Fic: Mama (The Godfather, Kay & Carmela, 3.5k, G)

[sobriquett]

Mama

Rating: G

Fandom: The Godfather - Mario Puzo

Characters: Kay Adams Corleone, Carmela Corleone

Relationships: Kay & Carmela

Word Count: 3492

Summary:

It seemed such a lovely, quaint idea for a whole extended family to live together like this. Kay wondered if that was how they did things in “the old country”, but she knew so little about where Mike’s family came from except that they were Sicilian. The idea of parents, grown children and grandchildren all clustered together, with old family friends — it was magical. But Kay was apprehensive. She had so many questions, but she did not think they would be well received. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure she would be well received.

Kay's first day in her new married home.

Written for abyssalplain, for Fic in a Box 2025.
 

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When the newlyweds came home, Connie Rizzi was waiting to greet them.

Kay liked her new sister-in-law, one of the few members of Mike’s family to attend their wedding in the last weekend of July 1949. It had been a quiet affair in her New England hometown before Kay and Michael went on a short honeymoon to Martha’s Vineyard. Mike had done some training there during the war and Kay had fond memories of summers there as a child. The whole week was wonderful.

Returning to New York on Saturday, Michael arranged a night in the city with dinner and the theater before they returned to the mall, and the apprehension had hit her the evening before, leaving her sleepless.

It seemed such a lovely, quaint idea for a whole extended family to live together like this. Kay wondered if that was how they did things in “the old country”, but she knew so little about where Mike’s family came from except that they were Sicilian. The idea of parents, grown children and grandchildren all clustered together, with old family friends — it was magical. But Kay was apprehensive. She had so many questions, but she did not think they would be well received. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure she would be well received.

“You could stay for lunch,” Kay said, but Connie excused herself with a kiss for her brother, a wink for Kay, and a slightly crass joke about newlyweds’ need for privacy. There was only a flicker of a downturn to Michael’s mouth on the uninjured side but Kay caught it, and thrilled that she knew him well enough to notice. He was a private man, but so many of her private expressions were hers alone now.

Michael returned to work the following morning, walking over to his father’s house promptly at eight o’clock. Kay watched him go, and wondered where Mrs. Corleone was going as her short black-clad figure passed her son on the path and was driven away in the back of a sleek black car.

An hour passed before Kay’s new mother-in-law returned, in which time Kay had put the kitchen to rights after the breakfast she had been unable to eat for nerves, and then watched through the window, coffee growing cold in her hands.

Michael and his father had also been driven off the mall. Kay assumed they had gone to the Genco Pura offices, although she doubted Michael would even confirm that much. That light flutter of anxiety slithered down her throat and into her belly as she wondered how she would get hold of him in a crisis. Would she be able to call him? Infrequent as it was, Kay could remember her mother calling her father at work from time to time, once the telephone had been installed when Kay was twelve or thirteen. The calls were always important, although never critical, and Kay also didn’t think she’d be frivolous about it, but it was so strange not to be able to call him at the office. That was just what ordinary, typical wives did, she thought. Not wives of—

Her spiral was interrupted by the engine growl and crunching gravel of Mrs. Corleone’s return, and the way the older woman swatted at the young man who tried to help her out of the car made Kay feel as though she should stop twitching her curtains and get on with something. It was her first full day in their new house, and she felt as though she should have something to show for it when Michael returned home — whenever that might be — and her lightest blouse was already sticking to her back. She wasn’t sure how many useful hours she would have in the August humidity.

Kay told herself to stop being so foolish and found a pad to start making a list, taking it from room to room.

Connie had mentioned that this had been Santino’s house, Mike’s older brother. Kay had only met him at Connie’s wedding when he’d been too busy to spare more than a moment for her, but Kay remembered his busy wife Sandra and their children, and Kay wondered where she was now, at that moment.

She thought too about this being that woman’s house, and how Sandra Corleone had once probably moved in full of hopes and dreams — and left a few short years later as a young widow with four children. She was in Florida now, with her parents, Michael had told her, but what was her life? Could that be Kay’s own–

If her hands were shaking as she held the pen, she told herself that that was because she hadn’t eaten her breakfast. Her appetite was absent due to excitement, nothing more, and her damp palms the result of the oppressive summer air. She lit a cigarette to steady her nerves and abandoned her pad, returning to smoke in the kitchen.

