Chapter 8 #2
And then she was gone too, out under the sign her father hung, the bell jingling bright and stupid behind her exactly the way it had behind her brother a hundred times — and Dante stood alone in the dark diner with a rolled set of knives and a champagne emoji in his pocket and Thea Roussos's key still sitting warm on the counter where she'd set it down.
Left it, he understood after a second. On purpose.
For him. A thing you only leave behind for someone you expect to need a way back in.
And for the first time in his practiced, portable, one-foot-out life, leaving did not feel like winning. It felt like doing the cruelest thing first so nobody could do it to him. It felt, exactly, like being Nick.
***
Gloria came for Nick at seven the next morning, before the gulls, before the gloom lifted, and she did not knock.
Nick was at the counter where she found him, where she'd known she'd find him, because he had counted the drawer four times in the dark and it had come out right every time and he had kept counting anyway, because the numbers were the only thing in his life still willing to behave.
He hadn't slept. He hadn't gone up to the apartment.
He couldn't be in the apartment, in the sheets that still — he'd stayed down here, in the cold, with the ghost he could handle instead of the one he couldn't.
"Get up," Gloria said. "You're going to want to be standing for this."
"Gloria, I don't —"
"I loved your father." She set her purse on the counter like a verdict.
"You know that. Thirty years. And there is a thing I have never told you, because it wasn't mine to tell while he was alive and then he was gone and you were so — so closed, Nikos, you closed up like a fist and I couldn't find the door.
" She took a breath. "You think he signed that boy on because you weren't enough.
I know you do. I've watched you carry it for ten months.
So I'm going to fix it now, because I let you carry it too long already. "
"Don't —"
"Your father's heart was going. You know that now; the chef told you.
" Her voice was very steady, the way a hand is steady setting down something breakable.
"What you don't know is what he said to me, the week before he did it.
He sat right there — right on that stool — and he said, Gloria, I did it to my Elena.
I let her carry me alone. Thirty years she carried this place and me and never a day off, and I told myself I was providing, and really I was just letting her hold all of it until it wore her out.
" Gloria's eyes were bright now, but her voice held.
"Your mother, Nick. He watched what carrying it alone did to your mother.
And he looked at you — you, who count the drawer at a funeral, who climbs a ladder in the dark rather than ask a soul for help — and he was terrified, Nikos.
Not that you weren't enough. That you were exactly enough, exactly like her, and that you'd carry this place alone until it wore you out, and he wouldn't be here to stop it.
So he found you somebody. He went and found a lonely, talented, half-broke kid who made him laugh and who needed a family as bad as you needed to stop being everyone's — and he gave him a piece of the place, so that when Stavros was gone, his son would be forced, finally, to let one other person hold one end of it. "
The diner was completely silent. Out front the sign hummed its two-winged hum into the gray.
"He didn't leave you a stranger," Gloria said. "He left you the opposite of the thing he did to your mother. He left you a hand. And you just spent yesterday afternoon breaking every finger on it because you were too scared to be held."
Nick discovered he was gripping the edge of the counter hard enough to hurt.
Ten months he'd carried that folder like a wound, like a verdict, and it had been the opposite of what he thought the whole time — not his father's last judgment but his father's last kindness, mislabeled, misfiled, read upside down by a son too deep underwater to turn it over.
His father hadn't looked at him and seen not enough.
He'd looked at him and seen Elena. Seen his own worst mistake about to run again in his own boy, and loved him too much to let it, and done the one thing a man can do from the far side of a failing heart — he'd gone and found his son a person.
Handpicked him. A lonely, laughing, half-broke kid with a dead grandmother's handwriting inked down his arm and a hole in him the exact shape of the hole in Nick, and Stavros had looked at the two of them from eight months out, before they'd ever met, and known.
And Nick had taken that — the last and best and most secret thing his father ever did for him — and yesterday he'd stood in this kitchen and called it a clause.
He'd taken the hand his dying father reached across the whole distance of death to give him, and he'd broken it finger by finger, on purpose, with the coldest words he owned.
Because being held was more frightening than being alone.
Because if he shoved Dante out now, then at least Nick would be the one who did it, at least it would be his own hand on the knife.
You were always going to leave, he'd said. And Dante had just — agreed. Because somebody, a long time ago, had taught him the exact same lie Nick's grief had taught Nick: that the safest love is the one you kill yourself, first, before it can get around to killing you.
"He's leaving today," Gloria said, gentler now, the verdict delivered.
"Thursday. Thea told me. He said yes to the friend in the city; he's loading the car this morning.
You've got about an hour before the best thing your father ever did for you drives up the 710 and doesn't come back.
" She picked up her purse. "So. You can count the drawer again.
It'll come out right. It always comes out right, and it will never once, for the rest of your life, be enough.
" She was at the door. "Or you can go be your father's son.
His actual son — not his cash register. The one who knows the sign was never really broken.
It just needed somebody to want it lit."
She left him there. The bell rang. The gloom sat on the glass.
Nick looked at the drawer, still open, still right, still not enough.
He looked at the stool nobody sat on. He looked, a long time, at the sign burning through the front glass — his father's glad bird, both wings, wanting to be seen.
And somewhere under ten months of granite, in the place where the apology had been stuck behind his teeth since yesterday afternoon, something finally gave.
Not broke. Gave — the way a lock gives, the way a door you'd bricked over turns out, when you finally lean on it, to have been a door the entire time.
He had a chef loading a car. He had a sister with an envelope and a deadline on Friday.
He had a developer with a bulldozer, and a block full of aunties, and a diner everybody's grandkid grew up in, and a crack in the paperwork the size of a year of city hearings.
He had, maybe, an hour. And for the first time since a spatula hit the floor of this kitchen, Nick Roussos knew exactly what he wanted — and it wasn't a number, and it wasn't safe, and getting it meant opening his mouth and his whole ruined chest in front of the entire neighborhood and saying it out loud to a man he had gutted, or losing it for good.
He grabbed his keys.
And Nick Roussos, for the first time in ten months, stopped counting.