Chapter Twenty
Max
The café on Fifth Street has mismatched chairs and windows that take up the entire front wall. The combination of natural light and the soft yellow glow from tiny table lamps is so cozy.
Cal brought me here three days after we arrived and I sat down, looked around and felt like it was built for me.
Or the me I was in college, anyway. It’s the perfect place for a study session and the type of café I would have gravitated towards during law school.
I have asked to come every morning since, and he has conceded.
With Gio and Rudi at the table behind us, of course.
Having to ask to go places is something I’m getting used to in the past week, but I’m working through it. Luckily, Cal was able to get me a laptop to continue working through the Halbrook case the past few days while Peter is running lead. So I haven’t been too bored.
“You look so content,” he says, watching my face.
I wrap both hands around my coffee: hazelnut, mocha, and caramel, of course. I look out the window at the street, at the people walking past with their own coffees, at the way the light hits the brick of the building across the road.
I am so content.
“This is exactly where I would have sat during bar prep. Big window, good light, coffee close enough to refill without having to pack up.” I pause. “If I’d gotten that far.”
Cal says nothing. He doesn’t offer comfort or contradiction, which is one of the things I absolutely adore about him—he doesn’t fill silences with things that aren’t true just to make them easier.
He just lets the thing be what it is and sits with it alongside me until I’m ready to talk through it or move on.
I look at the table. I pick up my coffee.
I spent three years of my life working toward something and I let someone talk me out of it in a kitchen in January with cold feet because I wasn’t wearing my fuzzy socks and I was tired.
That’s the version of me I don’t let myself look at directly because if I look at it directly, I have to look at all the ways I let Patrick make me smaller and I’m not doing that right now on a Tuesday morning in a café that should have been mine.
I look out the window again instead.
“What are you thinking?” Cal asks as he brushes his fingers over my knuckles.
“That this place has excellent croissants,” I lift mine up and take a bite. “I love them, and I love it here.”
He looks at me for a moment. He knows that’s not what I’m thinking, but he lets it go. I put that in the Things I Love file, too.
Sunday dinner at the Renzetti house is not a meal. It’s an event. An experience.
It starts before we get inside because Maggie meets us at the door and kisses me on both cheeks, immediately interrogating me about whether I have any allergies or dietary restrictions.
Which would be a normal question if she were asking out of concern and not, as becomes clear approximately fifteen seconds later, because she wants to know if there’s any legitimate reason I can’t eat everything their mother has made before the barrage of smells hit me as we enter the kitchen.
Sophia appears behind her. “She’s already made the sauce, the pasta, the braciole1, the stuffed artichokes, the—”
“We get it.” Cal puts an arm around my waist and pulls me closer to him.
“Don’t overwhelm her, it’s her first time,” a man’s voice appears from the back door and he’s rolling up a sleeve, looking almost like a carbon copy of Cal, except for his lighter hair color and darker eyes.
“I’m Nico,” he says it softly as he approaches me and wraps me in a gentle embrace, kissing both my cheeks just like Maggie.
“So happy to be your first… Italian Sunday dinner, that is.”
He pulls back and wags his eyebrows at Cal, clearly trying to egg him on. Cal rolls his eyes and shakes his head, pushing Nico out of the way as he ushers me into the kitchen to sit on a stool at the island.
“She started cooking Friday,” Sophia says over the bickering of Maggie and Nico behind us. “Because she wanted it to be perfect.”
Cal looks at the ceiling, mumbling something about this being a bad idea.
“Because you brought someone home,” Maggie adds in Cal’s direction.
“You are forgetting to mention that she does this often enough, it’s not just because of me or Max,” Cal argues.
“So, Ma only makes braciole when Cal comes home, and barely ever makes meatballs even for me, don’t let him fool you that it isn’t special,” Nico leans across the island and offers me a smile.
“Yeah, Cal won’t admit it because he’s Cal, but he’s the favorite, probably because he’s never home. In fact, that may be the secret. She’s less annoyed at him because he’s never home!” Sophia holds up a wooden spoon like she solved a puzzle.
“I’m literally right here.” Cal frowns at his siblings.
“We know,” both sisters say at once and roll their eyes at him.
The kitchen smells like a restaurant, garlic and onions and basil. Carmela walks in and her face lights up with that involuntary warm delight, and she says something to Cal in Italian that makes him put his hand briefly over his eyes before crossing the kitchen to kiss her cheek.
Nico pours a glass of wine and points at me, looking at Cal.
“She came back, Ma,” he says. “I told her Max would run the other way once you saw Cal in the mornings, but here you are.”
“You said she wouldn’t come back?” Cal looks at him with disgust.
“I said she was too smart to come back.” He shrugs. “I’m reassessing.”
“She’s smart enough to come back,” Sophia corrects from somewhere behind me. “Those are different things; she liked us so much she came back.”
“I asked myself, why ever would a woman want Cal—”
“Nico,” Carmela says, without turning from the stove. One word. It lands like a gavel.
Nico closes his mouth.
