“Deadhead,” Michael said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the stewardess with the perfect English.

“Nell ’inglese la parole è deadhead.”

“Deadhead,” she said. “Why, thank you.” She seemed offended that he’d resorted to Italian. She and the other stewardesses cleaned the cabin and left.

“This is so like you,” Kay said to Michael. “You never wanted to go to Sicily, and now you’re getting your way.”

“Kay,” he said, “you can’t be serious.”

“Think of your mother,” she said, thinking of the trunk full of gifts sitting somewhere in the airplane. Preparing it had been her reason to live for months, the reason-everyone agreed, even the doctors-that she’d recovered so well from her brush with death.

“I’ll have it unloaded,” he said. “I know people who can get it all to the right people.”

“Of course you do.”

“Kay.”

“I feel awful, flying all the way here and leaving the kids. For what? For nothing.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He’d wanted to go someplace and take the kids. That kind of vacation would have been a vacation for him. The hardest thing he’d have had to do was sit still to be buried in the sand. Kay’d have spent her time tending to Anthony and Mary, which she loved doing but was not a vacation. For two years she’d selflessly done what Michael needed her to do. She’d had to raise the kids almost as if she were a widow (including holding them though hours of inconsolable crying the year he’d been so caught up in whatever he was trying to do in Cuba that he never even came home for Christmas). She still hadn’t gone back to teaching and was starting to fear she never would. On her own, she’d coordinated the move to Las Vegas. Then she’d taken on the even bigger job of designing and overseeing the construction of the whole complex in Lake Tahoe: their house, a bandstand for entertaining, and preliminary architecturally harmonious plans for houses for the Hagens, for Connie and Ed Federici, for Fredo and Deanna Dunn, for Al Neri, even a little bungalow for guests. Kay had been surprised by how much she’d enjoyed building a house, actually: the countless details and decisions, the chance to undertake the ultimate shopping spree, all for the greater good of her whole family. Still, it was work. She’d asked almost nothing from Michael except to go where she’d wanted to go on vacation, just the two of them.

“What are we going to do now,” Kay said, “turn around and go home?”

“We don’t have to go home. This kind of thing, if you’ll recall, was a part of why I didn’t want to go with you to Sicily.”

“For God’s sake, Michael. This is a murder threat we’re running away from.”

“We’re not running.”

“Right. We’re flying.”

“That’s not what I mean. And it’s not so much a threat as a precaution. Look, Kay, if there’s one thing I’ve been completely… what’s the word I’m looking for? Steadfast. Right. If there’s one thing I’ve been steadfast about, it’s been protecting my family.”

Kay looked away and didn’t say anything. He was steadfast about everything, actually. His good traits and his bad. It was the best and the worst thing about him.

“Those men,” he said, “the carabinieri? One of them is Calogero Tommasino, the son of an old friend of my father’s. I’ve had dealings with his father and with him, too. I trust him. We’re certainly in no danger now and probably wouldn’t have been at all. Again, just a precaution. Please understand. And you at any rate would never have been in any danger, obviously. It’s the code not to-” He stopped himself.

“Harm the wives or children,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Which no doubt goes double in Sicily, which I can’t of course hope to understand, can I, because I’m not Sicilian?”

Michael didn’t answer her. He looked like hell. Maybe it was just the flight. She couldn’t admit it now, but if she’d really understood the ordeal involved in flying from Las Vegas to Palermo, she’d have probably gone along with going to Hawaii or Acapulco.

The pilots got back on board. Neri went up to the cabin to talk to them. Moments later he took a seat, far away from Kay and Michael. The cars and people were gone from the tarmac. The plane took off.

“You actually wouldn’t understand,” Michael finally said. “How could you?”

“Oh, Christ,” Kay said. She got up and sat far away from Michael. Twice in a matter of moments he’d provoked her to use the Lord’s name in vain.

He let her go.

But she knew it would work, eventually, her silence. Just because he so expertly wielded silence as a weapon didn’t mean that he was invulnerable to it himself, especially from her. She sat on the right side of the plane and patiently watched the Italian coast ease by.

After about an hour he came to her. “Is this seat taken?” he said.

“So’d you finish your book?”

“I did,” he said. “I thought it was good, actually. A nice escape.”

“If you say so.” The book he’d taken to read was Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, which Kay had given him for Christmas. He kept nodding off. Not long after she’d finished her book, he’d picked it up, and she’d taken his. Kay thought The Last Hurrah was the best thing she’d ever read about city politics. She was appalled he hadn’t loved it. “And, yes, the seat’s taken.”

“Kay,” he said. “The reason you wouldn’t understand is because I didn’t-” He closed his eyes. Maybe this, too, his struggling for words, had to do with the long flight, but there was something about him now that seemed more shaken up than exhausted. “Because,” he said, “it’s true that… that I haven’t been entirely, you know…” He let out what started as a frustrated sigh and finished as a soft, agonized moan.

“Michael,” she said.

“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I have to tell you some things.”

Most of the time, she looked at him and hardly recognized the man she’d fallen in love with. He’d had his face smashed, then fixed. His hair was shot through with gray, and-though she told herself it was her imagination-he’d become a dead ringer for his father. But there was the same look in his eyes now as he’d had years ago, on a New Hampshire golf course on a warm starry night, when he told her what he’d done during the war, things he’d never told anyone, and he’d sobbed in her arms. Angry as she’d been, suddenly she just melted.

“I’d like that,” she said, her voice quavering. “Thank you.” She patted the seat beside her.

He sat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, taking his hand. “No apologies. Just talk to me.”

They stayed in Rome only long enough to sleep off the jet lag and have a magnificent meal at a restaurant Kay had been to years before with her parents. The next day, with Michael still asleep upstairs, she spoke to the hotel concierge herself and arranged a reservation at a resort in the Swiss Alps. He helped her rent a plane, too, for Michael to fly them there, which she knew he’d love. She’d never been to the Alps, but when they’d flown over them on the way here, she’d promised herself she’d go someday. Turned out, someday would be tomorrow.

When she finished, she turned and saw Al Neri, sitting in a leather chair across the lobby, smoking and chomping a sweet roll. She shook her head and he nodded. She told the concierge she’d been mistaken. She needed two rooms. Preferably not adjoining. He sighed and made an exasperated gesture but dialed the phone and was able to change the reservation.

Kay got an espresso from the hotel bar. The hotel had a glassed-in courtyard, and on her way to get a table, a man about her age whistled at her. A younger man next to him raised an eyebrow and called her beautiful. She tried not to react, but she was a happy woman and in truth they’d made her happier. She was only thirty-two years old. Yes, they were Italian, but it was still nice to think of herself as a woman able to summon blurted compliments from strange men.