the matter.”
    “Why is she my second cousin?” the boy asked his mom.
    “Maybe that’s not what she is—maybe she’s called your cousin once-removed , or something,” Nunzi said. When Dominic looked confused, his mother said: “Whatever she’s called, she’s not really your cousin—not a first cousin, anyway.”
    This information (or misinformation) posed an unknown danger to a crippled sixteen-year-old boy. His accident, his rehabilitation, his homeschooling, not to mention his reinvention as a cook—all these—had deprived him of friends his own age. And “little” Dom had a fulltime job; he already saw himself as a young man. Now Nunzi had told him that the twenty-three-year-old Rosie Calogero was “not really” his cousin.
    As for Rosie, when she arrived, she was not yet “showing;” that she soon would be posed another problem.
    Rosie had a B.S. in education from the teachers’ college; at that time, frankly, she was overqualified to teach at a Berlin elementary school. But when the young woman started to look pregnant, she would need to temporarily quit her job. “Or else we’ll have to come up with a husband for you, either real or imaginary,” Annunziata told her. Rosie was certainly pretty enough to find a husband, a real one—Dominic thought she was absolutely beautiful—but the poor girl wasn’t about to sally forth on the requisite social adventures necessary for meeting available young men, not when she was expecting!
    FOR FOUR YEARS , the boy had cooked with his mother. In some ways, because he wrote every recipe down—not to mention each variation of the recipes he would make, occasionally, without her—he was surpassing her, even as he learned. As it happened, on that life-changing night, Dominic was making dinner for the two women and himself. He was on his way to becoming famous at the breakfast place in Berlin, and he got home from work well before Rosie and his mom came home from school; except on weekends, when Nunzi liked to cook, Dominic was becoming the principal cook in their small household. Stirring his marinara sauce, he said: “Well, I could marry Rosie, or I could pretend to be her husband—until she finds someone more suitable. I mean, who needs to know?”
    To Annunziata, it seemed like such a sweet and innocent offer; she laughed and gave her son a hug. But young Dom couldn’t imagine anyone “more suitable” for Rosie than himself—he had been faking the pretend part. He would have married Rosie for real; the difference in their ages, or that they were vaguely related, was no stumbling block for him.
    As for Rosie, it didn’t matter that the sixteen-year-old’s proposal, which was both sweet and not -so-innocent, was unrealistic—and probably illegal, even in northern New Hampshire. What affected the poor girl, who was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy, was that the lout who’d knocked her up had not offered to marry her—not even under what had amounted to considerable duress.
    Given the predilections of the male members of both the Saetta and Calogero families, this “duress” took the form of multiple threats of castration ending with death by drowning. Whether it was Naples or Palermo the lout sailed back to was not made clear, but no marriage proposal was ever forthcoming. Dominic’s spontaneous and heartfelt offer was the first time anyone had proposed to Rosie; overcome, she burst into tears at the kitchen