I press my lips together, burying a smile.
Cal appears at my shoulder. “Still enjoying this?” he says quietly, right at my ear.
“Enormously,” I whisper back.
The table fits ten and there are six of us and somehow every inch of it is covered. Carmela circulates between the kitchen and the table efficiently like someone who has been doing this for thirty years and enjoys every moment of it.
Maggie and Sophia argue about whether the braciole needs more sauce. Nico somehow has opinions about this despite being told numerous times he doesn’t get a vote if he doesn’t contribute to the cooking process.
Cal sits next to me. His knee is against mine under the table, just resting there, and he doesn’t move it, so I don’t move mine either.
And God this just feels… right. Everything in this moment: the laughs, the food, Cal.
Carmela pours wine. She reaches me and I put my hand over my glass.
“No, thank you,” I smile sweetly at her.
Cal looks at me sideways.
I look back.
I noticed he moved his empty glass away from his plate earlier.
I look back at my food.
Across the table Nico is telling a story that involves significant hand gestures and what I’m fairly certain is an embellished account of something that couldn’t have happened the way he’s describing it.
Sophia is fact-checking him in real time, and Maggie is trying to eat and failing because she keeps laughing.
Carmela is watching all of them with her chin in one hand and her wine glass held loosely in the other and there is an expression on her face, like longing or wistfulness.
She stands and lifts her plate to go into the kitchen.
I pick up my own.
“I’ll help,” I say, and before anyone can tell me not to, I’m in the kitchen behind her.
She sets her plate down and starts moving between the counter and the sink, and I fall into the rhythm of it beside her, scraping plates and rinsing them.
She’s quiet for a moment.
Then I hear her exhale, soft and controlled, the kind that means the opposite.
I look over.
She’s at the sink, back to me, and her shoulders are held very still.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, feeling like I’m intruding. “I can go—”
“No.” She shakes her head and turns, and she has a dish towel pressed against her face and when she brings it down her eyes are bright and brimmed with tears. “No, please—don’t.”
She looks at me for a moment and then she laughs softly, a little embarrassed.
“Happy tears,” she says. “Don’t mind me, I’m a foolish old lady.”
“You’re not,” I offer a small smile.
She takes a breath and looks toward the doorway, toward the noise of her children still arguing at the table.
“Do you know how long it has been since they were all in the same room?” She shakes her head.
“Nico is here more, the girls I see every day, but Cal—” She stops.
“He is in and out… if I’m lucky every few months.
But this time, it feels like he came home, not just for work but home.
And he brought you. And they’re all in there at the same time, at our table. ”
I don’t say anything.
She reaches out and takes my hands between both of hers, the way she did the first time I came through her door. Her hands are warm and certain, just like her voice.
“I don’t know how much he’s told you,” she says it slowly, but definitively.
“About his father. About how things go around here.” She pauses.
“His father, toward the end, had lost something. In his eyes. A light.” She looks at me steadily.
“And I have been watching Cal very carefully for the past few years as he has taken more and more on because I know what that looks like and I was afraid—” She squeezes my hands.
“I was afraid he was going down the same road.”
I think about the penthouse; how it looks like he just comes and goes but nothing looks like it’s actually lived in. How he said he went to Ellison to get away from everything here, even though it all continues to try and pull him back in.
“But he came home,” she says, “and you are with him, and I look at my Cal, and I see my son again. The one I’ve loved for thirty-one years.
” She smiles and it’s a full one. “So, forgive a silly old woman for her happy tears. I don’t know if it’s you or—but he hasn’t seemed this—this right in a long time. ”
I squeeze her hands back. I don’t have words for this moment that are adequate, so I don’t try to find them.
She pats my hands once and releases them, turning back to the counter with a sniff.
“Am I interrupting?”
Cal. His voice has a careful quality.
Carmela spins around and points the dish towel at him. She says something in Italian—fast, emphatic, it sounds like both curt instruction and affection simultaneously.
He ducks his head slightly, chin down, the way he does when he’s absorbing something, and she crosses the kitchen to him.
Tossing the dish towel into his hands and cupping his face in both her hands, she kisses him once on each cheek.
She walks back out to the dining room leaving Cal and me in the kitchen.
Cal eyes me from across the kitchen.
“What did she say?” I ask.
He tilts his head. Rubs his eye with one hand. “You sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
A small exhale, and then he makes good on the promise to always answer my questions with the truth: “She said, ‘Don’t fuck this up, she’s perfect.’”
I feel the smile work its way across my face against my best efforts. I look at the counter then back at him.
“So,” I raise my eyebrows. “Don’t fuck this up, Renzetti.”
He shakes his head, slowly making his way around the island to where I’m leaning against the counter. He cups my face in his hands and his smile is wide. He kisses me once on the forehead and it warms me from the inside out.
1. braciole — a classic Italian dish made with thin slices of meat, filled with breadcrumbs, cheese, garlic, and herbs, then rolled up, tied or pinned closed, and cooked slowly in tomato sauce until tender