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someone seen her birth
certificate?”
“Sowhat,” Papa answered,
flipping through the sports
page and ignoring the
buttered roll my mother
had set on his breakfast
plate.
“Heidi says there was a
little something on the
way.”
Papa now lowered his
paper. “Schneider’s?”
“What was on its way?” I
asked.
“No idea. None of us were
there, were we?” my
mother said.
“And what about now?”
“She made it go away.”
“What? What?” I cried. “A
baby?”
“Pah,” Papa responded.
“It has nothing to do
with us.” He ducked back
behind the paper.
“But they’re Italians. That
means they’re Catholic,
every last one of them.”
“We’re
not,”
Papa
murmured in a tone that
made it clear that, for him,
the subject was closed.
I ran to the school and
immediately told the
others. The subject was
over our heads. Thorsten
half-heartedly made a
dumb joke about the
women who marched
around with the “My body
belongs to me” signs, but
nobody laughed. I could
only parrot what I had
heard from my brother.
Down with §218, stuff like
that. What did that mean
for Silvana’s mother?
Would they put her on trial