A Marriage of Bleeding Roses

PROLOGUE

ADELINA

The salamander grill at Da Gio has burned me nine times.

I know it is nine because I count. The one on the inside of my left forearm is the big one, from the August I turned nineteen, and it has gone shiny and pale and it does not match the rest of me anymore. The other eight faded. That one decided to stay.

I reach under it now for the last tray of bread and my sleeve rides up and the heat finds the same spot it always finds, and I do not make a sound, because Matteo is asleep in booth four and it took forty minutes to get him there.

Ten of these.

Ten and the bread is in and the ovens go off and then it is just the floors and the register and the walk-in and then we can go home.

I can do ten.

My uncle has a radio on the shelf above the pass that only gets one station and the station only plays men who have been dead for fifty years, and Gio turns it up at four every night, when the last table goes, like the volume is a thing he has been saving all day.

Tonight the last table went at ten past.

Tonight is slow. Tonight is a Tuesday in the middle of October with rain in it, and the men who come to Da Gio do not like rain, and so we did sixty covers instead of a hundred and ten, and I am counting that too.

Sixty covers is four hundred and change on my sheet after tip-out.

Four hundred is the inhaler and the light bill and the half of the rent my father is going to say he already paid.

I stack the trays. I wipe down. I pull the mats and hose them out the side door in the rain with my sneakers off, because I only have the one pair and they take two days to dry on the radiator and I work Thursday.

There is a man asleep in the doorway of the laundromat across the alley.

He has been there since the spring. His name is Bernard and he tells everybody he was in the merchant marine, and I do not know if that is true and I have never once thought it was worth finding out.

I put the mats back. I go through the kitchen and I make a plate out of the pans that are going in the bin anyway, the ends of things, the burnt edge of the lasagna, the last four meatballs that have been sitting in the sauce since seven and have gone soft in the way the old men complain about and I have always liked.

Gio does not look up when I go past him with it.

Gio has not looked up when I go past him with it for six years.

I put it on the step where Bernard can reach it without getting up and I put a fork on the napkin because eating with your hands out of a foil tray is a thing that takes something out of a person, and I go back inside and wash my hands to the wrist and get on with the floors.

That is the whole of it. Burnt edges and four soft meatballs and a fork on a napkin.

I am not good about it, either. I do not think about Bernard when I am not looking at Bernard. It is food that is going in the bin and I happen to be the person standing next to the bin.

That is all it is. Whatever anybody decides to make of it later.

At half five I count the register and I am sixty dollars down.

I count it again. I count it a third time with the tape, and the tape agrees with me, and there is no version of the arithmetic where the drawer is right.

Gio is wiping the same clean spot on the bar. He has a system with that spot. He works on it when he does not want to be asked something.

"Zio."

"Mm."

"The drawer's short."

He wipes. "It's not short."

"It's sixty short."

"Then it's sixty." He lifts the cloth and looks at the spot and puts the cloth back on it. "Your father came by at six."

There it is.

There is a particular way my chest does when somebody says your father came by, and it is not a new feeling and it has never once been a good one, and the strange part is that it is not anger. It is closer to the thing you do when you are carrying too much and somebody opens a door for you.

Relief that he is alive.

Then the rest of it.

"He took sixty dollars out of your drawer," I say.

"Out of my drawer. It's my drawer."

"Zio."

"Adelina." Gio has a voice for my name that he does not use for anything else. It is the voice of a man saying a thing he has decided not to argue about in 1998. "Go home. Take the boy."

"He hasn't picked up the phone in two days."

"I know."

"Two days, Gio."

"I know how many days it is." He folds the cloth. He folds it in a way that means the conversation is finished, and then he does not walk away, which means it is not. "Your father's got something going on."

"He always has something going on."

"Not like this."

I should stop there.

I know what the folded cloth means. I have known what the folded cloth means since I was fifteen. There is a whole other version of tonight where I put my coat on and pick up my brother and go out the front door, and I can see it, and it is right there, and it costs nothing.

I don't stop there.

"What does that mean," I say.

Gio picks the cloth back up.

Matteo sleeps like somebody who has been told he is allowed to.

That is the only thing in my life I am completely sure I did right.

He is nine, and he is face down in booth four with his cheek on a math worksheet and his mouth open, and there is a pen in his fist he has been holding since eight o'clock, and when I lift him he does the thing where his arms go around my neck before he is awake enough to know he is doing it.

He weighs too much for this now. He has weighed too much for this for about a year and I have not stopped and I am not going to.

