Chapter 9
Sunny Side
Nick called him from the sidewalk and it went to voicemail — you've reached Dante, leave it hot — and Nick stood under his father's lit sign with his keys in his fist and understood, the way he understood a drawer, that he was not going to fix this with a phone.
So Nick would build the thing here, and he would bet the last of himself that the man came back through it.
He went inside and did the one thing his father had never let him do.
He changed the menu.
The board behind the counter was Stavros's — his slanted, running hand, the classics that had fed Fourth Street for thirty-five years, the scramble, the avgolemono, the loukaniko, untouched since the day the man dropped a spatula.
Nick had guarded it like scripture. Now he took the chalk in his own bad blocky handwriting, the handwriting of a man who did numbers and not words, and under his father's list, in the empty space nobody had been allowed to fill, he wrote it out: DANTE'S SIDE.
The longganisa. The garlic rice and egg.
The ube br?lée. The calamansi pie. And across the top of the whole board, over both their names, his father's and the chef's, big and crooked and permanent — SUNNY SIDE. ALL DAY.
He stood back and looked at what he'd done, chalk dust on his fingers, his hand not quite steady.
For ten months he'd have said that changing his father's board was a thing he'd die before doing — that the board was the last place Stavros's actual handwriting still lived, that to write over it was to erase the man.
Standing there now, he understood he'd had it exactly backwards, the way he'd had the folder backwards, the way he'd had all of it backwards.
You didn't keep a person by freezing every surface they'd touched.
You kept them by letting the thing they built keep growing — by writing the next name under theirs, by leaving the door unlocked for whoever they'd have wanted fed.
His father would have hated the museum Nick had made of him.
His father bought a starburst sign in 1986 specifically to look glad.
Then he called his sister.
"Nikos, it's seven in the —"
"I'm not signing." His voice cracked and he let it.
"Thea. I'm not taking the money and I'm not letting them have the block without a fight, and I know that's not fair to you, so here's the deal — you keep your half, you never have to walk in that door again, and I'll pay you your share of what the buyout was worth out of Sunny Side, month by month, for as long as it takes.
You get your money. You get to leave. And I get to keep him.
I get to keep all of it." He was crying, he realized, and he did not stop.
"He looked at me and he saw Mom. That's what Gloria said.
He got scared I'd end up like Mom, alone with a place that ate her, so he found me a person.
And I called the person a clause, Thea, I broke Dad's last gift with my own two hands.
So I'm not signing. I'm going to fight for the diner and I'm going to fight for the guy, and I need my sister. Please."
There was a long silence on the line. And then Thea, who hadn't set foot in the Skylark since April, said in a wet voice, "Marisol's already got the historic-district petition halfway to the council.
She's had it going for weeks. She was waiting for you to want it.
" A breath. "I'll call her. I'll — Nick.
I'll come in. I'll come stand in the door. "
By seven-forty the block had started to arrive, because that was how Fourth Street worked — you didn't buy an ad, you told Gloria, and Gloria told Marisol, and Marisol told the aunties, and the aunties had opinions and calendars cleared.
Manny in his collared shirt. Delfin. The record-store guy.
The vintage kids. Marisol with a cardboard tube of signatures under her arm and fire in her eye.
They filled the booths and the counter and the sidewalk under the sign, a whole neighborhood packed into a diner on a gray Thursday for reasons half of them didn't have yet, and Nick stood behind the counter he'd stood behind his whole life and watched the door and waited to find out if he'd built a wedding or a wake.
Gloria came and stood beside him behind the counter, her shoulder against his arm, and didn't say anything, and didn't have to; she'd forgiven him the second he picked up the chalk.
"If he doesn't come," Nick said, low, only to her, "I did the right thing anyway.
I need you to know I know that now. Even if he doesn't come. "
"He's going to come."
"You don't know that."
"That boy left your father's recipe cards taped up right where they were and packed his knives around them," Gloria said. "Nobody who's leaving for good leaves the cards up. Watch the door, anak."
