Like Family by Paolo Giordano

truth, why don’t you admit that having a son who is not a mathematical genius makes you feel diminished?”
    Oh, was she ever right. But that time my answer was deliberately spiteful. “Unfortunately, a bent for mathematics is genetic.”
    She shook her head. “And he was unlucky enough to inherit it from the wrong side, I suppose?”
    _____
    Now here we are, Emanuele and me, facing each other on yet another Saturday morning, the moment we both hate most in the entire week. We’re sitting at the dining-room table, a table of raw beechwood that Nora commissioned from one of her designers in Belgium and has now made us terrified of using, for fear of leaving ballpoint marks on it. Slowly I leaf through the arithmetic notebook, the smell of the glossy plastic cover taking me back to an identical one from my childhood. It looks like a battlefield: there are red marks everywhere, diagonal lines crossing out entire pages, objections and exclamation points.
    â€œWhat happened here?” I ask.
    â€œThe teacher tore out the sheet.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI got it all wrong.”
    We struggle for half an hour with the multiplication tables, both of us more and more sullen.
    â€œSeven times one?”
    â€œSeven.”
    â€œSeven times six?”
    Emanuele counts on his fingers, painfully slow. “Forty-four.”
    â€œNo, forty-two. Seven times zero?”
    â€œSeven.”
    It’s ironic, or rather no, it’s atrocious: with a degree in theoretical physics, a major in quantum field theory and a general familiarity with the most advanced formalism of calculus, I am unable to transfer into my son’s head an understanding of why any number times zero results in zero. I seem to see the inside of his skull, the brain floating in a foggy mist where assertions dissolve without constructing any meaning.
    I lose my patience. “It’s zero! Zero! If you can’t grasp it, then just get used to it!”
    Forming an empty circle with my thumb and index finger, I hold it up two inches from his nose; it’s clear that with that zero I’m describing him.
    â€œBut it’s not in the multiplication table,” he defends himself.
    â€œThe multiplication table has nothing to do with it! It’s that you’re dense!”
    At that point Nora intervenes and asks me to leave; she’ll continue with him. From the kitchen, where I try to regain my composure, I hear her doing the multiplications for him.

Winter

    S ometimes, after years of living together, you see signs no matter where you turn: traces of the person with whom you’ve shared a space for so long. I often come across Nora in every corner of our house, as if her spirit had settled on the objects like a fine dust, while Mrs. A., even during her last year, would encounter Renato’s tenuous hologram everywhere she went. Whenever she paused at the window to look out at the steep driveway to the street, she remembered the day when, violating her husband’s orders, she had stolen the keys from the tray in the entry hall and taken the car out of the garage. He didn’twant her to drive, but he was sick and had to be brought to the hospital three times a week for dialysis, and who else could do it if she didn’t?
    â€œI scraped the right side against the corner,” she told me, “and then I went home and told him, ‘Prepare yourself!’”
    She often mentioned that timid, heroic undertaking; she considered it an important step, simultaneously encompassing the beginning of Renato’s decline and the dawn of her emancipation. Until then their union had been an orderly one, much more orderly than Nora’s and mine. We were continually trading the roles of husband and wife to the point where we could no longer tell who was responsible for what. Renato drove, Mrs. A. didn’t; Mrs. A. dusted the furniture, Renato didn’t—each task had been assigned to only