The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo Page A

to her and studied her fingernails.
    “Mom!” Erin raised her voice, and several families turned to look at them. Bets, who sat across the table, shook her head quickly and tried to fill the silence with stories about Frank. Erin looked around the cement slab where the prisoners sat with their families. She saw that most of the women there were young, and her eyes settled on a middle-aged black woman disciplining her son for climbing on the table. Her prison blues were wrinkled and her hair had been flattened, but not styled. She was the sort of woman who would wear a wig if she weren’t in prison. Probably had a different one for every day of the week and three different ones for Sundays. Erin expected the woman to grab the boy and yell, but was surprised to see the woman wordlessly put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and then gently lean in and whisper to him. Erin had been yelled at as a child. Callie, especially, shouted and swatted. Her grandmothers were of a different generation.
    Bets looked at her watch and began to set out the food purchased earlier from the prison store. It was the stuff of convenience—chips, soda, and soggy sandwiches. Erin realized that they were going to move past her question, to ignore her need to understand. Later, when she was older and had read the newspaper accounts, the trial transcript, and talked with her therapist, she realized that even if her mother understood why she’d killed Carl, it was not something she could put into words. But that day, Erin felt like it was deliberate action, a conspiracy to keep her from entering their grown-up world.
    The sandwich Erin ate was tuna fish and the bread was so soggy it fell to pieces. The prison photographer made her way to their table, and the women slid around to one side and put their arms around each other as she gave them a thumbs-up and told them to say “parole.” In the following years, Erin would put together a collection of these photographs tucked into the frame of her mirror at home. None of her smiles went past her cheeks. Bets circled back to Erin’s singing.
    “Have you heard her sing?” she asked Deb.
    Erin’s mother shook her head. “When she was little, but it was nothing but the alphabet and that song about the wheels on the bus.”
    “She placed third as a mezzo-soprano this year at the state competition.”
    “I keep up on things,” said Deb, nodding.
    Erin had sent her mother the ribbon she won. She didn’t know if it was the sort of item they let prisoners keep, but when she sang Com’è bello she thought of her mother and father. She made sense of their story by thinking of it as an opera. In Lucrezia Borgia’s renaissance world, rife with treason, murder, and illegitimate children, the story of a woman killing her husband felt like a minor subplot. She wondered if her mother knew much about opera.
    “Do you know the aria?” she asked Deb.
    She shook her head. The movement of the tight braids gave the gesture more force.
    Bets rushed to speak over Deb, who was fumbling around an excuse. “We never listened to opera until you started singing it. Heck, even Mom never liked the classical stuff, she sang folk songs and then it was all jazz growing up.”
    “Sing it for me?” Deb spoke quietly.
    Erin knew she could pretend not to hear her mother, but she didn’t want to let this opportunity slip by. She needed to show her mother how different they were. How different she was from all the Keller women. She stood.
    She thought of what her coach had told her about Lucrezia. She considered the emotions of a woman singing to a child she had not seen and then she opened her mouth and with a raw intensity and earthy richness, she sang, Com’è bello quale incanto .
    She finished, and there was sporadic clapping and some laughter, as if this audience wasn’t sure what to make of the thin child with hair the color of asphalt singing in a voice that belonged to an older woman, a larger woman.
    Deb wiped away