"Addie."

"Mm."

"Did I finish it."

"You finished it."

"I didn't finish it."

"Go back to sleep."

His inhaler is in my coat pocket and I know exactly how much is left in it because I shake it when he cannot hear me doing it, and what it does now is not the sound a full one makes.

It is the sound of a thing with about nine days in it, and it is sixty-one dollars at the pharmacy on 20th, and I had four hundred, and now I have three forty, and October is the month of the light bill.

I stand in the middle of my uncle's restaurant with my brother on my hip and I do that arithmetic twice.

Then I do it a third time, differently, and it works, if I pick up Sunday brunch and if nobody gets sick and if the rent is actually paid.

It works.

It is fine.

I have said it's fine so many times in my life that the words have gone smooth, like a step.

You cannot tell what they were shaped like originally.

My mother used to say it. She said it in the car in the rain with her hand flat on the bottom of the steering wheel.

She said it in the hallway at Maimonides at four in the afternoon on the nineteenth of March with her hand on the small of my back, pushing me gently toward a plastic chair, because she was about to go in and have a baby and I was fourteen and I did not want to sit down.

It's fine, Adelina. Sit down.

Forty minutes later a nurse who had nobody else to give him to put my brother in my arms in that corridor, and my father was in the parking lot, and he stayed in the parking lot, and he was still in the parking lot when they came to ask me which funeral home.

I have not sat down since.

That is the joke I do not tell people. It is a good one. I have never once said it out loud.

The rose is on the bar when I come out of the walk-in with the last of the milk.

One. Red. Cut short, the way you cut one for a glass and not for a vase, and there is no paper on it and no card and no ribbon, and it is lying across the wood next to the tip jar like somebody put it down to shake a hand and forgot about it.

I stop in the middle of the floor with a crate of milk on my hip.

"Gio."

"Yeah."

"Who came in."

"Nobody came in."

"Somebody came in."

He looks up. He looks at the bar and he sees it and something happens in his face that I do not have a name for, and it is over before I can, and then he is my uncle again, sixty and tired and wiping.

"Nobody came in," he says.

The seventh one.

The first one arrives when I am seventeen and I decide it is from a boy called Danny Petrosino and I am unbearable about it for a week and a half. Then Danny Petrosino gets a girlfriend and moves to Yonkers, and the second one comes anyway.

The third one I hide.

The fourth one Paola sees. Somebody's been watching you, she says, in the voice she keeps for being the first one to put a bad word on a thing.

And here is the part I cannot explain to anybody, including myself.

It does not frighten me.

Six years of proof that a person I have never seen knows what day I was born and where I work and what time I lock up, and every one of them is flat in a phone book in a shoebox under my bed, and not once, not one single time, has the word run got anywhere near my mouth.

I know how it sounds.

It is the only thing all year that comes for me.

Everything else in my life comes for somebody I am holding.

I pick it up. The stem is still wet at the cut, so it has not been out of water long, and it smells like an actual rose, which the ones in the deli never do. I put it in my coat pocket with the inhaler.

"Happy birthday," Gio says, to the bar.

"Thanks, zio."

"Twenty-three."

"Twenty-three."

"Your mother was twenty-three."

He says it and then he goes into the kitchen, and I stand there with a crate of milk on my hip in an empty restaurant, and Frank Sinatra finishes and somebody dead starts a new one.

I get Matteo's coat on him standing up, which is a skill.

I turn off the lights in the front and leave the one over the register.

I check the back door twice because I always check it twice.

I count the stools. There are eleven stools and there have been eleven stools since I was fifteen and I count them every night, and I could not tell you when that started or why it makes me able to leave.

Six.

Then out the side, into the rain, with my brother asleep on my shoulder and his backpack in my other hand and my keys in my teeth.

And the lot is not empty.

There is a car in it, black, parked nose out at the far end by the fence where the light does not reach, and it is not one of the cars that is ever in that lot, and the engine is off.

The headlights are on.

I stand there in the rain with a nine year old on my hip and a rose in my pocket, and I look at those two lights, and I wait for them to go out, the way lights do when someone has just come out of somewhere and has not pulled away yet.

They do not go out.

I count to thirty.

They do not go out.

And I do the thing I do.

I do not run. I do not scream. I do not go back inside and tell my uncle.

I shift my brother higher onto my shoulder, and I put my chin up, and I walk to my car in the rain like somebody is watching me.

Somebody is.