Epilogue - Luca
“Not that one,” I said. “That one goes in the dining room.”
Thiago, holding two serving bowls and looking as if I’d handed him live ammunition, turned his head toward the table. “The blue-rimmed one?”
“Yes.”
“The one I’m not currently holding.”
I looked at him over my shoulder while I checked the pot on the stove. “I had complete faith in you until that last sentence.”
“That seems unfair.”
“It is, but dinner is in forty minutes and fairness is not the governing principle of this kitchen.”
He moved past me with bowls balanced carefully in both hands. Two months earlier, he’d taken a bullet through the shoulder in front of eight hundred people and kept moving. Tonight he crossed my kitchen with more caution than he’d shown in the Orpheum.
The kitchen was running hot. Chicken braised with garlic and white wine had another twenty minutes. The rice was done and covered. I’d already dressed the bitter greens. Bread waited beneath a folded cloth, and a tart was cooling on the sideboard where my father had no doubt already spotted it.
From the salon, Jules Guidry’s saxophone wound through the house in a low, easy line.
Dominic sat at the piano, not leading so much as laying the floorboards under the melody.
Jules had a way of entering a phrase from the side, as if he’d been standing around the corner listening to it for a while before deciding it was worth joining.
Thiago came back into the kitchen and set the second bowl where I pointed.
“Better?” he asked.
“Marginally.”
“I’ll take it.”
He leaned a hip against the counter and watched me stir the sauce.
His hair was still damp at the temples from his walk over from the Marigny.
He had not yet fully adjusted to the fact that New Orleans in October could still feel like someone had draped a hot, wet towel over the city and forgotten to remove it.
Wearing one of the shirts he bought on Magazine Street, Thiago looked less like a visiting bodyguard every day and more like a man who belonged in my line of sight.
“You’re staring,” he said.
I added another pinch of salt without looking up. “You are standing in the middle of my kitchen being decorative. It’s difficult to avoid.”
“The decorative criticism again.”
“Take it up with Dominic. He’s the one who keeps encouraging you.”
That made him smile. Dominic had heard one full report about Thiago’s new apartment in the Marigny and immediately announced that the neighborhood had good bones.
Two days later he sent over numbers for a locksmith and a plumber.
He also offered an unsolicited observation about where to get decent olives within walking distance.
Dominic instructed me to make sure Thiago took the extra key to the front door.
I lifted the lid on the braise. “Open the Burgundy.”
Thiago reached for the bottle. “Do you want me to pour tonight?”
“I want you to open. Celeste will insist that she do the pouring.”
He uncorked it cleanly and set the bottle down. “I talked to my mother this afternoon.”
“And?”
“She asked whether the city always sounds like this.” He tipped his head toward the salon. “I told her no. Then I told her yes.”
“That’s accurate. Yes, and no.”
“She laughed.”
I set the spoon down. “How serious are you about having her move here?”
“Serious enough to be looking,” he said. “Not tomorrow. But serious.”
“For near you or with you?”
“Near me, I think. Close enough that I can check in. Far enough that she can close the door and tell me to mind my business.”
I went back to the sauce. “Does she want New Orleans, or does she want you?”
He exhaled softly through his nose. “Both, maybe. She’s curious about the city. The food and the music. The fact that everyone I know appears to have an opinion about where she should live already.”
“That began the moment you told Dominic.”
“Yes.”
The piano stopped. Applause sounded from the salon. I heard Celeste’s voice above it. My mother answered with something I couldn’t make out. My father laughed.
Then came Jules in the kitchen doorway, saxophone hanging from his hand, tie loosened, smile easy.
“You’re hiding,” he said to me.
“I’m cooking.”
He kissed the air beside my cheek, reached for the open bottle without permission, and glanced at Thiago.
“You look less pale every time I see you,” he said.
“I take that as a compliment.”
“It’s meant that way. Last time I saw you, you had hospital in your face.” Jules poured himself half a glass. “Dominic’s still talking about the Orpheum as if the whole thing was an issue of poor timing.”
Thiago gave him a dry look. “He said last week that when I tackled Micah, I was slightly ahead of the beat.”
Jules barked out a laugh. “That sounds like him.”
He looked into the pot I was tending, and said, “I would leave you men to your work, but one of you is clearly not working.”
“I opened the wine,” Thiago said.
Jules glanced at the bottle and then at me. “He’s right. Don’t be cruel just because the man relocated.”
Relocated.
