Chapter 6 #2
Dante couldn't stop grinning and didn't try.
He fried eggs and clocked Nick every time the man passed the pass, and twice Nick — Nick Roussos, who squared plates so the yolks faced the customer — set a hand at the small of Dante's back on his way by, brief, unnecessary, a thing he didn't have to do and did anyway, and each time it went through Dante like the first sip of coffee on a cold morning.
Delfin ordered the longganisa "for research" again and shot Dante a thumbs-up that felt, absurdly, like a benediction.
It was, for about an hour, the best morning of Dante's year. Then the bell went, and it was Thea.
He knew her before Gloria said the name — she had Nick's dark eyes and Nick's way of scanning a room like she was pricing it, except where Nick's grief had gone to granite hers had gone to motion, restless, a woman who hadn't sat all the way down in months.
She stopped inside the door and looked at the turned tables, the chalkboard, the tip jar, the lit sign she'd have seen from the street.
She looked at Nick. She looked at Dante standing too close to Nick.
And something crossed her face that was grief and love and exhaustion all fighting for the same square inch.
"You lit the wing," she said.
"It came back on its own," Nick said. "Friday. During the dinner."
"The dinner." Thea's laugh had no floor under it.
"Marisol called me. Said the whole block came.
Said it was —" She stopped, pressed her lips together, and Dante watched her decide to be the practical one, the way you decide to lift something heavy.
"It doesn't change the math, Nikos. I need you to hear that even though the sign's back on and your — " a flick of her eyes at Dante, not unkind, just tired " — even though it was a good night.
Meridian called me Thursday. They put an offer on the table.
Real money, to surrender the lease early and walk clean.
Relocation, a settlement, our dad's whole life turned into a number we could actually split and use.
" Her voice cracked once and she pushed through it.
"It's a good number, Nick. It's a this-changes-my-life number.
And they want an answer by the end of the month, and I am asking you — I'm begging you, before you fall in love with a full room and a lit sign and a chef and decide to go down with the ship — please.
Take the money. Let him go. Let us both go. "
"You think I don't want to?" Nick's voice dropped, meant for her, but the quiet room caught all of it.
"You think I like this? I count a drawer every night that doesn't add up.
I climb a ladder in the dark. I live in his apartment because I can't stand to change it and I can't stand to be in it — same as you can't stand to walk through that door.
You think I don't lie awake doing your math?
" He came around the counter. "But I stood in this room Friday and it was full, Thea.
Full of people who'd miss it. Dad didn't leave us a number to split. He left us the thing the number's for."
"He left us a heart attack behind a griddle.
" Her voice finally broke all the way through, and there it was — not a woman who wanted money, a woman who had lost her father in this building and could not draw breath inside the smell of it.
"That's what he left us, Nick. I can't come in here.
Every time I smell the coffee I'm nine years old and he's alive, and then he's not, all in one breath.
You get to grieve him by keeping it. I have to grieve him by leaving.
So stop — stop making me the villain for surviving it a different way than you do. "
That landed somewhere Nick didn't keep any granite. Dante watched it land.
The diner had gone quiet. Manny was studying his coffee. Gloria had stopped moving.
Nick's jaw worked. "Thea —"
"Don't decide right now." She was already backing toward the door, having spent everything she'd walked in with. "Just — don't decide no right now either. That's all I'm asking." And she was gone, out under the sign their father hung, and the bell jingled stupidly bright behind her.
Nobody said anything.
Nick stood where she'd left him, one hand flat on the counter, staring at the door like the answer might walk back through it.
Whatever he'd found on that alley wall Friday night, whatever the sign had switched on in him — Dante watched some of it go dark again, watched the granite start back up brick by brick, and understood that Thea hadn't only put money on the table.
She'd put the ghost back in the room. Two right answers, one diner, and the two people who'd inherited it standing on opposite sides of their father's body.
"Nick," Dante said, quiet.
"Not now." Not cruel. Just a man who needed the room to hold still and had too many people asking it to move. "Just — not right now. Okay?"
Dante's own phone buzzed against his hip into the silence, and he almost didn't look, and then he did, because some reflexes you never lose.
REY: hey brother, no pressure but i gotta lock the kitchen. i open in three weeks. i need you here monday to build it or i call Danilo instead and i really, really don't want Danilo. tell me today. you in?
Monday.
Dante stood in the diner where he'd been home for one entire hour, next to the man he'd spent the night undefending, with a dead father's buyout on the table and a living best friend's escape hatch in his pocket and a hard date on both — and understood, with the specific vertigo of a man who has finally gotten exactly what he wanted at exactly the wrong time, that he was going to have to choose.
Soon. Out loud. The one thing he had built his entire life to never have to do.
Because here was the thing nobody had ever told Dante — the thing his lola maybe knew and never got to say: the leaving didn't hurt less if you kept one foot out the door.
It just meant you spent the whole beautiful thing standing wrong.
He'd been in this diner eleven days and change and he'd already gone and fallen for all of it at once — the room, the sign, the aunties, the grumpy undone man, the ghost teaching custard over the range — and the foot he'd kept in the hallway hadn't protected a single thing.
It had just made him worse at being here.
Best night of his year. Clearest exit he'd ever been handed. Same Saturday morning, before the gloom had even burned off.
One foot out, the old voice said, almost kind about it. Told you.
Dante put the phone away and didn't answer it, and went to pour Manny's refill with hands that had, at some point in the night, stopped being sure which way the door was.