Chapter 9 #2
"I can't cook." Nick gestured at the board, at his own terrible handwriting over both their names.
"That's the whole problem, that's the thing I've been so scared of — that if I let anybody change one plate, I lose him, I lose all of it.
But you didn't come here to erase my father.
You came here to stand next to him. You said that to me the first week and I was too busy guarding a museum to hear it.
So." He swallowed. "I put your name on the board.
In permanent. Sunny Side, all day, his classics and yours, because a plate can hold more than one man's whole life — you told me that, in rice, before I'd earned it.
I'm not asking you to be my chef. I own a diner with a hole in the paperwork and a developer with a bulldozer and a fight in front of the city that we might lose.
I'm asking you to be my partner. On the door.
In the will. In the apartment upstairs with the toothbrush.
In all of it. I'm asking you to stay — not because you signed a thing in June, but because I'm choosing you, out loud, with witnesses, on purpose, the way somebody should have chosen you a long time ago. "
The diner was so quiet Dante could hear the sign hum.
And Dante — who had built an entire portable life out of leaving first, who kept one foot out of every door he'd ever walked through, who had a stocked walk-in and a signed lease and a champagne emoji forty minutes up the freeway — took his phone out of his pocket, and in front of the whole packed room, thumbed open the thread with Rey, and typed, can't do it brother.
i'm home. i'm so sorry. i'll help you find someone, i'll owe you forever, but i found the place i get to stop. And hit send.
Then he crossed the diner.
He didn't do it smooth. His hands weren't steady and he didn't try to make them.
He walked through the parted crowd, past Manny and the aunties and Marisol clutching her petition, past the empty stool nobody sat on, and he took Nick Roussos's shaking face in both hands the way he had in the gold alley a lifetime ago, and he said, so only Nick could hear it, "Kain na," — come eat, it's ready, sit down before I have to say it twice — "you absolute disaster.
Yeah. I'll stay. Try and get me out the door now. "
He kissed him, and the whole block came apart cheering, the aunties loudest of all, and somewhere in it Gloria was crying and Thea was standing in the doorway she couldn't stand to stand in with tears running down her face, and Marisol was already shouting something about the council meeting Tuesday and how many of them could show up, and it was not a solved thing, the diner, it was a fight they might still lose — but they were going to lose it or win it together, a whole block of them, loud, with the sign lit and both their names on the board.
Marisol pushed through to the counter and slapped her cardboard tube down like a gavel.
"Historic district," she announced — to the room, to Nick, to anybody listening.
"Fourth Street corridor. Four hundred signatures, and Councilmember Sokha ate breakfast here every Saturday of her childhood, and she is itching for a fight with Meridian.
That bulldozer needs city approvals, and approvals need us, and there happen to be —" she swept an arm at the packed, roaring room "— a great many of us.
Tuesday. City hall. Everybody comes." The aunties cheered.
"And somebody tell that boy his calamansi pie is going in the newsletter. "
And Manny — quiet Manny, seventy-six years old — leaned over the counter and said to Nick, gruff, "My grandson's coming by this week.
Gonna rewire that sign proper, so the wing stays lit for good, not just when the grid hiccups.
Family rate. Don't argue with me." And Nick, who two months ago would have argued on reflex, just gripped the old man's hand and said thank you, and meant it, and got it out on the first try.
And Thea — Thea Roussos, who had not been able to breathe inside this building since April, who smelled the coffee and heard their father alive and then gone in the same breath — took one step, and then another, and came all the way in.
She crossed to the end of the counter, to the stool nobody sat on, and laid her hand flat on the worn wood of seat number one for the first time since the funeral, and left it there, and stayed.
Nick watched his sister walk back into their father's house, and had to press the heel of his hand to his mouth all over again.
"Stay," Nick said against his mouth, still asking, always going to be a little bit asking.
"I'm staying," Dante said. "I already unpacked the important stuff." He grinned, wet and helpless and finally, fatally, all the way home. "My knives are still in the car, but my one foot came back inside about a week ago. I just didn't tell you. I'm bad at the saying part too. We'll work on it."
"We'll work on it," Nick agreed, and pressed his forehead to Dante's the way he had in the alley, both of them breathing hard in the middle of a diner full of cheering aunties — and for once in his life Nick Roussos didn't square anything, didn't count anything, didn't put anything away.
He just held on. "You know I still can't cook," he murmured.
"This is a terrible business decision. I'm making a chef I'm in love with my partner.
That's a conflict of interest. Everybody's going to say I only did it because —"
"Nick."
"— because I'm crazy about you, which, for the record, is the actual reason. I want that on the record."
"Nick." Dante was laughing now, wrecked and helpless. "Shut up and let them clap. You worked really hard for this clapping. Take the clapping."
Nick took the clapping.
Behind them, over both their names, the board said SUNNY SIDE, ALL DAY, and outside the gloom was finally, at long last, starting to burn off gold.