Thiago had moved into a second-floor apartment in the Marigny three weeks ago. He still traveled for The Guardians when Eamon needed him elsewhere, but New Orleans was now the city he called home.
Jules headed back to the salon, the saxophone brushing lightly against his trouser leg. Another burst of conversation followed. I heard Dominic ask, “One more?”
Thiago reached for the plates.
“Not those,” I said.
He stopped with both hands suspended over the stack. “This kitchen is hostile territory.”
“This kitchen is precise.”
I chuckled as I put the spoon down. Turning, I reached for him and shared a quick kiss.
Dominic sat at the head of the table as if he’d been sitting there for a hundred years.
Celeste was to his right in dark green silk and pearl studs, one wrist ringed in gold.
My mother sat across from her in deep blue, compact and composed.
Next to her was my father. Jules sat midway down the table with his saxophone case leaned carefully against the wall behind him and spoke to Dominic about a drummer neither of them trusted not to rush.
Thiago sat beside me.
Celeste lifted her glass once the first plates had been served. “To survival,” she said.
Dominic, with his own glass halfway to his mouth, paused and looked down the table before answering. “To continuation.”
That was better. More honest too.
We drank.
Conversation moved around us in overlapping lines.
My father described a set of iron balcony rails he’d salvaged from a house in the Lower Garden District and made them sound like the bones of saints.
My mother asked Thiago whether his landlord was reliable and, before he could answer fully, told him the warning signs of a man who would delay roof repairs indefinitely.
Celeste listened to it all with open amusement and then informed Thiago that if his mother moved to the city, she was not to be placed in a building with indifferent plumbing. Jules offered three names of neighborhoods and rejected two of his own suggestions before anyone wrote them down.
Dominic ate in composed silence for stretches, speaking only when he chose.
Continuing to work with The Guardians, Thiago fielded phone calls from Eamon and text messages from Michael. He would have assignments that would cause him to disappear into other people’s crises for a week or more.
I still worked for Dominic. I ran the house as always.
After dinner, the table broke the way good tables do, reluctantly, and by degrees.
Celeste and Dominic took their wine to the salon.
Jules followed with the saxophone. My father drifted toward the courtyard to inspect the lemon trees and deliver unsolicited opinions about terracotta.
My mother remained in the kitchen long enough to help me stack the plates.
When the room had narrowed to only Thiago and me, he said, “Your father just told me the southern wall would benefit from more shade.”
“He says that about every wall he loves.”
“He also believes one of the lemon trees has character.”
“It does.”
We worked in a companionable rhythm. My pre-dinner anxiety had faded. I rinsed. He dried. The windows over the sink were open to the courtyard, and the evening had cooled.
Dominic was playing the piano again. It wasn’t “Saints.” It was something quieter.
I handed Thiago another plate. “What’s your next assignment?”
“Three days in Houston next week. Low drama, according to Eamon, which means medium drama in reality.”
“And after that?”
“I come home.”
I dried my hands on the towel and turned toward him fully. “Good.”
His mouth shifted slightly at one corner. “That’s all I get?”
“That depends. Are you fishing?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s unbecoming.”
“It hasn’t stopped me yet.”
I stepped close enough to smooth the front of his shirt. “You moved to my city,” I said. “You took an apartment in the Marigny, and you let Dominic hand you advice about locksmiths. Now, you’re considering moving your mother here. I’d say the fish is already on the dock.”
He laughed softly, then touched my wrist, thumb resting against the inside where the pulse sat close to the skin.
From the salon, Jules began playing his saxophone, joining Dominic once more.
“We should go in,” Thiago said.
“In a minute.”
He tilted his head. “You’re hiding.”
He kissed me then, quick and certain, in the middle of the kitchen with the dish towel still in my hand and the last of the plates drying on the rack. Not enough to start anything. Enough to confirm something.
When we stepped out into the courtyard a minute later, my father was indeed inspecting the lemon trees. My mother sat at the iron table with a small cup of coffee. Celeste stood near the French doors with her wine and one eyebrow already slightly raised in our direction.
Two months earlier, I had been in this same house moving lemon trees before a storm. I had known the drains and the windows and the feel of the air before rain, but I had not yet known how quickly a life could be split between before and after.
I had not known that the parlor could smell of gunpowder.
I had not known that the wrong arrangement of “Saints” could chill me more deeply than violence.
Most importantly, I had not known that a man from New York would walk through the front door and learn the house quickly enough to help keep it standing.
I felt Thiago shift slightly at my side and, without looking, place my hand against the center of his back.
He was whole.
So was the house.