Chapter 9
Marco
My body woke me early. Or maybe it was her body.
My hand was on her hip. Somewhere in the night it had found the curve of bone through the silk of the dress she still wore and settled there with the unthinking confidence of a body that had decided, without consulting me, where it belonged.
Her back was against my chest. Her hair was on my pillow and also on my mouth and I didn’t move to fix either because I was not ready for this to end.
Serafina was asleep.
Not the brittle, stolen sleep I’d been cataloging all week—the way she’d close her eyes on conference calls for a count of three and open them like a woman punching a clock.
This was different. This was the body gone, the whole apparatus of her put down for the night, her breathing low and even and so deep I could feel it in the length of me where I was pressed against her back.
She’d slept.
I watched her for far too long. The small constellation of freckles at the top of her shoulder I hadn’t seen because her hair had been down.
The faint ghost of a tear track at her temple, dried to almost nothing—the record of something large that had happened in a small room on a leather chair and then happened again in this bed.
I’d deal with that later. When she wanted to talk. Not before.
Her mouth was parted. Soft. Not the instrument she’d used to trick me at Marchetti’s. Just a mouth.
My body had its own opinion about the length of her spine against me.
Specifically, my cock, which had woken up approximately fifteen minutes before my brain and was conducting an unsolicited campaign against my better judgment.
I breathed through it. Thought about tax law.
About the ledger on my desk. About Santo‘s face when I’d almost told him what she smelled like.
None of it worked. I was hard against the silk covering her hip and the silk was doing nothing to mediate the situation.
But she was sleeping.
She was sleeping, and it was the first time I’d seen her do it properly, and I would rather have cut my own hand off than wake her for the reason my body wanted to wake her.
I slid out.
Carefully. Inch by inch, the mattress transferring my weight by degrees so the change wouldn’t reach her.
My hand was the last thing to leave—I lifted it off her hip the way you lift a hand off a sleeping child, and she made a small sound, a question in her sleep, and rolled into the warm place I’d left behind and settled again.
The cashmere blanket was bunched at her waist. I drew it up over her shoulder.
Tucked the edge under her chin the way I’d tucked it last night.
Stood in the near-dark and looked at her for a count of five more because I was apparently a man who now did things like that.
The kitchen was cold but bright.
I pulled two espressos. The La Marzocco had been warm since five and I went through the ritual without thinking.
Dose. Distribute. Tamp, medium pressure, the calibrated resistance of coffee yielding under steel.
Lock the portafilter. Pull. The first shot came out the color of old varnish, the crema a thick caramel that broke slowly when I tapped the cup.
I set them both on the counter and then just stood there, watching the steam.
I made a decision.
My phone was on the counter.
I picked it up. Texted Dante. Push Cicero to Thursday. I’m off today.
Three dots. They stopped. They started. They stopped again. The don, composing. Then: Copy.
The economy of a man who had correctly deduced from the mere existence of my text that something had changed and had decided, wisely, not to ask. I loved my brother. He would be insufferable about this later. But not now.
I looked at the espressos. Looked at the clock. Seven-fifty-two.
She padded in five minutes later.
I heard her before I saw her—the whisper of bare feet on hardwood, a rhythm I had apparently filed away in whatever part of my brain had also filed the movement of her index finger turning pages. I turned.
She looked at me.
I pressed the cup into her hands. The ceramic was warm. Her fingers closed around mine around the cup for a second too long, and neither of us pretended it was accidental.
“Good news. No work today, baby girl.” I kept my voice low. The register from last night. “I’m showing you my city.”
Her mouth moved. The barest curve. Not the Nero smile, not the boardroom smile. The real one.
“Okay,” she said. “I think the boss will give me a day off.”
“You have to check wit—”
“I’m the boss, Daddy.”
She put the cup down. Set it on the counter so precisely the sound could have been a metronome, then stepped in, close, the silk brushing my thigh.
She reached for my shirt—gray, crew neck, the one she’d worn last night and I’d put on because that’s what was on the floor—caught a fistful at the hem and used it, not to pull me low but to anchor herself while she pressed her body into mine, up on tiptoe, mouth to mouth.
It wasn’t a morning kiss. It was a claim.
