CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ADELINA
The woman at the bank in Glen Cove asks me three times if I am all right.
She asks me once when I hand over the slip, and once while the machine is counting, and once more when she puts the envelope on the counter, and by the third time I understand that there is a script for this.
A twenty-three year old girl in a coat that is wrong for the building takes four thousand dollars out in cash on a Tuesday morning and there is a man in a suit waiting in a car outside, and this woman has been trained on it.
"I'm fine," I say. "It's for my uncle."
"Of course."
"He's got a restaurant."
"Of course, ma'am."
She has a name badge that says Doreen and five years of somebody's management behind her eyes, and she puts her hand flat on the counter next to the envelope for about a second before she takes it away.
"There's a number on the back of the statement," she says. "Any hour."
Everybody in my life keeps telling me there is a number.
Frankie does not ask me where.
That is the thing I keep turning over in the back of the car with four thousand dollars in my bag.
He picked me up at the door at five past nine, he said good morning signora, and he has driven me to a bank and now onto the Belt and he has not asked one question, and last night when I said and I'd rather you didn't tell him he looked at me for slightly too long and then said yes signora, and that is all that happened.
"Frankie."
"Signora."
"Did you tell him."
Frankie changes lanes.
"No," he says.
"Are you going to get in trouble."
"No."
"Because if you are, I will tell him myself, I am not having somebody lose a job over."
"Signora." He looks at me in the mirror, once, quickly, and then back at the road. "He told me in front of Tommaso, the day before you came, that if you ever asked me that, I do it, and I don't tell him. He said it like a rule. He does rules."
"He does rules," I say.
"He really does rules," says Frankie.
And I sit in the back of a car on the Belt Parkway with my bag on my knees and I have to look out of the window for a while.
Da Gio at half six on a Tuesday should be sixty covers of prep.
There are four people in it.
Two at the bar and an old couple at a table by the window, and the specials board has three things on it instead of nine, and there is one girl on the floor who I do not know, and my uncle is down the far end where the phone is, with his reading glasses on and a stack of invoices.
He sees me and takes the glasses off.
"No," he says.
"I haven't said anything."
"You've got a bag and you've got a face. No."
I sit on a stool.
I count them while I am doing it, all eleven, out of habit, and Gio watches me do it and something happens in his mouth.
"Zio."
"Adelina."
"There's four thousand dollars in this bag and it is mine. It is not his. It is out of an account in my name at a bank in Glen Cove where a woman called Doreen asked me three times if I was in trouble, and the money in it is mine to do what I want with, and I want to do this with it."
"I don't want it."
"Thursday and Friday."
"I don't want it, sweetheart."
"You have lost forty per cent of your covers," I say, "because my father walked out of your back room, and the reason he was in your back room is me."
Gio puts both hands flat on the bar.
"The reason he was in my back room," he says, "is that he stole four million dollars. Say the true thing. Don't do the thing your mother did where you put it on yourself because it fits."
We look at each other for a while.
Then I take the envelope out and I put it in the register, in the drawer, under the tray, which is a thing I have done four hundred times in this building and which he cannot stop me doing without coming round the bar.
"Adelina."
"It's already in."
"Take it out."
"I'm not taking it out, I put it in the drawer, it's in the drawer now, it's been in the drawer, it's basically been in the drawer for years." I shut it. "You can spend it or you can leave it under the tray until you die."
My uncle looks at the ceiling.
"Your mother," he says, "used to do exactly this to me."
And then the door to the back room opens.
I know what it is without turning round, because of the smell. Amaro Montenegro at half seven in the morning, and a coat that has been slept in, and under it the aftershave he has worn since 1996 which I could pick out of a hundred.
"There she is," my father says.
The old couple by the window look up.
"Zio," I say. "Is he living here."
"He's been in the back since Friday."
"He's been in the back since Friday and you didn't tell me."
"He's my brother," Gio says.
We sit in booth four because my father sits down in booth four, and I follow him, and I hate myself for following him, and I do it anyway.
He looks all right.
That is the worst part. He has shaved. He has his good coat and he is talking before he is all the way into the seat, and within about ninety seconds he has told me three things, and here they are.
That he is glad. Genuinely glad, sweetheart, because Marchetti is a serious man and a serious man looks after what is his, and there are girls on this avenue who would take that deal in a second.
That Paola has been difficult about the house.
And that he is going to make it right, all of it, he has got something moving, he cannot say what, but in about six weeks.
"Pa."
"Six weeks. Eight at the outside."
"Pa. Stop."
"You'll see."
And there it is, laid out on a paper mat between us, the exact conversation I described to myself standing in front of a basement door in Staten Island eight days ago. My mother is going to come into it in a minute. Then the part where he has been hurt. Then the part where he did all of it for us.
