Chapter Text
The first time she tries to cook for him, she is eight; he is five. Her mother’s cookbook has been discarded for several years now, the mezzaluna she had always wielded with the finesse of a Michelin-starred chef rusting for lack of olive oil and manpower. There is flour, still, dusting some of the recipes, and she can see the spots that flecks of sauces have left in their wake. Bianchi can remember the taste of beef stew, meaty and whole, the homemade pasta so rich it only needed olive oil as a topping. Now her mother avoids the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, and any other room besides the guest bedroom upstairs that she has claimed for her own. None of the men speak about her. This is one of the facts of life.
Her brother is an entity she is uncertain about. He is the cause of her mother’s disappearance; this has been evident since her parents fought with unstoppable force when her father arrived with a baby in tow. When her father hired a piano teacher four years ago so that Bianchi could receive lessons, she was aware she was the excuse for Hayato to receive lessons as well, from a woman with white-blonde hair as pale as her brother’s. Family legend says that her mother now cannot stand the instrument. Bianchi does not much care what her mother thinks anymore.
But her brother – this is a different story. He followed her around for a while (“sorellona!”), until she snapped at him that she was not his sister, and he was just a ghost of a brat. When he broke down into tears, her father had yelled at her loud enough that one of his men ran in with gun raised in preparation to shoot.
Even so. Every once in a while, Bianchi will perch on a sitting chair opposite the piano and listen while she does multiplication tables to appease one of her father’s ever-rotating tutors. Even she can tell Hayato is gifted, from the way he sits, the way his eyes shut when he plays, the way he can hum six different scales before he is three and the white-blonde woman leaves them forever. She can call out a multiplication problem and he can answer it, still playing.
And they are alike, she thinks, when he stops playing and stares at the keys as though waiting for something more to happen. For surely there is more than this, the silent bodyguard waiting outside the door, the silence in the guest bedroom upstairs, the silence of the piano teacher’s absence. And when he begins again, from the beginning, she knows it is more to fill this silence than for the joy of playing. This is another fact of life.
His recital approaches, and Bianchi’s scrutiny of the cookbook intensifies. Her father catches her once, leaning against the kitchen counter, and exclaims over what a cute little housewife she will make. The hair, self-dyed several months ago, has been commented on, but not asked about. She doubts the questions will ever come up.
Her father is incorrect, as Bianchi is finding occurs with many things, and the cookies she makes, while they are perfection itself in principle, are so bitter that her first taste results in food spat onto the floor. She almost laughs, at how perfect this is, and though she doesn’t know the word irony yet, she learns the definition at this moment.
When she wraps them up in cellophane to present to him, she wonders if he’s old enough yet to understand it as well.