Chapter 1 #2
“Furniture,” I said, amused, like it was a small thing. “What’s a bar got to do with furniture.”
“That’s what I said.” He topped off my coffee without asking. “Nothing moves in that yard you’d put in a living room, I’ll tell you that.”
I had it now. The shape of it, and the name of the thing under the shape, and a yard with a fence around it where the threads of three months of cold mornings all ran into one knot.
I felt the click of it land somewhere behind my ribs the way it always did—clean, cold, satisfying.
But I didn’t show him any of that. I gave him the wide-open face, the one that’s never thinking anything in particular, and I drank my coffee and asked about his daughter’s wedding, which I knew was coming up, and let him talk about a hall and a dress and how much it was all costing him, the bandit caterers, the open bar.
And then his phone went, and it was her—the daughter—and his whole face changed, lit up, went soft in a way nothing else had touched it all morning, and he said into the phone I’m coming, I’m coming, give me ten minutes, and to me, I gotta get home, she’s stopping by before work, I haven’t seen her in two weeks.
“Go,” I said. “Go, get out of here.”
He got his coat. He was hurrying now, full of somewhere to be, full of someone waiting, and for one second I felt the cold of the empty room where the warmth had just been standing.
He had a daughter calling at dawn. He had a wife who wanted him home and a son-in-law to disapprove of and a whole loud crowded life on the other end of that phone.
All I had was a dog who wasn’t even mine.
“Hey.” I caught him at the door, grinned, clapped his shoulder. “Your son-in-law? At the wedding? Get him drunk early. Bad men dance worse. You’ll get great pictures.”
He laughed all the way out to his car. That’s the job, that’s the whole job—you leave them laughing, and you leave with what you came for, and they never once feel the second thing happen.
Olimpo got up off the floor with a groan of complaint and came to lean on my leg. The bar was empty now and going cold without its owner in it. I crouched, took the dog’s heavy head in my hands, looked into his disappointed amber eyes.
“A logistics company,” I told him quietly, in Sicilian now. “A yard by the freight line. Same paper, same lawyer, eating the whole block.” I scratched behind his ears. He didn’t wag. A verdict. “Yeah. I don’t like it either.”
I stood. I folded the name away inside me where the cold useful things go, next to the warm window I wasn’t thinking about, and I clipped the leash, and we went out into the morning to find my brothers.
By eleven the back room of the restaurant looked like a war zone—albeit one with excellent coffee and countless dining options.
I came in out of the cold with the dog, who immediately abandoned me for Sal, the traitor, and I stood in the doorway for a second and just took the noise of it.
After the dead block and the empty bar, the noise was a thing you could warm your hands on.
A long table laid with little plates. A vendor in an apron sweating gently.
My cousin Pietro on the phone holding it away from his ear while Palermo shouted into it.
My brother Sal at the head of the table with a list, a pen, and the face of a man auditing God.
And the wedding everywhere, in every plate and every phone call and every fight.
Pietro’s wedding. My brother, who two years ago I’d have bet money would never marry anyone or anything, who came back from Catania with the sound turned off on his whole life and stayed that way so long I stopped expecting him back—that Pietro, marrying his Angela in three weeks, and me the best man, and the menu apparently going to be the death of all of us first.
“Toe,” Sal said, not looking up. “Sit. You’re late.”
“Dont’t your’re late me! I was working.” I dropped into the chair across from him and snagged an arancino off the nearest plate before anyone could rule on it. “I bring news of the outside world. There’s a sun. It’s cold. The Bears are still bad.”
“The fish,” Sal said, ignoring me completely, “or the meat. Rosa wants both. We cannot do both for two hundred and forty people, it’s obscene.”
“Rosa wants both because Uncle Arturo’s people will count the courses,” I said, with my mouth full, “and report back to Palermo whether the Scordatos did it cheap. So we do both, and we do it loud, and the old man hears we spent like kings on the boy. That’s not a menu, that’s a message.
” I pointed the arancino at him. “Trust me, I speak Rosa.”
Sal looked at me for a long moment. Then he wrote something down. A swear in another life he lives as a fucking accountant.
Pietro got off the phone looking like a man surfacing from deep water. “She wants the cousins seated by branch,” he said. “By branch. There are nine branches. Two of them don’t speak.”
“Three,” Sal said.
