Angels Unaware

and what it smelled like to them. Cooked cabbage, I guessed. About half an hour passed before Luca came out. He closed the door softly behind him, then stood before Jewel and me looking down at the floor uncomfortably.
“Sometimes, Luca, honey, you just got to leave it where Jesus flung it,” Jewel offered cryptically, doing little to make an awkward situation any easier.
I wanted to know what he planned to do with his father’s body, and how soon he would be vacating his room. What he did after that and where he went, I didn’t know or want to know.
Predictably, Jewel put a hand on his arm. “Come, sit downstairs for a moment,” she said, leading him gently down the hallway to the sitting room below. Once Luca had been settled in an armchair to her satisfaction, she asked, “Do you want us to take care of the funeral arrangements?”
Aware where this was leading, I gritted my teeth, shooting her what I hoped was a discouraging glare. Luca’s eyes hung on Jewel as if she were all that kept him afloat.
“We haven’t much money,” Jewel told him to my relief--“but whatever we have, you’re welcome to.”
That was the last straw. “But—but that money is for the girls’ college education!” I blurted out.
Luca gave me a look that would have withered me if I were capable of being withered. “My father brought money,” he said. “Not a lot of money, but enough to bury him. I would not take money from women.” he added with a stiff pride.
“Shame on you, Darcy,” Jewel said.
But Luca looked bewildered. “Shame? She has no reason for shame. It is right she thinks of her family first.”
“There’s the family of man too,” Jewel told him. It was just the kind of thing she would say, and mad at them both—Jewel for crossing me, Luca for defending me—I folded my arms and turned away.
Luca clearly understood Jewel’s pronouncement no better than I did because from the corner of my eye, I saw him watching her mouth like a deaf man, trying to figure out what she was saying from her moving lips. “And after the funeral,” she went on, unruffled because she was used to being misunderstood, “what then? Do you have family back in Italy?”
My ears perked up, like Old Sam’s when something stirred in the brush. This was more in keeping with my plans.
“I have an aunt and uncle there and a few cousins, but after I pay to bury my father, I won’t have enough money to return. I wish very much that I had enough money to bring my father to Italy and bury him there.”
“What’s wrong with here?” I interrupted, feeling somehow slighted. “Galen’s a great place to be buried. Sometimes, I think that’s all it’s a great place for.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Luca told Jewel, ignoring me. “Perhaps it would be wrong to go back to Italy. My father sacrificed everything for us to come here.”
Jewel patted his hand. “I don’t think your father would have wanted you to go back. I think he’d have wanted you to stay with us for a while.”
I choked on my breakfast, and Jewel pounded me on the back as I coughed and spluttered.
“No, I could not stay here,” Luca replied. “I would be a burden.”
Because I could not speak for coughing, I nodded vigorously to show I concurred.
“No, no,” Jewel insisted. “We could use a man’s help around here, especially a big, strong boy like you.”
“Perhaps I could find work,” Luca said hesitantly. “Just for a short while.”
Jewel laughed. “Honey, if you try and take work away from the men in Galen, especially you being foreign and all, you’re just likely to wind up seeing your father again sooner than you think. Besides, you’re just a boy. You should be in school. In the meantime, you could be a big help to us just doing things around the inn. I know Darcy needs you.”
My mouth fell open in protest, but Jewel was already pushing me toward the door.
Two days later, Jewel badgered me and the girls into putting on our good clothes and going to the funeral, where she and the boy stood together crying like professional mourners. His wailing I could understand. He was Eye-talian after all, and the man had been his father. But hers? She had known the old man less than five waking hours. How aggrieved could she be? It was galling the way she was forever bringing trouble into the house, while I was forever trying to keep it out. It wasn’t our tragedy after all. But as with everything else, Jewel never could tell the difference as to where she left off and other folks began.
So gradually, almost inevitably, did Luca D’Angeli work his way into our lives that before many months had passed, it seemed he had always been with us, as much a part of the Hopsitality Inn as the old weather vane on the roof that had belonged to the Justice’s grandmother. Or rather, it seemed that way to the others.
To me, there was nothing right about him being with us, and I resented his presence more and more every day. For one thing, he was so damned helpful, it made me want to scream. Wherever, I was working—in the yard, house, barn, or orchard—he was there, waiting to take the hoe or the axe or the scrub brush from my hand. He was trying to replace me in my own house, and the others were happy to let him.
Everybody liked him, liked him better than they did me. He talked with Jolene by the hour about two Eye-talians named Dante and Beatrice, and they completely ignored me when I tried to tell how Byron had died in Greece, far from the land of his birth.
Jewel doted on him as if he were her own son, but worst of all was Caroline, who surely had the makings of a tart. She