Chapter 1 #4
They were smiling now, the both of them, because that’s how we survive these conversations—we put a joke over the abyss so we can stand on it.
Bring her to the wedding. It had gone from a tease to an assignment and back to a tease in the space of an hour, and the laughing was real and the dread was real and they were the same thing now, the warm and the cold, the girl and the case, all one job.
“Fine,” I said. I gave them the grin. I always give them the grin. “I’ll suffer for the family. I’ll go drink coffee and watch a beautiful woman bake bread. The sacrifices I make.”
But under the table, where neither of them could see it, my hands had gone very still.
I’d be living on her block now. Watching her doorway.
Building a case that ran up through a corridor of leaned-on storefronts toward a man I’d called cousin my whole life.
And the one bright stubborn light in the middle of all of it, the holdout, the keystone, the thing that, pulled, would crack the whole block open—
—was her.
Idropped Pietro first. He was going home to her, to the apartment with the seating chart taped to the fridge and the woman who’d put the lights back on in him, and he clasped my shoulder at the curb and said grazie, Toe, for all of it, and meant it, and went inside to his life.
Then I drove Sal and the dog back, and Olimpo gave me one last judgmental grumble and lumbered out of the car to go be Sal’s, because he was always Sal’s, he’d only ever been on loan.
Sal stood in his doorway with the great wet beast leaning on his leg and looked at me a second too long, the way he does, like he was about to say a true thing.
He didn’t. He just said, “Good work today.” And went in.
And then it was just me. The car, the dark, the heater ticking, and the particular quiet that comes down after you’ve spent a whole day being the noise.
I should have gone home. When we first moved here, we lived together in a carriage house. Soon after Pietro met Angela though, that changed. I had an apartment with my name on the lease now and a bed in it. But I didn’t go home.
I drove. I told myself I was just driving, just letting the engine cool me out, just shaking the day loose—and somewhere in the lying I noticed where my hands had taken the wheel, which was back toward the river, back toward the freight line, back toward the dead block with the same sign-shop signage and the air going out of it store by store.
The block. My block now. My assignment, my cover, my case. I parked across from it the way I’d stood across from it that morning a lifetime ago, and I shut the engine off, and I sat in the cold and the dark and the quiet, and I looked.
Dozed off. But I woke the following morning, early.
Three in the morning. Maybe four. The hour with no name.
Every storefront dark—the cowed ones, the bought ones, the for-sale ones, the whole leaned-on length of the street black as the inside of a fist. The grocer dark.
The church candles guttered out. Nothing moving, nothing warm, nothing awake, a whole block holding its breath in the dark while somebody patient and ugly six miles or six thousand miles away ate it one mouthful at a time.
And then.
A light.
It came up soft and gold mid-block, north side, the way it had come up every morning I’d ever come to watch for it—the ovens going on, the heat throwing up against the steamed front glass, the thin gilt haze of flour catching it. FILOXENIA in its worn green paint.
She was in there.
I sat there and I looked at the light and I didn’t have a joke for it.
Out here, alone, there was nobody to be funny for, and the charm came all the way down like a shutter going up the other way, and underneath it was just this—this stupid, enormous, unmanageable thing in my chest that the light put there, the thing I wouldn’t look at in daylight because you don’t show that hand.
Forte come un bue. Strong as an ox.
She didn’t have anybody either. I’d worked it out over three months of buying too much bread.
In she went in the dark, out came the bread, and I had never once seen a single soul help her carry it.
She was as alone in there as I was out here.
The grout and the holdout. Two people pouring all their warmth into the thing in front of them—her into the dough, me into everyone else—because the dough doesn’t leave you and the family can’t, and that way you never have to find out what’s underneath, never have to risk the one warm thing being for you.
I should have driven home. I should have folded it away with the cold useful things and gotten some sleep and come back at a decent hour with a joke ready.
I didn’t move.
I sat in the dark across from the only warm light on the street, restless, aching, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food, drawn toward it the way a body is drawn toward fire on a cold night—warm, warm, do not touch—and I did not yet know why, or I knew exactly why and would not say it, even out here, even to nobody, even in Sicilian.
The light burned on. Gold against the black. Stubborn. Awake.