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relieved of all responsibility for her husband’s physical body, she was delighted by the cigar-smoking spirit and even by the stogie smoldering unchanged beyond death.
    Zio, however, had changed a great deal. In life he’d been a down-to-earth man who wasted no more words than it took to tell her how many pounds of sausage were needed for the next day’s customers. But his ghost was given to the vague, the philosophical, the cryptic; often, Carmela had no idea what he meant. She forgave him for this, for it seemed only reasonable that the company of angels might make a man flighty.
    But she couldn’t forgive him that night when he came to her room and refused to answer the question she’d been asking San Gennaro all day.
    “Why Catherine Falconetti?” she asked. “Zio, why her?”
    “Man deals,” was all Zio’s ghost would say. “And God stacks the deck.”
    The task of illuminating Mrs. Santangelo fell to her daughter-in-law Evelyn, who so relished this mission that the very next morning she drove all the way in from Long Island to perform it.
    Evelyn waited till Joseph stepped out of the shop, then flounced in, opened her big orange mouth and said, “So, Mama. How do you like our Joey winning his bride-to-be in a pinochle game?”
    Mrs. Santangelo suffered occasional palpitations and shortness of breath; now she felt as if her heart were being lanced with a hot needle. But the pain was bearable compared to her distrust of Evelyn’s big mouth. So Mrs. Santangelo put one hand on her chest to contain it, shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Better pinochle than bingo.” This was a dig at Evelyn, who had met Augie at a prewar bingo game in the basement of Our Lady of Victory.
    “Mama.” Evelyn gave the air a playful slap. “That’s ancient history.”
    “What do you know about ancient history?” snarled Mrs. Santangelo, under her breath.
    For Evelyn cared only for the newest, the latest, the most American. Under her spell, Augie had been lured away from Mulberry Street. He’d deeded the family business to Joseph, then moved to Long Island, where he’d started a truck rental firm and fathered twins names Stacey and Scott. (“And who will protect them?” Mrs. Santangelo had demanded at the christening. “Saint Stacey and Saint Scott?”) Invited to her daughter-in-law’s home, Mrs. Santangelo was served a barbaric concoction of fried pork and celery in a briny sauce which Evelyn said was Chinese. (The children, Mrs. Santangelo thought, the poor children.) But the truth was that she had no great love for her freckled, suntanned grandchildren, who didn’t even look Italian. On that same visit, when she’d hugged them and asked when they were coming to her house, little Scott had wrinkled his nose and said, “Never. Your apartment smells funny.”
    Now, as if to atone for such ungrandmotherly thoughts, Mrs. Santangelo stuffed a bag full of sausage and passed it over the counter.
    “Here. For Augie and the kids. Fry it up with a couple onions and peppers.”
    “Mama!” Evelyn made a show of being affronted, though Mrs. Santangelo had found her to be virtually uninsultable. “I know how to cook sausage.”
    Mrs. Santangelo let it pass. She paused and then, struck by an afterthought, said, “Oh, and by the way. About that pinochle game. I wouldn’t tell anyone, would you?”
    “ I certainly wouldn’t!” exclaimed Evelyn, her smile betraying the fact that there was no one left to tell.
    Mrs. Santangelo had no choice but to draw herself up to her full five-three and practice the line she knew she’d be called upon to deliver many times in the coming days: “If my Joseph won a horse and wanted to marry it, I’d feed it hay off my wedding china and love it like a daughter.”
    “Your daughter,” muttered Evelyn. It was hard to imagine. For the general consensus was that Mrs. Santangelo was the kind of woman who never had daughters, only sons; the kind who would have been happier in another century,