He does not disappoint me.
"Your mother would have," he starts.
"Don't."
"I'm only saying she'd have."
"Don't say her name to me," I say, "in this building, at eleven in the morning, with a drink in you. Say anything else. Say anything at all except that."
My father sits back.
And his face does a thing I have never seen it do, which is that it gives up for a second.
The charm goes off it like a light going off in a window, and underneath there is a fifty-two year old man in a slept-in coat who is frightened, and I get about one second of him, and it is the only second of him I have ever had.
Then it comes back on.
"I need nine thousand dollars," he says.
I have given my father money forty or fifty times.
I have given it to him out of tips, in twenties, folded, at this table.
I have given it to him when Matteo needed a coat.
I have given it to him at my mother's wake.
I have never once said no, not one single time in my entire life, because the arithmetic of saying no was always worse than the arithmetic of saying yes.
"No," I say.
He laughs.
"I'm not asking your husband. I'm asking you. You've got an account, Paola said."
"No."
"Adelina."
"No."
"It's ten thousand dollars, it's nothing, it's what he spends on."
"No," I say, for the third time, and it comes out completely flat, and I am about as surprised as he is.
My father looks at me.
And then he does the last thing, the thing under all the other things, the one I have been ducking since I was nine years old.
"You think he's different," he says.
"I don't think anything."
"You think he's a serious man and I'm a bum.
That's fine. That's fair, I've been a bum.
" He turns his glass on the mat. "You want to know who I was moving that money for?
Six years. You want to know who put it in front of me in the first place, who set the routes, who told me which trucks and which weeks? "
"Pa."
"Go home," my father says, "and get the transport book, and look at whose signature is on the authorisations. Go on. October 2020. Look at the bottom of the page."
The old couple are paying at the register.
Gio has not moved from the phone end. His hands are flat on the wood and he is not pretending he cannot hear.
"You're lying," I say.
"Sure."
"You're lying, because if that was true you'd have said it in the back room on Thursday, in front of six men, instead of offering him your own son."
My father's mouth goes thin.
"Yeah," he says. "You're right. I would have."
Gio follows me to the door.
He comes round the bar to do it, which at sixty with his back is a production, and he gets to the front before I do and puts his hand flat on the glass so I cannot push it.
"Listen to me."
"Zio, I have to."
"Thirty seconds." He does not take his hand off the door. "What he said about the book. Whose name is on the authorisations."
"He's lying."
"He might be lying," my uncle says. "Or he might be telling you the one true thing he knows, at the exact moment he worked out it would hurt you the most. Your father is not a smart man, Adelina. He is a very, very good aimer."
I look at the floor.
"So which is it," I say.
"I don't know."
"Zio."
"I genuinely do not know, and I want you to hear that from me, because everybody else in your life is going to be sure about it in one direction or the other and I am not.
" He takes his hand off the glass. "Here is what I know.
A man came into my restaurant six years ago, in October, and he sat in the corner and he ate a plate of food and he watched you take the ends out to Bernard on the step.
And I watched him watch you. And then he paid, and he tipped ninety on a forty dollar check, and he left, and he came back. "
"He came back."
"Four or five times a year. Six years." Gio wipes at nothing. "Always on a night you were working. Always in your section. Never once said a word to you until last week."
The room goes quite far away.
"You never told me."
"No."
"Zio, you never told me."
"What was I going to say?" My uncle opens his hands.
"That there is a man in my restaurant four times a year and he is a very serious man and he sits where he can see you and he has never done one thing wrong?
What do I do with that? Call who? And say what?
" He shakes his head once. "So I put him in your section every time, because the other girls are not careful, and I stood at the phone for six years, and I never picked it up.
That's what I did. That's my whole contribution. "
I have my hand on the door.
"Was he good to you," I say. "Those times."
"He was polite," Gio says. "He was the most frightening polite man I ever served."
I do not cry in the restaurant.
I do not cry on the sidewalk. I get into the back of the car and I say, "Home, please, Frankie," and he pulls out onto Eighteenth Avenue, and we get about nine blocks.
Then I say, "Can you stop."
He stops on a hydrant outside a laundromat.
And I sit in the back of a car I did not pay for, in a coat that is wrong, with four thousand dollars of my own money in a register drawer behind me, and I put both hands over my face and I make a sound I have not made since I was fourteen.
It takes about two minutes.
Frankie does not turn round and does not say anything and does not offer me a tissue, and at some point during it he very quietly turns the radio off.
When I am done I say, "Okay."
"Okay, signora."
"That didn't happen."
"What didn't," says Frankie, and puts the car in gear.