Kay thought back to her school teacher days; they would be well into their morning by now, wrapping up mathematics in time for recess. Only six weeks ago, she had said farewell to her third grade class for the final time. How would she occupy her days now? Once the house was settled, what would there be to do?

Everything was so quiet. She focused on the sounds. Were these birds the same as at home? No, she could hear gulls. If she strained hard enough, would she be able to hear the sea?

She had never lived in the city, but this was so different even from her own small home town. The air here was sultry, heavy, unbroken by the sea breeze. Every sound – every starting engine, every open or close of a door, every crunch of feet on gravel – was heightened by the isolated quiet of the place. There were families here, Mr. and Mrs. Corleone’s children and grandchildren, friends and… well, there were the perennial men, on the gate and coming and going from the garage and the corner house. 

But on this Monday morning, all was quiet. Would she have preferred an apartment in the city, at least while they were newlyweds, and still getting to know one another again after Mike’s long absence? If she opened the window there for fresh air, would she be glad to hear the roar of traffic, a symphony of horns, voices, radios and road noise, instead of this stewing silence? She pushed the question away, unable to reach an easy answer, as she stubbed out the end of her cigarette and returned to work.

The tasteful, expensive, practical wedding presents of her New England family and friends were carefully packaged and laid out on the covered dining table, empty cabinets yawning down at her. These were not the ubiquitous, abounding discreet cream envelopes of Connie Rizzi’s wedding, but considered and expensive gifts of china, silverware, glassware, fine ceramics and luxurious tableware.

She knew what they all were, of course, but was it bad luck to re-open her wedding presents without husband, these items meant for their married home? She didn’t know, but she would not tempt fate. Instead, she started with her books, unpacking tomes from her adolescence and her own college studies onto the study bookshelves, as well as a few beautiful leather-bound editions that had been a gift from her father to her husband.

There was a short, sharp rap at the front door and Kay hurried to answer it, heeled Oxfords clicking down the long hall. She smiled as she saw her new mother-in-law, stout, small-eyed, always clad in black, standing on the step with a tall man behind her, his arms laden with food.

“How are you, Mrs. Corleone?” She smiled at the young man too but he looked away, impassive. “Come in, please. Would you like coffee?”

She led the older woman back down the hall. As they passed the study, Mrs. Corleone said, “Ah, good, you keeping busy.” 

In the kitchen, Mrs. Corleone directed the young man to put the food down on the table and shooed him out again. She looked around. Kay did too; there were signs of activity with her pad and an open box, but no disarray. Even the clean dishes from after breakfast had been put away.

Nodding her approval, Mrs. Corleone tackled the pile of food on the table, showing Kay the bread, cheese, sausages, and a pile of firm, scarlet tomatoes still on the vine — “These tomatoes, they from my husband’s garden.” — then putting them away in Kay’s pantry.

“Thank you,” Kay said as the scent of fresh tomato stems rose to match the scent of warm, fresh bread. “It all smells wonderful.”

Carmela waved a hand, making a wordless Italian noise that Kay couldn’t decipher.

Kay started the coffee and a few minutes later she was sitting at her kitchen table with her mother-in-law.

“You come for dinner tomorrow, you and Mikey,” said Mrs. Corleone. 

“Yes, we will, thank you.”

“You come early, I teach you how to make. We start to feed you up, yes?”

Kay laughed; she had never left Mrs. Corleone’s kitchen unfed, and the woman’s warmth was infectious. It had even pushed off Tom Hagen’s lawyerly chill back in those frigid days with no news of Michael.

She had always enjoyed her conversations with Mrs. Corleone, and if there was anyone who could shed some light on the life she might lead now — all the rules, spoken and unspoken, known and unknown, that she would live by — it was her new mother-in-law. Kay had so many questions, and so many of them that she could never ask Mike. She wasn’t afraid of him, of that cold, chilly anger that had crept in once or twice during their engagement, but she knew that asking the wrong thing would be the easiest way to summon that side of him instead of her Mike. But Mrs. Corleone had always had time for Kay’s curiosity during their months of phone calls. She thought back to her question of the morning and dared to voice it to this woman who’d always had advice for her, even if it wasn’t to Kay’s taste.