At seven-fifty-one, a familiar beat-up car slowed at the curb.
***
Dante had made it exactly as far as the on-ramp.
He'd sat there at the light with his blinker on and his knives in the back and Rey's stocked walk-in forty minutes north, and he had not been able to make his hands turn the wheel, because turning the wheel meant leaving without saying goodbye to a woman who called him anak, and it meant driving off with Thea Roussos's key in his cupholder like a stone, and it meant being, one more time, the guy who left before the leaving could get done to him — and Thea's voice was in his head, and his lola's, and he'd sat through three green lights and then, hating himself, turned around.
Just to say goodbye. Just to give the key back. That was the story.
Then he pulled up to the Skylark and the story fell apart in his hands.
Because the whole block was there. Cars everywhere, the sidewalk full, faces he knew crowded up against the front glass under the sign that burned gold and whole in the gray — and through the window he could see the board.
His board. His name, in blocky crooked chalk that was not his and not Stavros's, under the classics, over the classics, SUNNY SIDE ALL DAY, a dead man's menu and a leaving man's menu written up together by the one person in the world who'd sworn he'd never change a thing.
For a second Dante just sat behind the wheel and couldn't breathe.
He knew what that board meant to Nick. He'd watched the man flinch when Dante slid a dish of rice next to the toast; he'd heard the scramble stays like a vow taken over a body.
Stavros's slanted handwriting up there was the last of the actual man left in the world, and Nick had guarded it like the reliquary it was — and now, in that terrible blocky hand, he'd written Dante's name beneath his father's and hadn't erased a single classic to do it.
He'd found the empty space nobody was ever allowed to fill, and he'd filled it with both of them.
Dante got out of the car because his legs did it without asking.
The crowd saw him and went quiet, and parted, and there at the end of it, behind the counter, in the door his father hung to look glad, stood Nick — wrecked, unshaven, eyes red, absolutely undefended, a man who had clearly not slept and had clearly been crying and had, just as clearly, stopped caring who saw.
"You didn't answer your phone," Nick said.
"I was on the on-ramp." Dante's voice came out wrong. "I couldn't — Gloria. I came back to say bye to Gloria."
"Okay," Nick said. "Say it later. I need to say something first, and I need to say it in front of all of them, because I said the worst thing I've ever said to anybody in this room two days ago with nobody but you to hear it, and that's backwards.
You should get the true thing the same size as the cruel one.
" He came around the counter. His hands were shaking.
Nick Roussos, whose hands never shook. "So everybody's going to have to stand here while I do this badly. "
***
"I told you that you were a clause." Nick's voice carried in the packed quiet of the diner, rough and plain, and Dante stood in the doorway with the whole block between them and could not have moved if the building caught fire.
"A percentage. A stranger my father saddled me with.
I said you were always going to leave, and I said it because I was the one about to do the leaving — I was going to push you out the door and take a check and go be alone with a drawer that adds up, because being alone is the only thing I've known how to be safe at since the day my father died in this kitchen. "
Somebody's coffee cup clinked. Nobody breathed.
"My father didn't leave me a clause." Nick's jaw worked, and he pushed through it.
"He left me a hand. He was scared I'd carry this place alone till it wore me out — the way he let it wear out my mother — so from eight months out, with a bad heart, he went and found the one person who could keep his food alive and crack my chest open, and he gave you a piece of the Skylark so that when he was gone I'd have no choice but to let you hold one end of it.
You weren't the thing he did to me. You were the kindest thing he ever did for me.
And I called it a clause." His voice broke all the way.
"I'm sorry. Out loud, in front of God and Gloria and every auntie on this block — I'm sorry, Dante.
You are not a percentage. You're the reason I laughed in here for the first time in a year. You're the reason the sign's lit."
"Nick —" Dante started, and couldn't finish, because his whole face had gone hot and wet.