Her mouth opened against mine. Soft at first, then heat.
She tasted like the memory of sleep and the espresso she hadn’t even finished, and she made a sound—small, unguarded, a sound I’d heard before but never so close, never with her hand in my hair and her hips flush against me, silk so thin I could feel the warmth of her through every inch.
“Got it. You’re the boss.”
I squeezed her ass and she yelped with delight.
Lou Mitchell’s had been on Jackson since 1923 and the line on the sidewalk proved it. Tourists with guidebooks. Cops on their way to the courthouse. A couple of old men in windbreakers who looked like they’d been eating here since Eisenhower and would keep eating here until they couldn’t chew.
I put my hand at the small of her back and we skipped the line because the hostess waved us through. Serafina noticed. Her eyebrow lifted by a millimeter. She didn’t ask.
The booth was vinyl, red, cracked at one corner and repaired with silver tape a decade ago.
The table was laminate. The menu was laminated too and had been laminated so many times the corners had rounded into soft translucent curves.
Sinatra was not playing. Patsy Cline was, quietly, from a speaker somewhere above the counter.
The place smelled like butter and burnt sugar and griddle grease and coffee that had been brewing since before either of us was born.
The waitress was maybe sixty, hair the color of a wheat field in a drought, and she arrived at our booth in under thirty seconds with a pot of coffee and a small waxed-paper sleeve of Milk Duds which she set in front of Serafina with a smile.
“On the house, honey. First time?”
Serafina blinked at the Milk Duds like they were a small, chocolate-coated puzzle.
“Yes,” I said.
“You tell her to try the pancakes.” The waitress was already pouring coffee. “Lemon ricotta. You won’t regret it.”
She moved on. Serafina picked up the Milk Duds between her thumb and forefinger and examined before setting them down.
“What is happening?” she said.
“That’s the prune Danish girl. They‘ve been giving out free prune Danish and Milk Duds since the forties. It’s the whole thing.”
“The whole thing.”
“Yeah.”
“You brought me to a place where the whole thing is free candy.”
“I brought you to a place where the whole thing is that they’ve been doing the same thing for a hundred years and it still works.”
She looked at me over the coffee mug. Something moved in her face. The dry, flat laugh I‘d first heard at Marchetti’s arrived in her throat softer than I’d ever heard it. The edges off. A version of it that existed in this booth and hadn’t existed anywhere else.
“Okay,” she said. “Pancakes. I’ll yield.”
They came in a ridiculous stack. Four of them, each one bigger than the plate it was supposed to sit on, drizzled with something yellow and glossy and dusted with powdered sugar that was still sublimating into the air when the waitress set them down. Serafina looked at the plate. Looked at me.
“I cannot eat this. It’s too big for humans.”
“You can eat some of it.”
She cut a wedge with her fork. Took a bite. Chewed. Her face did a thing I had not seen it do before—a small, involuntary widening of the eyes that she tried to arrest immediately and did not quite arrest in time.
“Oh,” she said.
“Mmhmm.”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah.”
She ate the whole stack.
I did not mention it. I did not watch her do it, which is to say I watched her do it with the peripheral attention of a man who had been told not to look directly at the sun.
Rule two. Three meals a day. She’d walked herself into it — had picked up the fork and made the decision and finished the plate without a single reminder from me, and when the waitress came back and took her empty plate with a look of frank professional pride, Serafina’s face did the softening again and she said, quiet, “Thank you.”
The waitress patted her shoulder. Called her honey again. Moved on.
Serafina’s eyes followed her.
“In Palermo,” she said, “nobody calls you honey.”
“I know.”
“It is strange.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t hate it.”
I paid. Left a tip that was probably too much. We walked out into a Chicago morning that had decided to be kind—the sun was up proper now, the wind off the lake was flat, and the light on Jackson was clean gold.
Three blocks to the dock. She walked beside me. Her hand brushed mine twice in three blocks. Neither of us narrated it.
The boat was the Chicago’s First Lady, two levels, glass and white paint and the docent already at the microphone warming up his jokes.
I gave the tickets to the girl at the gangway and she found us the seats at the bow the woman on the phone had promised—a railing, a low bench, the river moving under us green-gray and slow.
The boat pulled away.