CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
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MARY
Esperanza Cruz set her stamp down on the dining table at ten in the morning and squared it to the edge of the wood with two fingers, and then squared it again.
“Right hand, m’ija.” The stamp wheel went around to the date. “All of your name, and the Warren at the end of it.”
“Mary Corinne Warren.”
Then Esperanza wrote the date again in her book, because she does not trust rubber. December sun came straight in off the water. It lay across that table in one long bar. Three men were standing at the far end of it, because nobody had told them yet that they could sit.
Nicolas had set one chair with its back to the doorway and left the wall-side place for me. He stood behind his until I arrived with a box of pastelitos on my hip.
“Sit down, Luca,” I said. “All three of you. You’re making Esperanza nervous.”
“I’ve never once been nervous in this apartment,” Esperanza said. “Sit down anyway. She’s paying me.”
Luca sat on the corner of the table, which is not sitting. Rian dragged a chair around so he could watch the terrace door and the hallway at once. The legs went over the stone with a noise like a zipper coming down. Nobody said anything about that either.
Nicolas asked me to marry him in the dark last night and I did not answer him in the dark. I wanted the light on it. I wanted witnesses. I wanted flour on my hands and a stamp on the table, because he asked it on the one night of his life when he had nothing left in his hands to hand me instead.
“Last night,” I said. “You asked me something, Nicolas.”
Rian’s head came up. Luca put down the paper clip he had taken off my pages.
“Yes. On purpose. And it’s not going anywhere near the paper, Nicolas, because I’m not putting the one choice I made where somebody could hold it.”
“Then don’t,” Nicolas said.
Luca opened his mouth, and shut it, and opened it again. “That’s the shortest closing argument I’ve ever heard a man make and it worked, so I’m going to stop talking before I—”
“Do that,” Rian said.
My heart had gone off before any of it reached the part of me that decides things. I put my palm on the dining table. The wood was warm in the sun. For once I knew what every page on it was going to say.
“You’ve been taking the wrong chair since the first night in my kitchen, Nicolas. I know why now.”
“Sit down, Mary,” Nicolas said.
Nicolas answers a smaller question than the one you asked him.
He had done it since September. Now I could tell when he was hiding and when he simply wanted me near him.
This was the second one. I sat down with the wall behind me and the door in front of me.
I took up the whole of that chair, all of me, and I did not make myself narrower in it for one person at that table.
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Luca stood up at the end of the dining table to read, because he stands to read.
“Page one. This agreement is between four adults, and not one of them is consideration for any of the others.”
“Read that again, slower,” Rian said.
“You’ve heard it twice.”
“Then a third time won’t kill you, Luca.”
“Both of you, quiet,” Esperanza said. “She’s paying me by the hour and you’re costing her croquetas.”
Luca laughed before he could help it. That is the only way that man ever loses anything. Then he read.
I wrote my terms at my own counter with the oven on for the heat.
Luca put the legal language around them; I checked each change against what I had written.
The last page stayed in my words. I numbered them myself in blue ballpoint, because the printer at the shop will not do it.
I pressed hard enough that the numbers came up on the back of every sheet. Every one of them is crooked.
“Page three. The Class B unit stands as written. One quarter, undilutable, and it’s consideration for nothing, because nothing was ever bought with it.”
“Say the next line.”
“It also says nobody’s allowed to offer to buy it, and that any offer’s void the second it’s made.”
Rian made a sound that in another man would have been a whistle.
“Page four is thirty lines about what happens if one of you dies. I’m not sitting through my own writing. Go to six.”
“You wrote the thirty lines, Luca. You can sit through—”
“Six, Luca.”
“Page six,” Luca said. “The Warren clause.”
He read it warm and slow, the way he reads everything. It was my brother’s whole life in eleven lines. My hands were shaking under the table where the notary could not see them and where Rian could.
“Danny gets the front counter, a schedule and one chance. Put the word one in twice, Luca. I want him to trip over it.”
Luca did not look down at the page. “It’s in twice. Page six and page eleven, and I set it in bold in both places, which nearly cost me my professional dignity.”
“What happens when he’s used it up?” Rian said.
“Then he’s a man with a job somewhere else and a sister who still picks up the phone.”
Nobody argued with that. Luca turned the page. The sun bar had moved a hand’s width up the table while he did it.
“Page eight. The household stands in the name of Yelena Baranova, for as long as she wants it, and it doesn’t pass to anybody named Varela.”
“That means nobody’s putting her out of that kitchen,” I said. “Including me. Keep going.”
“Page ten. The table.”
“The holder’s chair is entered in my name. It is not a fifth family vote, and it is not a chair I borrow from Nicolas. Mine.”
Rian sat back and the chair took it.
“You want to sit at that table.”
“I sat at it yesterday, Rian, in a room with eleven men in it, and I read the clause to their faces. Nobody asked me to leave. Page ten says they can’t.”
Luca read the rest of it into the sunlight. A seat comes off that table when all four families say so and never on three. No alliance is ever verified by a marriage again, by anybody, on any grounds.
“Brighton Beach won’t like it,” Nicolas said.
“Brighton Beach hasn’t answered a phone since yesterday. Somebody there’s going to read this before he knows what he’s inherited.”
