Enders In Exile

that was the town where
Grandmother lived.
    Instead of going home,
she used her student pass and hopped the train to Polignano and then
spent forty-five minutes walking around the town searching for the
address. To her disgust, it ended up being on a stub of a street just
off Via Antonio Ardito, a trashy-looking apartment building backing on
the train tracks. There was no buzzer. Alessandra trudged up to the
fourth floor and knocked.
    "You want to knock
something, knock your own head!" shouted a woman from inside.
    "Are you Isabella
Santangelo?"
    "I'm the Holy Virgin
and I'm busy answering prayers. Go away!"
    Alessandra's first
thought was: So Mother lied about being a child of the fairies. She's
really Jesus' younger sister.
    But she decided that
flippancy wasn't a good approach today. She was already going to be in
trouble for leaving Monopoli without permission, and she needed to find
out from the Holy Virgin here whether or not she was her grandmother.
    "I'm so sorry to
trouble you, but I'm the daughter of Dorabella Toscano and I—"
    The woman must have
been standing right at the door, waiting, because it flew open before
Alessandra could finish her sentence.
    "Dorabella
Toscano
is a dead woman! How can a dead woman have daughters!"
    "My mother isn't dead,"
said Alessandra, stunned. "You were signed as my godmother on the
parish register."
    "That was the worst
mistake of my life. She marries this pig boy, this bike messenger, when
she's barely fifteen, and why? Because her belly's getting
fat with you, that's why! She thinks a wedding makes it all clean and
pure! And then her idiot husband gets himself killed. I told her, this
proves there is a God! Now go to hell!"
    The door slammed in
Alessandra's face.
    She had come so far.
Her grandmother couldn't really mean to send her away like this. They
hadn't even had time to do more than
glance
at
each other.
    "But I'm your
granddaughter," said Alessandra.
    "How can I have a
granddaughter when I have no daughter? You tell your mother that before
she sends her little quasi-bastard begging at my door, she'd better
come to me herself with some serious apologizing."
    "She's going away to a
colony," said Alessandra.
    The door was yanked
open again. "She's even more insane than ever," said Grandmother. "Come
in. Sit down. Tell me what stupid thing she's done."
    The apartment was
absolutely neat. Everything in it was unbelievably cheap, the lowest
possible quality, but there was a lot of it—ceramics, tiny
framed art pieces—and everything had been dusted and
polished. The sofa and chairs were so piled with quilts and throws and
twee little embroidered pillows that there was nowhere to sit.
Grandmother Isabella moved nothing, and finally Alessandra sat on top
of one of the pillow piles.
    Feeling suddenly quite
disloyal and childish herself, telling on Mother like a schoolyard
tattletale, Alessandra now tried to softpedal the outrage. "She has her
reasons, I know it, and I think she truly believes she's doing it for
me—"
    "What what what is she
doing for you that you don't want her to do! I don't have all day!"
    The woman who
embroidered all of these pillows has all day
every
day. But Alessandra kept her sassy remark to herself. "She has signed
us up for a colony ship, and they accepted us."
    "A colony ship? There
aren't any colonies. All those places are countries of their own now.
Not that Italy ever
did
have any real colonies,
not since the Roman Empire. Lost their balls after that, the men did.
Italian men have been worthless ever since. Your grandfather, God keep
him buried, was worthless enough, never stood up for himself, let
everybody push him around, but at least he worked
hard and provided for me until my ungrateful daughter spat in my face
and married that bike boy. Not like that worthless father of yours,
never made a dime."
    "Well, not since he
died, anyway," said Alessandra, feeling more than a little outraged.
    "I'm talking about when
he was alive! He only worked the fewest hours he could get by with. I
think he was on drugs. You were probably a cocaine baby."
    "I don't think so."
    "How would
you
know anything?" said Grandmother. "You couldn't even talk then!"
    Alessandra sat and
waited.
    "Well? Tell me."
    "I did but you wouldn't
believe me."
    "What was it you said?"
    "A colony ship. A
starship
to one of the formic planets, to farm and explore."
    "Won't the formics
complain?"
    "There aren't any more
formics, Grandmother. They were all killed."
    "A nasty