Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Giovanni
Roberto drums his fingers on the dashboard to a song only he can hear. I kill the engine and sit with sounds of Atlantic City moving around the car. The hiss of buses braking, the gulls squawking in the distance, voices moving past on the sidewalk.
Regalia’s front windows glow like a living thing, fogged from heat and too many bodies. A black ribbon hangs crooked on the door. Somebody taped it up there quickly.
“You sure about this?” Roberto asks, voice easy, eyes not. “We send flowers. We send a card. We don’t usually send… us.”
“Sabina fed our men for many years,” I say. “We show up. Pay our respects.”
He grins sideways. “You say ‘we’ but it sounds like ‘me.’”
“You like people.” I open my door. “I’ll let you talk to them.”
Inside, the air is all steam and tomato and grief. Christmas lights zigzag the ceiling and try to lighten the atmosphere. It almost works. I clock exits without thinking: front, kitchen swing door, the back hall by the bathrooms that leads to the alley. Old habit, old muscle.
Heads turn. Some in fear, some in curiosity. Some nod. Some whisper. And still, some are completely oblivious.
Francesca is by the bar, stiff as a knife in the block. She wears a black dress that isn’t new, hair sprayed up like a helmet. When her eyes find me, color drains under her powder.
She walks over quickly and stiffly on worn black heels.
“Giovanni,” she says. It’s a greeting and an accusation, both small, both brittle. “Roberto.”
“Francesca.” I tilt my head. “We heard about Sabina. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
I mean it. Sabina was small and loud and made the best ribollita I’ve ever eaten. She told me once I slouched, and I straightened all night without thinking. “We came to pay respects.”
Her mouth presses into a white line. There’s a small tick in her eye as she glances toward the kitchen and back at us. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Roberto slides forward with a smile that disarms juries and bartenders. “We won’t take a plate. We won’t take a chair. Five minutes and we’re gone.”
“I didn’t say—” She catches herself. Her hands are clean, but the knuckles are red from work. “It’s… not the time.”
“When is it ever?” I ask, quietly. “We owe Sabina. That’s all.”
Her eyes flick to the room. People are watching, pretending not to.
She knows what a scene costs. For a second, the line of her shoulders softens, then tightens again, like she’s wrestling with something only she can see.
The panic flashes brighter, then goes down behind her eyes the way a burner turns low.
“Fine,” she says. “Five minutes.” She moves aside hesitantly. “Don’t… just don’t.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Roberto says, already easing toward a knot of old men who loved Sabina’s eggplant more than their wives. He claps backs, kisses cheeks, promises prayers he’ll never say. He’s good at this. It’s what we keep him for, besides his practice of the law.
I keep my hands in my pockets and my back to a wall. The room is a collage of sound and mood. Sentences start with laughs and end with cries, chairs scrape, lids clatter. A baby cries, and someone bounces it against her hip in a rhythm.
I nod to men who nod back. I thank a server who sweeps past with a tray of meatballs, and he flusters like he’s not sure if he should be grateful or terrified. It lands somewhere in the middle.
Francesca threads through people like a captain cutting through weather. Twice, she looks at me and looks away, the panic flaring and going dark. I file it in a drawer marked Later.
Roberto materializes at my shoulder, a pepper of perfume and laughter following him. “Old man DiNallo cried into my jacket for two solid minutes. You owe me dry cleaning.”
“He never liked you.”
“He does now. I told him you make a mean marinara.”
“I don’t.”
He winks. “He’s ninety. By the time he tells that story again, you invented tomatoes.”
Someone behind me says, “Conti,” low, hushed. Feared.
I don’t turn. If there’s trouble, it will come to me. It doesn’t. The room keeps moving around the hole where Sabina should be.
Then I see her.
Not because she’s loud or drawing attention, but because the air shifts around me.
The door to the kitchen swings open, and in one second, I take it all in.
She’s at the stove, tall, back straight, hair pulled into a neat knot on top of her head.
A ladle in her hand. She tastes, frowns, and the door gently closes, shutting her away from me.
“Who was that?” I murmur to Roberto.
“Who?”
I nod to the door opening. The tall woman in the black dress walking out. “Her.”
“The granddaughter, I think. The chef one in Italy.”
Before either of us can say more, an answer comes from my right from the produce guy who’s been delivering here since before I could get into a bar.
“That’s Sabina’s Bianca,” he says. “Francesca’s girl. Flew in from Florence or somewhere fancy. Chef.” Pride colors his voice.
Bianca. The name fits the lines of her face, even when it’s marred with a frown and grief. She’s got her head tilted close to her mother’s and is talking. For a heartbeat, Francesca forgets to worry about us being here, and the grief in her mouth softens into something like relief.
Roberto nudges me. “Stop scowling like a gargoyle. You look like you’re casing the place.”
“I am always casing the place.” I don’t look away from Bianca. “It’s survived this long without us. It’ll survive another hour.”
He follows my look, grins. “She’s pretty.”
“She’s young.”
“So were you once.”
“Briefly,” I say, and he laughs quietly.
Francesca turns and finds me still there. Panic rockets through her so hard I can feel it across the room. Her hand comes up like she might ward me off with a spoon. She doesn’t come over. She just looks at me like I’m a match near a gas line and shakes her head once. Not here. Not this.
I give her the smallest nod. I’m not here for that. Not today.
We make the rounds. Roberto tells the story of Sabina smacking his wrist with a wooden spoon when he stole a meatball. “I still have the scar,” he says, and shows them nothing, and they howl like they can see it.
I shake hands, I say the right words, I let people say something back. I keep my eyes off Bianca and fail.
She moves through the room, and the crowd parts like they know better than to interrupt the person who’s making sure the food keeps coming.
I catch a glimpse of Francesca frowning in our direction. It’s long past five minutes, and she’s starting to panic.
I could push. I could say Sabina would’ve wanted—what? Me to eat? Nonsense. Sabina wanted rent paid, and sauce right, and people fed. She wanted peace, which was why she kept us at a careful distance, and we kept our distance as well.
“Roberto,” I say. “Let’s go.”
With reluctance, he agrees.
We head for the door. On the way out, I look back at the kitchen again, wanting one more glimpse. But the door doesn’t open, and she’s on the other side.
Outside, the air smells like rain that will come whenever it pleases. Roberto shoves his hands in his pockets and whistles nothing. “So,” he says. “We showed up, we were polite, we didn’t start any wars.”
I look back at the fogged windows, at the glow. At the black ribbon tilting under tape. “Send flowers to the house,” I say. “Not here.”
“From us?”
“From no one.”
He nods. “And the envelope?”
“No envelope,” I say. “She’ll know who it’s from and pretend she doesn’t.”
Roberto grins. “Vatican levels of denial.”
“It’s a gesture, Roberto,” I say. “Not a threat.”
“She might not see it like that.”