“The licensing board sat at nine,” Luca said. “We’re renewed. They did it before their coffee went cold, with a burned file in a bin somewhere in their own building.”
“Don’t tell me that part before noon.”
“You wrote page ten. Your place at that table is yours from now on. Nobody has to invite you through the door again.”
Esperanza had her ink pad open and her hands folded on the lid of it.
“And is there a page nine in this one?”
“There is a page nine. It is numbered, and every copy has it. No surprises in this one.”
She wrote something small in her book and did not tell me what.
“And the bakery?”
“Isn’t in it anywhere. That’s the entire point of it.”
She looked at me over her glasses for a while. Then she pushed the pages back across the table at me.
“Then read me page fourteen yourself. Your own words in your own mouth, or I’m not stamping anything.”
So I read it. The first sentence came out too fast. I stopped, put my hand flat on the page, and started again.
“I am not promising to be less trouble. I want that understood before any of you signs.”
Luca’s mouth moved. Esperanza lifted one finger and he shut it.
“I’m keeping my shop. I’m keeping my name. And I’m making a home with Nicolas, Rian and Luca Varela. All three. Nobody is a visitor in it. Nobody gets loved in the hall while the important people sit down.”
My voice thinned on Rian’s name. He had put both hands on the table, palms down, as though moving them would cost him the rest.
“You don’t have to buy me another thing,” I said. “You do have to come home. Hungry, furious, with something you don’t know how to tell me. Come home anyway. I’ll be there. That’s the promise I know how to keep.”
I looked at Nicolas. Then Rian. Then Luca, who had forgotten to look clever.
“And when I sit down, somebody else takes the trays out. I mean that part too.”
Rian laughed into his hand. This time he did not try to hide it.
“Give me the trays,” he said. “And the bad days. I’m staying for both.”
Luca put his pen down so there was nothing in his hand to hide behind. “Every page, Mary. Even the one I’m ashamed of. You get it before anybody else.”
Nicolas came around the table and stopped beside my chair. He did not take the paper from me.
“I’ll come home to you,” he said. “I should have done that four years ago.”
Esperanza gave us a moment. Then she tapped the signature lines. “A beautiful speech is not a signature. All of you.”
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“We settled the order coming up,” Luca said. “In the elevator. I’m going first.”
“Who decided that?”
“The three of us did, and no, nobody asked you, and I’d do it again tomorrow.”
I have sat in rooms with these brothers where being decided about would have cost somebody a plate.
This was not that room. They had worked out among themselves which of them was most afraid of me.
Then they had lined up in that order and come upstairs.
I let them have it, because they had paid for it and every one of them knew the price.
Luca uncapped his father’s black fountain pen and signed fast. He looked up at me before the nib touched the paper, and not after.
“Fourteen pages. I’d have signed it at page one and you know it.”
I put my hand flat on the back of Luca’s hand while the nib moved.
Rian took longest. He held the pen the way he holds anything small, as though it had done nothing wrong yet. “I can’t spell irrevocable and I’m signing it anyway, so somebody witness that.”
“Witnessed,” Esperanza said.
“You’ve written us a leash, Mary,” Rian said, “and here I am with my hands out.”
He signed. My hand went to the back of Rian’s hand. His thumb came around and found the inside of my wrist, where the bruise was and is not any more, and stayed on the spot a second too long.
“I’m reading it first,” Nicolas said.
“All fourteen?”
“All fourteen. I did it the other way once.”
So we sat in the sun and watched the pakhan of a bratva family read a contract a pastry chef wrote.
He went page by page with his thumb coming down the margin.
Nobody in that room said one word about it and every one of us watched him do it.
The sun bar came off the table and started up the wall.
Esperanza ate two pastelitos out of my box without waiting to be offered them.
Then Nicolas signed, and looked up at me after, and not before.
“You took a quarter. The rest of it’s been yours since before you asked.”
I put my hand over the back of his hand and over the burn on it. I had touched all three of them at that table and none of them had touched each other, and that is how it started and how it stays.
Then the pen came to me. I signed beneath them, Mary Corinne Warren, without shortening one part of it. Esperanza watched my hand to the last letter.
Esperanza inked her stamp and brought it down on page fourteen hard enough to make the table jump. The purple came out crooked across all four names.
Nicolas’s hand came up to the back of my neck in front of a woman who has known me since I was small. She did not look away and she did not pretend to be busy with her book.
“You’re ours, Mary,” Nicolas said. “That doesn’t need a page.”
“It’s got one anyway,” Luca said. “Page two. She read it out loud and nobody objected.”
Then Luca took the pen and put it in my hand and closed my fingers around it.
“Keep it. It’s my father’s, and it’s signed the last family paper it’s ever going to sign.”
“You’ll want it back tomorrow.”
“I will. You’re not giving it to me.”
He clipped the fourteen pages into a case for the safe behind the Rothko, where the original had been kept between all the times we dragged it out to hurt one another.
Then he put the brass emergency key to that safe in my hand.
The combination and keypad code were in a sealed envelope with it.
I checked my name on the envelope before I closed my fist.
I opened the box and pushed it down the table to Esperanza. She took another one without looking up, the way she used to take them off my grandmother’s tray.
The pen went into my apron pocket and the key went into my fist, and there was nothing left on that table but a crooked purple stamp laid across four names.