Dying on the Vine

the ossobuco was close kin to her dreaded schmorbraten— rump roast simmered on the range top—and simmered, and then simmered some more, until the gray meat literally slid off the bone and fell apart into shreds. It was from Tante Frieda’s pot roast that he’d learned firsthand that muscle was constituted of long, separable, stringy fibers.

Even the dessert was straight out of Tante’s kitchen: bread pudding. But here he had to admit that Nonna Natalia’s budino di pane, had Tante Frieda’s ofenschlupfer beat by a mile. Frieda made up for overcooking everything she cooked on the range by under-baking everything she did in the oven. Her “famous” bread pudding was a crustless, sodden, overly sweet lump of dough, edible because it had cinnamon and raisins in it, but nothing to look forward to. Nonna Natalia’s budino was another thing altogether, brown and crunchy on top, delicate as a fine souffle inside, only slightly sweetened, and filled with perfectly cooked apples, figs, and pears; as warming to the soul as it was to the body as it glided down his throat. Eating it was enough to make him forgive Nonna Natalia for her ossobuco, and he happily spooned up a second helping from the family-style bowl it had come in, as did most of the others.

Only as they finished their desserts, pushed back from the table a little, and turned to their espressos, biscotti, and glasses of Vin Santo, did the talk return from food and wine to the events of the day.

Luca loosened his belt a notch or two, shoved his chair back from the table, and patted his belly. “Well. I suppose, except for Linda, none of you guys have heard the latest development from the Cesare branch of the family.”

“We know about the wrongful death suit, if that’s what you mean,” Marti said.

“No, that was hours ago, ancient history. This is a weird new twist.”

“This sounds bad,” Gideon said.

“It’s not good. You remember when Severo went out to call his attorney? He couldn’t wait to tell her she might as well forget about suing us, because, what do you know, babbo couldn’t have killed Nola, being dead himself at the time?”

Gideon nodded. “Sure.”

“Well, it worked. She listened to what he had to say, she took an hour to think it over, and she did it. She dropped the suit.”

“And this is not good, why?” John asked.

“Because, instead of suing Franco for four million or whatever it was, now she’s challenging the entire will. She wants it declared invalid.”

“On what grounds?” Marti asked.

Luca waited while Amalia returned with the bottle to refill the glasses of those who wanted more Vin Santo. Only Gideon declined: too sweet for his taste. He considered asking if there was any brandy, but decided it was safer to let it pass.

“So, what you think?” a smiling Amalia asked in English when she’d finished pouring and setting the bottle down on the table for their continuing use. “Pretty good dinner, no?”

Everyone, Gideon included, agreed that it had been superb, even better than they’d expected. Only when she departed, broadly smiling, did Luca come back to Marti’s question.

“On what grounds? On the grounds that, since Pietro died before Nola—weeks before her, according to the brilliant, world-famous Skeleton Detective . . .”

Gideon sighed. “Gee, why do I have this feeling that I’m about to get blamed for something?”

“. . . that, since Nola outlived Pietro, everything should technically have gone to her when he died.”

“Wait a second,” Gideon said. “I thought his will left pretty much everything to Franco—the winery and all— with you and Nico and Cesare getting monthly stipends for a few years. Is that not right? Or did he leave something to Nola too?”

Luca poured some more wine for Linda and for himself, and passed the bottle to John. “No, that’s not right, not quite. The two of them had—I forget what it’s called in English—they had the same will—”

“A joint will?” Marti suggested.

“That’s it, yeah. Consisting of one paragraph. Three sentences. Exactly a hundred and fifteen words; I counted them once.”

“Pretty short for a will disposing of an estate like that,” said John.

“No kidding. And they didn’t even have that until Severo practically forced them into it, kicking and screaming.”

The Cubbiddus, it seemed, like many of their brethren in Barbagia at that time, didn’t believe in written wills. When a man died, his possessions passed to his eldest son, and that was that. Attorneys? Probate? The courts? No need for them, not in those mountain villages. Everyone knew the way it worked, and no one would think of contesting it when it happened. For one thing, nobody had anything worth fighting over, but even more important was the fear of what they called malocchio, the evil eye that was always on the lookout for you to make some slip, leave some opening that would let the spirits of misfortune and calamity into your life. And one way to do that, sure to bring laughter to those malevolent entities, was to “make plans” for your own death or that of someone you loved, or to talk about it, or even to think about it. So . . . no wills. And the authorities couldn’t be bothered with doing anything about it, not if it took going into those primitive, bandit-ridden mountain villages.

Luca paused, remembering. “I know this sounds like something from the Middle Ages, but, you know, I was born there, and I lived there, in Nuragugme—population forty-two, including us—until I was fifteen and babbo got married and moved us all here. Believe me, that’s the way it was, and that’s the way the two of them were. And the way they stayed. You’d think a guy with so much on the ball, all that business sense, couldn’t possibly be that superstitious—”

“No, I wouldn’t think that at all,” said Gideon. “Smart people can be pretty dumb when they venture outside of their own ballparks.”

Luca smiled. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Anyway, for years they refused to consider having wills at all. It drove Severo nuts, and then finally—this was, like, no more than five years ago—”

“Four years,” Linda said. “They did it just after I got here.”

“Four years ago,” said Luca, “he finally convinced them things were different here, and if they didn’t have a will, there’d be hell to pay when they died. I think they agreed to sign the thing just to make him stop talking about dying.”

“Well, what did it say, Luca?” Julie asked.

“It didn’t leave everything to Franco; they left everything to each other.”

“Each other?” John said. “So how did Franco wind up with the winery?”

“Here’s the way it worked: The first sentence says that they leave everything to each other. The second one says something like ‘If my spouse should predecease me, then I leave everything to my beloved son Franco,’ with those stipends to the others.”

“To Franco? Nothing about Cesare? I’m surprised Nola would have gone along with that,” Gideon said. “I only met her a few times, but she struck me as being pretty strong-minded. I’d have thought she’d have fought for more than that for him.”

“She probably did,” Luca said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re right about her being strong-minded, and she sure as hell didn’t hesitate to speak her mind.”

“I’ll say,” Linda said with a chuckly laugh. “If you think it was tough being her stepson, you should’ve tried being her daughter-in-law.”

“Yeah, but when it came to final decisions, she was just as old-school as he was. It’s the husband, the papa, who decides, and he does it on his own. He doesn’t take a vote.”

“That’s true,” Linda said, “and there’s something else. I don’t know about you, Luca, but I’m not really positive that Nola understood what was in that will. For one thing, she never did learn to read that well. For another—and Severo told me this—she seemed to think that if she didn’t look at it when she signed it, it might get around that evil eye she was worried about. So she kept her eyes closed. Severo had to guide her hand to the right place.”

“Hadn’t heard that,” Luca said. “Sounds right, though.”

“What did the third sentence say?” Gideon said.