Chapter 19 #2
“It was worth a tray of proof,” he said, soft, and the grin gentled into something I had no defense against, the thing in his eyes that gets through the wall I keep up no matter how high I build it.
I looked at him through the hole in my wall, grey to the jaw, beaming, dust drifting down between us in the light. And I leaned forward over the not-level lip of the brick he’d just knocked through and I kissed his dusty mouth through the wall.
It tasted of plaster and it crunched and I didn’t care.
He made a low pleased sound and kissed me back, his good hand coming up to hold my jaw through the hole, gentle, careful, the killer’s hand that put a man into the tile, the Daddy’s hand, the hand that had crawled across a killing floor to get to me, holding my face like it was the only thing worth holding, and meaning it with his whole chest.
“See you tonight,” he said, when we broke. “It’s six months.”
I knew which six months. It went through me cold and quiet under the warmth, the pang of it, the old man in the linen suit going down in the spreading red, the chair that would be empty at a table tonight. Six months since the killing floor. Six months since everything changed.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got it covered. I’m bringing the loaf.”
He nodded. He knew which loaf, too.
“See you tonight,” I said, and I meant all of it.
We ate the first meal in Tonio’s restaurant before there were lights in it.
The wiring wasn’t done. The oven wasn’t lit.
There were studs where the walls would go and a tarp over the front where the glass would be, and the floor was poured but bare, and into all of that they’d carried one long table and two dozen mismatched chairs and a forest of candles in jars, so the half-built room came up gold and shuddering at the edges, the way a thing comes up that isn’t finished but is loved anyway.
There was a chair at the head of it that nobody sat in.
I knew whose it was before anyone said. They’d set it like all the others, plate and glass and fork, and every so often through the night somebody’s eye would go to it and come away again.
Don Arturo’s chair. Six months gone. They’d buried him in Sicily, and tonight they toasted his empty chair in a room that wasn’t finished, and I sat among them and belonged.
Sal at one side, the wall, immovable, the graze long healed off his jaw and the grief no longer bolted down so much as carried, openly now, a weight he’d stopped pretending he didn’t hold.
Pietro across from him, with Angela tucked under his arm, her hand on his thigh, the brittle vigilance gone all the way out of her into something I could only call home.
Marco, warm and wicked, refilling glasses he hadn’t been asked to refill, watching the room the way he watches everything, missing nothing, the charm a thin coat over a mind that frightened me a little if I thought about it.
Dante grave at the far end with Gemma small and bright beside him, her hand in his, the don and his wife.
Donatella with her red lipstick and her phone face-down for once.
Santo and his dark quiet woman, Cora, and at her feet, asleep with his great grizzled scarred head on her boot, a chihuahua the size of a loaf who had bitten three waiters before the soup.
And under the table, sprawled across the bare poured floor in the exact spot guaranteed to inconvenience the most people, taking up half the room with his sheer grumbling bulk—
Olimpo.
Alive. Scarred down his whole left flank where the fur had burned off and grown back wrong, patchy and grey, a long bald road of shiny skin he’d carry to the end of his days.
They’d told me, in those first weeks, that he might not make it, that his lungs were full of it, that they wouldn’t promise anything.
And he’d made it. The dog who’d gone into the fire after me , the one who got there, the one who tried.
He slept now with his head on Cora’s foot and a leg in everyone’s way and he was the most beloved animal in two crime families and he knew it.
I had a hand down on his great side, on the scarred flank, and he sighed in his sleep and leaned into it, and I thought I might not deserve any of this.
Pietro stood up to tell a story.
The most contained of all of them, the one whose volume only ever went down, on his feet at the table with a glass in his hand, telling a story about the old man—something from Sicily, from when Pietro was a boy, Arturo and a goat and a priest and a misunderstanding that took three switches of language to land—and the whole loud table came apart laughing.
Roaring. Sal put his face in his hand. Marco wheezed.
Donatella threw her napkin. Tonio, beside me, laughed so hard the healed ribs made him wince and laugh harder.
