CHAPTER ONE
ADELINA
The next night a man walks into my uncle's restaurant at twenty to midnight and sits down in my section, and my uncle drops a glass.
Gio does not drop glasses.
Gio has been behind that bar since before I could see over it and he has a way of handling stemware that my mother used to say was the only elegant thing about him, and the glass goes out of his hand and hits the tile and comes apart and he does not look at it.
He does not bend down.
He puts the cloth on the bar, and he walks to the end where the phone is, and he stands next to the phone with his arms folded and he does not pick it up.
I have known my uncle for twenty-three years. He has never once stood like that.
I count the tables. Two left, both finishing, both regulars, both suddenly very quiet in a way that has nothing to do with me. Tony Benedetto is looking at his plate like there is something written on it.
I pick up my pad.
"We stop food at eleven," I say.
The man does not look up straight away.
He is sitting with his back to the wall in the corner booth, the one with the bad spring that I always steer people out of, and he has not taken his coat off, and his hands are flat on the table on either side of the paper mat.
Big hands. The knuckles on the right one are wrong. Flat where they should be round, the second and the third, and there is something black wound twice around the palm that I take for a bracelet before I get closer and see that it is a rosary.
Black beads. Wrapped tight enough to mark him.
"Coffee," he says.
His voice is very quiet. Not soft. Quiet the way a room goes when the boiler shuts off and you realise how loud it was.
"Coffee we can do."
"Then coffee."
I write cof on the pad because my hand is already moving and I do not need to write it at all, and I go to the machine and I pour it and the whole way there and the whole way back I am telling myself a story about how this is a man who wants coffee.
Tony Benedetto gets up. He has not finished. He leaves twenty on forty-two dollars of food and he goes out the front and he does not put his coat on until he is on the sidewalk.
The other table goes seven seconds later. I count.
And then it is the three of us. Me, and Gio standing next to a phone he is not using, and a man in the corner booth with his back to the wall.
I put the coffee down in front of him.
"Cream's on the table," I say.
"Thank you."
He does not touch it.
I go and get the broom and I sweep up the glass, because somebody has to and because it puts something in my hands, and when I straighten up he is watching me, and he is not pretending he was not.
Grey eyes. Pale. On a face that is nothing else pale.
"You're cleaning it up," he says.
"It's glass."
"It's his glass."
"He's sixty," I say. "His back's shot. You want a refill you have to say so, I'm not psychic."
And then I hear it, out loud, in the air, with nowhere to go.
There is a thing that happens to me when I am frightened, and it is not that I shut up.
Gio makes a noise at the end of the bar. It is not a word.
The man in the booth sets one finger on the handle of the cup and turns it about a quarter inch, and does not drink it, and looks at me for what feels like a long time and is probably two seconds.
"No," he says. "I'm fine."
"Okay."
"Sit down."
"I'm working."
"There's nobody in the restaurant."
"There's you in the restaurant."
He tips his head slightly, like I have said something he has to put somewhere.
"Sit down, please."
It is the please that moves me. That is the part I keep going over afterwards.
He could have said it the other way. He is a man who is clearly, obviously, structurally able to say it the other way, and the whole building already knows it, and he says please in a restaurant with broken glass on the floor and a sixty year old man standing at the phone.
I sit.
I sit on the outside edge of the bench opposite him with the broom still in my hand, which is not a power move, it is just that I forget I am holding it.
Up close he is enormous.
Not tall exactly, although he is that. Wide.
He takes up the booth the way furniture does.
There is a scar cutting through his left eyebrow and another one under his jaw on the right, four inches, old and white, and his hair is black and going grey on one side only, which for some reason is the thing that makes him a person to me instead of a shape.
"What's your name," he says.
"You know my name."
I do not know where that comes from.
He does not move. The coffee steams between us. Somewhere behind me Gio has gone back to the cloth and that one spot of his.
"I do," he says.
"Okay."
"Say it anyway."
"Adelina."
"Adelina what."
"You know that too."
"Say it anyway."
"Silvestri," I say. "Adelina Silvestri."
And he nods. Once. Slowly. Like somebody has handed him a receipt and it matches.
"You've been in here before," I say.
"Have I."
"You knew where the cream was. Nobody knows where the cream is. It's behind the sugar caddy and people ask me about forty times a night."
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The place a smile would go, if he had one available.
"You do that a lot," he says.
"Do what."
"Cover your mouth."
My hand is already halfway up.
