Yet this kitchen used to be dirty and now it’s clean because of me. For the first time in my life, I’ve done something useful. Mom would be furious to see me acting like a servant but what’s so bad about cleaning? Everyone likes when things are clean. I look around at the sparkling surfaces. Maybe I could ask Eli if I could be his housemaid?

It sounds crazy, even in my own mind, but they definitely need somebody and I’d like being a housemaid a lot more than I’d like being shipped off to Italy. Plus, it might be safer if Eli and the others saw me as a servant. I don’t want to be their sugar babies or wives, their strippers or murder victims. I want to be too unimportant to proposition or kill. I want to melt into the walls of this beautiful house the way Zia Teresa did at my place. As a maid, I’d be nobody. And I could be happy being nobody.

“Afternoon!” Harvey bursts into the kitchen, arms laden with groceries. “Everything looks wonderful.”

“Thanks,” I say, sliding off the counter. “How did it go at the store?”

“It took a while, but I found it all.”

Harvey bought three times as many ingredients as I need. I decide to make everything at once, that way all the staff can eat and they can have leftovers. I’ve already found a big pot for the meat, so I set the chicken and beef to simmer in salted water as I carefully shred the skin off the carrot and potato.

I shouldn’t know how to cook. Mom didn’t like my interest in food any more than she liked me singing, but whenever she was gone, I hung around Zia Teresa in the kitchen. Zia could make any cuisine under the sun, but when it was just the two of us, we only cooked Italian. The meals she grew up with and loved. Zia showed me how to cut spaghetti and fettuccini, to roll gnocchi, to fold ravioli parcels full of parsley and fresh ricotta. We made alfredo and carbonara and cannelloni though most of the dishes didn’t have real names.

“What do you call this?” I would ask of a thick soup of spinach and rice.

“It’s spinach and rice,” Zia would say.

“But what is it in Italian?”

She would roll her eyes. “Spinaci e riso.”

While mom was away getting her eyelids done, Zia Teresa focused my studies on desserts, tiramisu and profiteroles and continental cake. When mom returned and I was back on a diet of kale and grilled chicken, I dreamed about mascarpone cream.

In the eighth grade I wanted to run away and become a chef. As I got older, I imagined cooking for Mr. Parker, making him so happy with my food he would let Zia Teresa move in with us. Then she and I could hang out in my kitchen and we could talk and make trays of lasagne and sugar-dusted biscotti. As I skim the fat from the surface of my broth, I hope with all my heart Zia Teresa knows I’m alive and well and making brodo.