“Three of them don’t speak.” Pietro sat down heavily and dragged a hand through his hair, and then—and this is the part that got me, every time, the part I’d never once admitted out loud—he smiled.
Just rubbed his face and smiled at the lunacy of it, his own wedding eating him alive, two hundred and forty Sicilians at war over fish and seating, and the man looked happy.
Tired and besieged and happy, like a person, like somebody home in his own life.
I’d known him my whole life and I’d watched the lights go out in him in Catania and I’d spent two years yelling affection at a wall hoping some of it would land, and here he was complaining about seating charts with his eyes bright.
Fantasma, I’d called him for two years. Ghost. He didn’t look like a ghost anymore.
“Seat the ones who don’t talk near the bar,” I said. “Drunk men forgive everything. Next problem.”
We went through it like that for an hour, the three of us, and it was—I’ll just say it—it was the best hour of my day.
The vendor put plate after plate in front of us and I charmed him down on the price on the swordfish and got us the better cut on the veal at the worse cut’s number, just by being a person he wanted to please, and Sal pretended not to notice I’d done it, and Pietro argued for half an hour that we did not need a third pasta course and lost, because Rosa, always Rosa.
I cracked jokes and broke the deadlocks and translated everyone’s tempers into something they could live with, because that’s what I’m for, that’s the job inside the job—I’m the grout between the tiles.
Pietro is the deep one and Sal is the iron one and I’m the one who makes it so the two of them and two hundred and forty relatives can be in a building together without it coming down.
It was Pietro who started it. He’d been watching me work the vendor, and he leaned back and said, mild as anything, “You’re in a good mood for a man who got up before dawn.”
“I’m always in a good mood. It’s a curse—my life’s work, too,”
“You were on the block,” Sal said. Not a question.
“I was scouting cannoli. For the dessert table. You’re welcome.”
A silence happened. The wrong kind, the kind with a smile in it. I felt it before I saw it.
“Cannoli,” Pietro said.
“For the dessert table,” I said again, slower, which was a mistake, because slowing down is what you do when you’re guilty. Even the dog knew.
“From the bakery?” Sal said. “The Greek bakery? On the block?” He set his pen down, which from Sal is practically a standing ovation. “The one you have been to—what is it now, Pietro?”
“Eleven times,” Pietro said, without hesitation, the snake, he’d been keeping count. “That I know of.”
“For bread,” I said. “I like the bread. I’m a simple man, I have simple needs, I like a warm—”
“He buys too much,” Pietro told Sal, delighted, lit up, my own cousin, my own flesh, turning the volume of his recovered happiness entirely against me. “Every time. So much bread. Enough to open a fucking bakery of his own. He over-tips. He stays.”
“The bakery girl,” Sal said, and the way he said it, dry as a stone, the corner of his mouth not moving at all, which is how you know Sal’s enjoying himself—“you should just bring her to the wedding, Tonio. Save yourself the trips. A fortune on tips, too.”
They both looked at me. The vendor looked at me. The dog lifted his enormous head off Sal’s foot and looked at me too, and I swear to God there was an opinion in it.
And here is the truth, which I did not say, which I would have eaten glass before saying out loud in that room: for one half of one second, before the charm came up over it like a shutter, I saw it.
The wedding. The lights, the loud, the whole family, and her in it—flour gone from her hands for once, that mouth of hers turned up instead of armed, laughing at something the dog did.
I saw it whole and clear and wanting, and then I put it away, because you do not show that hand, not ever, not to anyone.
“Bring her to the wedding,” I scoffed. I leaned back.
I gave them the grin, the wide easy one, the one that’s never thinking anything in particular.
“I don’t even know her name. She’d take my head off.
Have you met me? Women love me on sight, it’s a tragedy, but that one looks at me like I’m something stuck to her shoe.
” I stole the last arancino. “Now. Are we doing the third pasta or do I have to call Rosa myself.”
They laughed. The room moved on, the way I’d made it move on, smooth as ever. Best man, the both of them mine, the table full and warm and loud, Pietro home in his own skin and Sal at peace in his terrible exacting way and me in the middle of all of it making it work.
And the ache went through, just once, fast and clean and gone. They were getting married, paired and built and seated by branch. And I was the one who’d dance with everybody’s grandmother and make the whole thing sing and go home, after, to no one at all.