The kitchen is the room that has always made the Santos house feel like a home rather than a place where famous people live.
The table is old, the chairs do not all match. There is a mark on the counter from the time Lucas tried to help with cooking when he was fifteen and the less said about that the better. The mugs have been replaced three times over the years but the hooks they hang on have not moved since the day Rico put them up.
Marco sits at the kitchen table.
He looks at the room the way people look at rooms they have imagined for a long time and are now sitting inside, not disappointed, not overwhelmed, just present, taking it in.
Rico fills the kettle.
His back is to the room, his hands are steady in the way hands are steady when the person they belong to is concentrating on keeping them that way.
Emma sits at the far end of the table. She has not spoken since coming inside, she has her hands around a mug that is no longer warm and she is watching Marco the way she has watched things her whole life quietly, completely, filing everything away.
The house is otherwise silent.Klaus and Lucas have not come back inside.
Rico sets a mug in front of Marco and sits down across from him.
For a moment neither of them speaks. The kettle finishes, the clock on the wall measures the silence in small precise increments.
Then Rico folds his hands on the table.
RICO: "Tell me about your life."
It is not a dramatic question. It is the question of a man who understands that the only way through something this large is to begin with something small and true.
MARCO: "What do you want to know?"
RICO: "All of it. From the beginning."
Marco looks down at the mug in his hands.
MARCO: "We lived in Milan, not the part of Milan people think of when they think of Milan, a flat in the north of the city, small. My mother worked in a laundry, later she cleaned offices at night when I was old enough to be left alone. She was, she worked very hard."
He says it simply. Without bitterness and without performance.
RICO: "Did you have enough?"
Marco considers the question honestly.
MARCO: "Enough to eat. Not always enough for everything else. When my shoes wore out there was usually a wait before new ones. When the heating broke in winter it was sometimes broken for a while before it was fixed, but she never let me feel poor. She worked too hard for that, she made it feel like, like we were just living. Just getting on with it."
Rico is very still.
RICO: "Did she ever talk about your father?"
MARCO: "Never. When I was young I asked sometimes. She said he was someone she had known a long time ago and that he was a good man but that things hadn't worked out. She never said anything bad, I stopped asking after a while."
RICO: "Why?"
MARCO: "Because she looked sad when I asked, and I didn't want to make her sad."
Emma looks down at the table.
Rico is quiet for a moment. The clock on the wall.
RICO: "School?"
MARCO: "I finished school. I was not a great student. I was, I was better outside than inside. I worked after school, a garage for a while, then deliveries and then I worked in a warehouse loading trucks at night."
RICO: "And recently? How did you get here?"
MARCO: "I saved. It took a long time. The jobs I had they paid enough to live on. When my mother got sick I stopped working for a while to be with her. After she died I went back to work. Every month I put something aside for the ticket."
Rico looks at him.
RICO: "How long did that take?"
MARCO: "Four months."
Rico closes his eyes.
Four months of warehouse shifts and delivery runs and putting money aside euro by euro to buy a plane ticket to find a man he had never met.That is the moment Rico breaks.
Not dramatically. Not loudly. He does not cry, but something in his face gives way a collapse of something structural, the way a wall does not fall all at once but develops a crack that changes everything about its integrity.
He puts one hand over his eyes.
Marco watches him. He does not look away, he has been carrying this for four months and he is steadier than anyone in the room expects.
EMMA: (very quietly) "Dad."
Rico shakes his head. He is not asking for help, he is just taking a moment. Allowing himself one moment.
Then he puts his hand down.
He looks at Marco.
RICO: "I didn't know. I want you to understand that, I did not know about you. If I had known —"
MARCO: "I know."
RICO: "I would have —"
MARCO: "I know."
His voice is not angry when he says it. It is the voice of someone who has already had the conversation in his head many times and arrived at something approaching peace with it.
MARCO: "She knew too. That's why she didn't send the letter. She said you would have come. She said that was exactly why she couldn't tell you."
Rico looks at him.
The kitchen is quiet.
The back door opens.
Klaus comes in.
He does not sit down. He stands near the door with his arms folded, the posture of someone who has decided to be present without committing to what that presence means. He looks at Marco, then at Rico and finally at the table between them.
Nobody says anything about the fact that he left. Nobody says anything about the fact that he came back, he is here. That is enough for now.
Rico looks at his son. Klaus gives him nothing. But he stays.
A few minutes pass. Marco has his hands around the mug. The conversation has settled into a quieter register Rico asking small questions, Marco answering them. What part of Milan, what the flat was like, whether he had friends growing up, whether he played sport as a child.
At that last question Klaus's eyes move to Marco.
RICO: "Did you play?"
MARCO: "Yes."
RICO: "What?"
MARCO: "Football. Always football. In the street mostly. There was a cage near our building concrete, metal fencing, a goal painted on the wall at each end. We played there every day after school. Sometimes until it was too dark to see."
Rico is very still in the way Rico is always still when football is being discussed.
RICO: "Did you play seriously?"
MARCO: "I tried. There was a local team. I trained with them for two years when I was sixteen, seventeen. But —"
He pauses.
MARCO: "My mother needed me to work and the team couldn't pay anything, so I stopped."
The kitchen is quiet for a moment.
Then Klaus speaks.
KLAUS: "So what is your plan. Now that you're here, in England."
Everyone looks at him. He is looking at Marco.
KLAUS: "What is it you actually want? Rico's money? A roof over your head? You want him to set you up somewhere?"
The questions are not cruel in their delivery. They are the questions of someone who needs to understand what he is dealing with before he can decide how to feel about it.
Marco looks at him.
He is not rattled, he has been waiting for this question since he stepped through the gate.
MARCO: "I don't want his money."
KLAUS: "Then what."
Marco puts the mug down on the table.
He looks at Rico, then at Klaus, then at Emma, taking his time and making sure he says it right.
MARCO: "I don't have many skills. I never had the chance to build them, but there is one thing I have. One thing that was —"
He pauses. Looks at his hands.
MARCO: "One thing that was passed down to me. By my father."
He does not look at Rico when he says it. He keeps his eyes on the table but the word is in the room now and it does not leave.
Klaus unfolds his arms.
Rico is completely still.
MARCO: "I want to play football."
The kitchen does not make a sound.
Marco looks up.
MARCO: "I know I am twenty-eight. I know what people will say about that. I know what the window looks like from where I am standing but I have been playing my whole life and I am good, not famous, not trained but good in a way that —"
He stops.
MARCO: "I just want the chance. That is all I came here for, one chance to show someone what I can do. That is everything."
The kitchen holds it.
Klaus is looking at Marco with an expression that has no clean name.
Rico looks at his hands on the table. He looks at Marco, he looks at the letter, which is still there between them, the pages slightly creased from being read and reread and held.
He does not answer.
Nobody answers.
The question stays in the room like something living.
END OF CHAPTER 24