It is halfway up before he has finished the sentence, and that is the whole problem, because I have been doing it since I was eight and I do not know when I am doing it, and the only way anybody has ever found out is by watching me long enough to see the shape of it.
I put my hand flat on the table.
"I chipped it falling off a wall," I say. "I was eleven. There wasn't the money that year, and then there wasn't the money the year after, and then it stopped being the kind of thing you spend money on."
He looks at my mouth for exactly as long as it takes to become unbearable.
"Don't do that," he says.
"Do what."
"Explain it."
The radio changes songs. Gio moves at the end of the bar and settles again.
"How old is your brother," he says.
Every warm thing in my body goes somewhere else.
I have been sitting in a booth being smart at a stranger for four minutes and I have been enjoying it, on some horrible level I am going to have to look at later I have been enjoying it, and he says your brother and the floor of the whole world moves about an inch to the left.
"Why," I say.
"Answer the question."
"Why are you asking about my brother."
"Adelina."
"He's nine." My voice comes out flat and fast and too loud in an empty restaurant.
"He's nine, he's got asthma, he has never met you, and if you say his name in here I will put this broom through the window and the whole street will come out, and you can do whatever you want to me after that but the whole street will have come out. "
Gio says, "Adelina," from the bar, and it is not the 1998 voice.
It is a voice I have never heard him use.
The man in the booth does not blink.
And then something goes across his face that I cannot read, that I will not be able to read for another nine weeks, and he looks down at the table and he moves the cup back the quarter inch he turned it.
"Nobody is going to say his name," he says.
"You just did."
"I said your brother."
"That's the same thing."
"No," he says. "It isn't."
He gets up.
He takes twenty seconds to do it, the way big men do, and he stands in the aisle of my uncle's restaurant and he puts two fingers in his coat pocket and takes out a hundred dollar bill and folds it once and puts it under the saucer of a coffee he did not drink.
"Your register was sixty short on Tuesday," he says.
I do not have anything to say to that.
"The light bill is the fourteenth of the month," he says. "You get a grace period of ten days, and they don't come out on a weekend, so it's the twenty-fourth."
"How do you."
"Buy the inhaler."
He is at the door before I get up.
He has to duck a little under the sign my grandmother hung in 1981 that says MANGIA, and he stops with his hand on the push bar, and he does not turn all the way around.
"Thursday," he says, to the glass. "Tell your uncle. Thursday, eight o'clock, he closes the back room and he doesn't take a reservation."
"Tell him yourself."
"I'm telling you."
And then the door, and the bell over it, and the cold coming in off 18th Avenue, and gone.
I sit back down in the booth he was in.
I do not decide to. My legs do it. The bench is still warm on his side and I put both hands flat on the table where his were, and I breathe in and out four times, and that is when they start shaking.
Not before. That is the thing about my hands. They wait until it is over and then they do it in private, and I have always found that very good manners.
There are eleven stools at my uncle's bar.
I count them from the booth. It takes nine seconds, and then I can stand up.
The hundred is still under the saucer.
"Leave it," Gio says.
"Zio."
"Adelina. Leave the money."
"It's a tip."
"It is not a tip."
"It's on my table, in my section, at the end of my shift." I take it out from under the saucer and fold it into my apron with the rest, and my hands are behaving now, and I make sure he can see that they are. "Sixty of it's yours. It was your drawer."
He does not answer me.
I stand in the middle of the floor holding a broom.
Through the window I watch him cross the lot, and there is a car waiting for him with the engine running and a man holding the back door, and I know that car.
I have seen that car. It was here on Tuesday with its headlights on for longer than thirty seconds while I stood in the rain with my brother on my hip.
And parked two spaces down from it, nose in, with the wiper on one side hanging off the way it has hung off since March, is my father's Buick.
My father's Buick is in the lot.
My father is not in the restaurant.
The Buick does not move. Not while the black car pulls out, not for a minute after, and then the interior light goes on for a second and I see the shape of him in the driver's seat with both hands on the top of the wheel and his head down, and the light goes off again.
He does not come in.
He sits in that lot the way he sat in another lot when I was fourteen.
Behind me, very carefully, like it is the thing he has to do before he can do anything else, my uncle Gio bends down and picks up the biggest piece of the broken glass off the floor with his fingers.
"Zio," I say. "Who was that."
He puts the piece of glass on the bar. He looks at it.
"Salvatore Marchetti," he says.
And out in the lot, my father's engine finally turns over.