Like Family by Paolo Giordano

he’s still acting a little or if a tiny piece of his heart has indeed just been ripped off.
    The exaggerated praise of his various grandparents is not enough to raise his spirits. On the streaked linoleum of the gym, Emanuele had performed especially for Mrs. A. and for the two of us, but his happiness is not equivalent to two-thirds of that hoped-for total, because her absence counts more than our presence.
    We quickly extricate ourselves from the good-byes and walk home, just the three of us: two parents and a small, sad scarecrow who doesn’t let go of our hands until we reach the door; as if to say he gets it, he understands that people leave, people just go away, forever, but not us, he won’t allow us to, not so long as he keeps us together like that.

The Black and the Silver

    E very child is also an extraordinary seismograph. Emanuele understood it before we did; he felt the shock wave that was approaching, and that’s why he clung to our hands the evening of the performance. After Mrs. A.’s desertion, there had been a subterranean quake, a silent slippage of water tables and groundwater levels, and over the summer we would discover that the hypocenter of the disturbance was located in Nora’s womb.
    One morning, already dressed to go out, she announced that she was two weeks late. It didn’t seemlike news you would tell someone in a hurry like that, standing up, car keys in hand.
    â€œHave you done the test?” I asked her, mainly to stall for time and transform my reaction into something preferable to confusion.
    â€œNo. I’d rather we first decide what to do about it.”
    â€œWhat to do about it?”
    Nora sat down at the table where I had stopped sipping my coffee. She did not lean toward me, nor did she show any emotion when she recited the words she spoke right after that; she reeled them off like a paragraph committed to memory. “It’s best if we talk about it now. I don’t feel ready. I don’t have the energy. I can barely manage the work I have to do and look after Emanuele. There is no one to help us, and you’re always at the university. Plus, I don’t think we’ll have enough money, and to tell the truth . . .” Only then did she hesitate, almost as if the last words had slipped out of her mouth unintentionally.
    â€œTo tell the truth?”
    â€œThings aren’t going so well between us either.”
    I pushed away the place mat with the remains of breakfast. I had not had time to question how I feltabout the news, but that wasn’t the point: the point was how casually I was excluded from any real possibility of having a say in the decision, the abruptness with which Nora affirmed that our lives were, after all, separate. I tried to appear calm. “Nora, one chooses whether or not to have a first child, not the second. We’re young, we’re in good health, what would justify such an action?”
    She thought about it for a moment. “That we’re afraid. Too afraid. I am.”
    â€œIt seems to me you’ve already made your decision. I don’t know why you’re even bothering to tell me about it,” I said, and now my words sounded sarcastic, full of indignation.
    She nodded without looking at me, then stood up and walked out. She kept her face hidden from me. I’m almost certain that her endurance had been exhausted and that by then she was crying.
    _____
    Oh, if Mrs. A. could have seen us in the weeks that followed! How disappointed she would have been. When Emanuele was nearly three years old, she hadlaunched a personal campaign for us to give him a baby sister (she never even considered the possibility of a boy): a series of inconsequential pedagogical opinions suggested to her that there was a precise window of time within which to plan for another child.
    â€œYou have the room,” she said, as if that were the main obstacle.
    We’d tease her.