“If I needed to speak to Mike during the day, how would I… how would I reach him?”

“What you need Mikey for, hmm? You a clever woman, what you need him for?”

”I don’t know.” Truthfully, she couldn’t think of any reason important enough to share. What if she was just lonely?

”You need something, you come see me, or my daughter. We help you.”

Kay thought she heard what Mrs. Corleone wasn’t saying. She wasn’t to call Michael. But perhaps his mother or his sister could, if she really needed him. And at least she wasn’t alone.

“Mrs. Corleone,” Kay said. She wasn’t sure how to ask her next question. This was this woman’s life and home, and Kay’s now as well. “It’s so quiet out here. What…” There was no polite way to phrase it; directness would have to suffice. “What do you do here?”

Kay had never in her life been idle. She had been an excellent student with a calendar full of extracurriculars, then earned her degree, then she had been a teacher. Even her vacations had been full of reading and studying, travelling to visit girlfriends, vacations with her parents. But she could not fill a life now with quietly reading and waiting for her husband to come home. Kay would go mad.

“I have my husband,” Mrs. Corleone said, “and Constanzia and her babies, and you and Mikey. I cook, I visit with my friends, I go to church. Life is good here, you like it.”

“I’m sure I will,” Kay said. She could almost believe it.

“What you like to do? What you want to do? You lucky, you no have children yet. You have freedom, for the last time for twenty, maybe thirty years! You enjoy it, yes? You still have girlfriends in the city? You see them!”

Kay did have girlfriends in the city; she had mentioned them to Mrs. Corleone before. Some still worked and wouldn’t be available in the daytime, but others were married and she could pass an afternoon with them, with someone from her old world. Would Kay be able to talk about life here? About her husband, his family? As much as she did not yet fit in this world, for how much longer would Kay fit in her friends’? 

“Once I had Santino—” Mrs. Corleone crossed herself. “—there always something to do. Those are good days, when your family needs you. A woman’s life is always work. Work for her family, work for her home. It never stops. And more than the men can see.” There was a glint in the older woman’s eye, as though she was sharing a great secret. “Men not so bright, you know.”

Kay laughed again. “Michael is very intelligent, you must know that! You’re his mother!”

Mrs. Corleone shrugged, waved a hand. “His father intelligent too, but not always so bright. He getting slow in his old age, always fiddling with his tomatoes. No, you only a young girl, you don’t know men yet. I am married forty years, raised three sons, always men everywhere—but you learn. Women much... women più astuto than men.”

“They need us more than we need them?” Kay joked.

“Si,” Mrs. Corleone said. “Yes. Fannu finta, but they know too. You not worry. You have your fun, you have your babies, you be fine. You a clever girl.”

”Thank you,” Kay said. “I was worried I’d run out of things to do when the house was set up.”

“Ha! A woman never done with work. But you need more, I find some for you.” Mrs. Corleone was grinning, her wizened hands wrapped around a nearly empty coffee cup.

“No, thank you!” said Kay. “Would you like more coffee?”

The older woman nodded and Kay fetched the pot to refill both cups.

“Kay… it’s not much of a name,” Mrs. Corleone said as Kay returned to the table. “You gonna give my grandchildren a proper name, hmm?”

Kay laughed and sipped her coffee, raising the cup to cover the low burn in her cheeks. She was a married woman now, and she’d brushed off comments throughout her few years as a spinster about children with more ease than she could manage now. “I don’t know if Michael will want to give them—” She started again. “I mean, I think he wants his children to have American names.”

“They your children too,” Mrs. Corleone said. “You gonna birth them, and raise them. You listen to your husband, but you the mother.” She shrugged, made another wordless Italian noise. “You and Mikey, you have handsome children. Clever too, with you a teacher.”

Kay thought she was right. She had imagined them, like herself and Michael in miniature, with her own fair hair and his intelligent stare. She imagined reading to them, teaching them, holding their hands as they explored.

She wondered what Michael and his brothers and his sister had been like as children; they were not much alike as adults, or at least Michael was different. But all this woman’s sons had gone into the family business, Kay thought, and one of them was gone already, not many years older than Kay and Mike were now.

“What if… what if one day he doesn’t come home, like…” She couldn’t find the right comparison. Mr. Corleone had survived, he was likely tending to his garden in the house opposite right now, even after the horrors she’d seen and read about in the papers. And Kay couldn’t bring herself to mention Sonny Corleone, or Sandra Corleone and her children in Florida. “What then? What would I do?”

