Last Night in Twisted River Read Online Free PDF Page A

Uncle Umberto informed him. “Ask Nunzi where your name came from—she gave it to you.”
    The twelve-year-old didn’t like it when Umberto, who clearly disliked Dominic’s mother, called her “Nunzi”—an affectionate family nickname, shortened from Annunziata—which Umberto didn’t say affectionately at all. (In a play, or in a film, the audience would have had no trouble recognizing Umberto as a minor character; yet the best actor to play Umberto would be one who always believed he was cast in a major role.)
    “And you’re not really my uncle, I suppose?” Dominic inquired of Umberto.
    “Ask your mama,” Umberto said. “If she wanted to keep you siciliano , she shoulda given you her name.”
    His mother’s maiden name was Saetta—she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.
    Annunziata was reluctant to speak of Dominic’s heritage at all. What little the boy had gleaned—bits of information, or misinformation—had been gathered slowly and insufficiently, like the partial evidence, the incomplete clues, in the increasingly popular board game of young Dan’s childhood, one the cook and Ketchum played with the boy, and sometimes Jane joined them. (Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick, or had the murder been committed by Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the revolver?)
    All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant Annunziata Saetta in Boston; he was rumored to have taken a boat back to Naples. To the question “Where is he now?” (which the boy had asked his mother, many times), Annunziata would shrug and sigh, and looking either to Heaven or in the direction of the exhaust vent above her kitchen stove, she would say mysteriously to her son: “Vicino di Napoli.” “In the vicinity of Naples,” young Dominic had guessed. With the help of an atlas, and because the boy had heard his mother murmur the names of two hill towns (and provinces) in the vicinity of Naples in her sleep—Benevento and Avellino—Dominic had concluded that his dad had fled to that region of Italy.
    As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle—and definitely a “legendary asshole,” as Ketchum would have said.
    “What kind of name is Umberto?” Dominic had asked the foreman.
    “From da king!” Umberto had answered indignantly.
    “I mean it’s a Neapolitan name, right?” the boy had asked.
    “What are you questioning me for? You da twelve-year-old, pretending to be sixteen!” Umberto cried.
    “You told me to say I was sixteen,” Dominic reminded the foreman.
    “Look, you gotta job, Baciagalupo,” Umberto had said.
    Then the logs rolled, and Dominic became a cook. His mother, a Sicilian-born Italian-American transported by an unwanted pregnancy from Boston’s North End to Berlin, New Hampshire, could cook. She’d left the city and had moved to the north country when Gennaro Capodilupo had slipped away to the docks off Atlantic Avenue and Commercial Street, leaving her with child as he sailed (figuratively, if not literally) “back to Naples.”
    Asshole (if not Uncle) Umberto was right: Dominic’s dad was no Baciagalupo. The absconding father was a Capodilupo—cah-poh-dee-LEW-poh, as Annunziata told her son, meant “Head of the Wolf.” What was the unwed mother to do? “For the lies he told, your father should have been a Boccada lu po!” she said to Dominic. This meant “Mouth of the Wolf,” the boy would learn—a fitting name for Asshole Umberto, young Dominic often thought. “But you , Angelù—you are my kiss of the wolf!” his mom said.
    In an effort to legitimize him, and because his mother had a highhanded love of words, she would not name Dominic a head of (or a mouth of) the wolf; for Annunziata Saetta, only a kiss of the wolf would do. It should have been spelled “Baciacalupo,” but Nunzi always