And Pietro got to the end of it and his voice did a thing, caught, just for a breath, on the old man’s name, on the goat, on a Sicily sixty years gone, and the laughing went straight over into the other thing without anybody having to decide, the wet standing bright in every eye at the table at once, grief and joy come up the same nerve, the way they always come up the same nerve, the way I’d stopped being able to tell apart somewhere in this family.
Pietro raised his glass to the empty chair and said something in Sicilian, low, and they all answered it, low, and they drank, and the candles shuddered, and I drank too, and the old man’s name was in my mouth even though I’d only known him for one golden impossible day.
At the head of the table, where the old man’s empty chair sat toasted, the real head of the family sat one place down.
Serafina. Quiet the way deep water is quiet. Six months in and the Scordato organization ran on her word now, steady, no fuss, the dark sharp mind that had stood in the center of a killing floor and said take it apart in three words and watched it done. The men deferred to her without seeming to.
And then the one cold thread came across the table, light, the way the worst things come.
Marco said it. Pleasant, almost offhand, into a lull.
New York. Gianni had surfaced in New York.
Building again—storefronts, a corridor, the same machine, the same shape, the rot that had slipped the net on the killing floor and run for the open door and gone, six months underground, surfacing now a thousand miles east with new money behind him and the old hunger intact.
Sal went still.
Not the everyday stillness. The other one—the one that says paragraphs, the one that meant be afraid.
The big scarred hand stopped on the stem of his glass.
The grief he’d been carrying openly all night went somewhere behind his eyes and something colder came forward, and the whole table felt it, the laughter draining toward the empty chair, the man who’d put his father’s killer’s name on the killing-floor concrete six months ago hearing it land again on a finished table.
Then Angela picked up the bottle.
She reached across, the new wife, the woman who reads a thing’s true shape in its margins, and she refilled Sal’s glass without being asked, and then Pietro’s, and then mine, unhurried, and the act of it said what she didn’t.
“Another city,” she said, easy. “It’s a problem for the future. Another year.”
Sal looked at her a long beat, the way he’d looked at me in a hospital hallway six months ago, and the stillness eased, not because the thing was gone but because tonight wasn’t for it. He picked up the glass she’d filled. He drank.
Olimpo sighed against my hand, and the candles burned, and we let it be somebody else’s problem, in some other city, for some other night.
Tonio’s opening night came on a Friday. He had been nervous, which seemed ridiculous to me, because normally Tonio didn’t do nerves.
The pass-through, finished at last, level now because I’d made him redo it, a clean stone-lipped window between my kitchen and his, propped open all day so the two shops breathed each other’s air.
My flour went through it. The scent from his oven came back the other way.
By mid-morning on opening day the whole thing ran as one loud animal, two rooms and one wall and a window in it, the bread coming off my rack and through the hole onto his tables, the char and garlic and woodsmoke of his fire rolling back into my proofing room to fight with the orange-blossom and the honey, and the noise—
I loved the noise.
I stood in the middle of it and let it wash over me.
Theo singing, badly. Eleni telling him to die.
The radio losing to the mixer. Through the wall, Tonio’s kitchen, louder still—his cousins had come to help on opening day, the whole loud clan crammed into a ten-table room, somebody’s voice going up in Sicilian, a pan slamming, Tonio bellowing an order and then bellowing a joke and then bellowing a song.
Two shops. One wall. A window in it. A wall of sound you couldn’t think through if you tried.
“Eleni,” I said. “Come here. We’re doing the loaf.”
She came. She wiped her hands and came. The mastic loaf. My father’s loaf.
“Watch my hands,” I said. “Don’t write it down. Hands first, words after.”
I made the dough plain and let her feel it come up under her palms, the spring of it, the way it tells you when it’s ready.
You have to learn to listen because it doesn’t say it twice.
And then I crushed the mastic, the little tears of resin, and I held them in my palm for her to smell—pine, sharp, clean—and I told her the thing my father told me, the thing the old woman in the window had given back to me over a koulouraki the day before everything broke.