Mrs. Corleone frowned, and Kay wondered if she had gone too far with this question. Still frowning, the older woman raised her cup and sipped. Kay’s pulse throbbed in her ears; this was a long way from happy thoughts of her future family. This was the other side of that coin. The sun dipped behind a cloud and the kitchen went dim and grey, although the heat did not abate. Kay couldn’t hear the birds in the trees or the men at the gate for a moment, just the ticking of a clock as she looked at her mother-in-law and Mrs. Corleone looked over Kay’s shoulder. Just as Kay was looking for a new topic, to leave this asked but unanswered, Mrs. Corleone spoke.

“Mikey a clever boy, more than his father.” She waited for Kay to meet her eye, holding her gaze with black steel. “You not worry about that.” She set down the cup with a crisp clink of porcelain. “You love my son, yes?

“Yes, of course, very much.”

“Good, you do that. Just that. You raise your babies and say your prayers and live a good life, and you love him, and you be okay.”

Kay wondered if it could be so simple.

“This a family,” Mrs. Corleone continued. “Not just you and Mikey, we all a family. And you have your own parents. You always have people to care for you, and you care for them. And then you have a good life, and be happy.”

Kay blinked to clear her eyes. She wanted, for a fleeting moment, to ask this woman if she’d had a happy life, but she knew she could never ask, and the answer would not be simple. After all, this was a woman whose eldest son had been murdered, her youngest son exiled for years, her husband shot twice in ten years. Yet here she sat, as steady and impassive as a mountain, the rock on which her family was built.

Could Kay find the same strength? She didn’t think she could.

“When Mikey bring you to Constanzia’s wedding, I was not sure. You too skinny, too American. I wanted Mikey to find a good Italian girl like his brother, God rest him. But I was wrong. You just right for him—and me.”

“Thank you,” Kay said. “That means a lot to me. You’ve always been so kind.”

“You still too skinny.”

Kay laughed; she used a handkerchief to wipe her face. “I can’t help it! I’ve always been this way.”

“Have your babies, that will fix it. And I teach you to cook, good Sicilian food, old recipes I learn as a girl. We start tomorrow. Mikey tell me you not free tonight.”

“No,” Kay said, smiling. Michael was not as flirtatious as he had been before he’d gone away, but she knew that ‘unpacking’ had been a euphemism when he’d suggested how they should spend their evening. But he would still need dinner – as would Kay, who’d eaten barely a morsel since the night before, and now her stomach announced that to the quiet room. “I would like to go out and get a few things,” Kay said, looking at her list so she didn’t have to look her mother-in-law in the eye. “Is it safe to go on my own?” 

“Of course it’s safe! You want to go this afternoon? I go with you, you don’t want to go alone.”

 “No, no,” Kay said. “You’re very kind but I couldn’t impose.”

“What is this ‘impose’?” she said, and Kay knew very well that Mrs. Corleone understood the word. “You come have lunch with me and Constanzia, then I go with you if you want, or not. You decide.”

Kay stood to fetch the coffee pot but Mrs. Corleone raised a hand and stood to leave. Kay followed her mother-in-law to the front door, aware of how much taller she was than the other woman, especially in her Oxfords.

Before crossing the threshold, Mrs. Corleone stopped and looked up at Kay, speaking quietly. “I tell you something. Something you need know, but you nice American girl, so you might not. You listening?” When Kay nodded, her mother-in-law continued. “You worry too much. What do men know about the lives of women, the pain of women? Nothing! But you know that pain, you have that pain. You don't need know their pain too, hmm?" She took Kay's hand. "When you need know something, you know. You don't need? You don't worry.”

Kay wasn't sure it worked like that. Could she really bear not to know, to live a life parallel to her husband but only intersecting when it suited him? Could she raise her children like that, with a father they could only ever half-know? But then how well did any child ever know their father? And Mrs. Corleone wore her troubles well.

“Thank you, Mrs. Corleone,” Kay said. “For everything.”

“No, no, no,” Mrs. Corleone said on the doorstep, looking up at Kay and smiling, mischief dancing in her small black eyes. “You call me Mama.”

Kay liked that.