Chapter 3 #3
And then—and this is the thing about my brothers, the thing that’s saved my life more than once—Sal looked at me a beat longer, and Pietro looked at Sal, and something passed between them that wasn’t about the op at all.
Because they’d both clocked it. The not eating.
The look like hell. The way I’d said her without saying her and caught it and edited it out, too late, too clumsy, when I’m never clumsy.
The whole loud machine that is Tonio Scordato running about forty percent quieter than usual and pointed somewhere none of them could see.
“He pushed her,” Pietro said, slowly, tasting it. “Her.”
“The collector,” I said. “He went hands-on with the owner. Of the bakery. It’s a relevant detail.”
“The bakery,” Sal said.
“The bakery girl,” Pietro said, and there it was, the corner of his mouth going up, the dread of the op folding right back over into the thing they’ve been doing to me since lunch yesterday, since eleven times, since so much bread.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said the bakery girl.”
“I said the bakery,” said Sal, dry as a stone, “Pietro said the girl. We are very precise men.”
“You’ve been down there every single morning for weeks,” Pietro said, leaning back now, settling in, lit up with it, my own cousin, my own flesh, who two years ago couldn’t smile and was now smiling entirely at my expense.
“Before any of this started. You go before dawn. You come back with enough bread to bury a man. You over-tip. You stay. And now you’re parked across the street at midnight watching her shop, blowing three months of work because some collector got handsy, and you sat down at this table this morning and the first time you mentioned her you got a look on your face like—Sal, did you see his face. ”
“I saw it.”
“This isn’t surveillance, fantasma,” I said, throwing the word back at him, reaching for the grin, reaching for the shutter, the wide easy one, the one that opens everything. “I mean—vecchio—”
It bounced.
I felt it bounce off them exactly the way it had bounced off her, slid right off, no purchase, and they grinned wider, the both of them, because of course it didn’t work, they’ve known me my whole life, they were there when I learned the grin, they watched me build it brick by brick on every bartender and bookie in Palermo, and a key doesn’t open the locksmith.
“He’s deflecting,” Pietro told Sal, delighted.
“He’s deflecting badly,” Sal agreed. “He usually deflects so well. Watch—Tonio. Tell me her name.”
“I don’t know her name.”
“You’ve been to her shop eleven times—”
“Fourteen,” I said, before I could stop it, and the room went off like a struck bell, the both of them, Pietro actually putting his head down on the wedding tablecloth he laughed so hard.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
I said it too fast and too hard and I heard it land wrong even as it came out of me—flat, no grin behind it, the boxer’s voice and not the morning man’s—and Pietro lifted his head off the tablecloth and the laugh died in the room like a candle pinched out.
“There’s a man going down there,” I said.
“He almost put his hands on her. He would be pushing her around an empty shop at night with nobody to see! The whole street’s flipped and she’s the last one and she won’t sell and she won’t pay, and you two are at the same table where we said the word Gianni, and you know what that machine does to a holdout, you know exactly what it does, and she’s standing in the middle of it alone with flour on her arms and nobody—there’s nobody, I’ve watched all week, there is not one single person in this world who helps that woman carry the flour.
She’s alone. She’s completely fucking alone.
So no. It’s not funny. She’s in real danger. Knock it off.”
Silence.
They were freaked out. I’ve never let a serious thing stay serious in my life.
Pietro looked at Sal. Sal looked at Pietro. And the thing that came up between them this time was not the op and was not the tease and was something else entirely, something dawning, something I’d put right in their hands by trying to take it back.
“Tonio,” Pietro said. Gently. Which was worse than anything. “Look at me.”
“I’m looking at you.”
“He’s serious,” Pietro said to Sal, wondering, like a man reporting a sunrise. “Sal. He’s actually serious.”
“I see it.”
“I have never in my life seen him serious about a woman.”
“No,” Sal agreed. “He is not serious about women. Never.”
“It’s not—” I started, tried to grin, failed. “It’s not about her. It’s about the business. The city. Our jobs. Family. All of it.”
But there must have been something about the way I said it, something unconvincing, because Pietro looked at me and said, quietly, “Madonna.” Pietro said, very quietly, and he wasn’t teasing now, or he was, but it had turned all the way over into something else, the astonished glee gone soft at the edges. “You’re in love with her.”
And I didn’t have anything. Nothing. They were right, and I hadn’t even realised it. I was in love and I didn’t even know the poor woman’s name.
“So,” Sal said, and the iron had a kindness in it now, buried deep where you’d never find it if you didn’t know him.
“Here is your situation. You’ve blown the cover anyway.
You’re already the man who hits like family on her block.
There is no putting that back in the box.
” He picked up the pen. Pointed it at me.
Dry. Devastating. The corner of his mouth not moving at all, which is how you know.
“So bring her to the wedding, then. If she’s so unimpressed by you.
What’s the harm? She already looks at you like something on her shoe—you said so yourself, at this very table. One more no won’t kill you.”
“She’d take my head off,” I said. “She doesn’t say two words to me. She fed the dog and told me he was the nicest thing about me by a distance and threw me out of her shop. That’s the whole relationship. That’s everything that’s ever happened.”
“Bring the dog, then,” Pietro said. “He’s the only one of you with a chance.”
They laughed. I let them.
I couldn’t invite her to the wedding—it was madness. But maybe there was something else I could do.