CHAPTER 21
THE DINER
POV: MAE
I’m in the library. I’ve been in the library since breakfast, which I ate at the long table in the kitchen with Rosa and without him.
He left at six. He’s been leaving at six.
Since the ledger, he hasn’t come into his bed until after I’m asleep, and he’s out of it before I wake, and the only way I know he’s been there at all is the dent in the other pillow and the smell of cedar on the sheets.
I’ve slept there anyway. Rule five.
I didn’t break it. I don’t know why I didn’t break it.
The phone buzzes on the arm of the leather chair. An unknown number. A 617.
Nobody has this number. Nobody’s called it in two weeks.
I pick it up.
“Hello?”
A breath. Wet. Ragged.
“Baby girl.”
Everything in me goes cold and small, the way it did in our kitchen when I was nine and heard his key in the lock and knew by the sound of it what kind of night it was going to be.
“Dad.”
“Baby girl, oh God. Oh God, it’s you.” He’s crying. My father is crying. I’ve heard him cry twice in my whole life, both times at funerals, both times drunk. “I didn’t think you’d pick up. I didn’t think—”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t—I can’t say on the phone. They’re listening. Everybody’s listening.” He sniffs, hard. “Mae. Maggie. Listen to me. They’re gonna kill me.”
“Who?”
“Conor. Conor’s people. Tonight. Because of what your—because of him.
Because he shot Liam. Because he did whatever he did to that cop.
They’re blaming me. They’re saying it’s my fault he’s crazy about you.
They’re saying—” His voice cracks all the way through.
“I just want to see you. That’s all. Before.
One more time. I just want to say I’m sorry.
I owe you that. I owe you so much more than that. Please.”
I close my eyes.
You sold me twice.
He sold you twice. On a bar napkin. Secured against: daughter.
“Where?” I hear myself ask.
“There’s a diner. Hancock Street. In Quincy. By the T. The one with the green awning. I’ll be there at noon. I’ll be in the back booth. Just fifteen minutes, baby. Please. You can bring anybody you want. Bring him if you want. I don’t care. I just want to see your face.”
The line goes dead.
I sit in the leather chair with the phone in my lap and the snow sliding down the tall library windows, and I know.
I know what it is. I’m not stupid. I kept the books for a convent that should have gone under in March. I know when a column doesn’t add.
A man who’s afraid for his life doesn’t tell you to bring your husband.
I know.
I get up anyway.
***
“No,” Theo says.
He’s in the kitchen with his coat on, eating a piece of Rosa’s toast standing up. His left arm is in a sling from the knee Declan kicked sideways into the desk, which isn’t how knees work, but Theo says that’s where it hurt.
“Fifteen minutes,” I say. “In a diner. In daylight. You can sit at the next table.”
“Mrs. Draven—”
“Mae.”
“—no.”
“He’s my father.” I hold his eyes. “He’s going to be dead by Christmas one way or another. Either Conor does it or my husband does. I want to see his face first. I want to ask him one question. That’s all. Then I’ll come home and I’ll tell Ronan myself.”
Theo looks at me for a long time. He chews. He swallows.
He takes out his phone.
He walks to the window with it and turns his back, and says, quietly, “Boss.” And then a lot of other things I can’t hear. He listens. He says, “Yeah.” He says, “I know.” He says, “Two cars.” He listens again for a long time.
Then he turns around and holds the phone out to me.
I take it.
“Why?” Ronan says in my ear.
Not no. Not absolutely not. Just that.
He sounds far away. There are cranes behind his voice, a horn, wind.
“Because I want to see if he can look at me,” I say.
Silence on the line. The wind.
“Twenty minutes,” he says. “Theo sits beside you, not at the next table. Two cars in the lot. If Frank touches you, if anyone touches you, Theo takes you out the back and you go without arguing.”
“All right.”
“Say it back.”
“Twenty minutes. Theo beside me. Two cars. If anyone touches me, I go without arguing.”
A pause.
“Mae,” he says.
I wait.
He doesn’t finish it. I hear him breathe out.
“Wear the coat,” he says, and hangs up.
***
The diner has a green awning with snow sagging it in the middle. Inside, it’s too warm and smells like bacon grease and burnt coffee. A counter with red stools. A pie case with one sad lemon meringue. A radio behind the register playing Christmas songs through static.
The two cars are in the lot. Theo parked us between them. One of the men in the other car nodded at me through the windshield.
My father is in the back booth.
I almost don’t recognize him.
He’s small. That’s the first thing. My father used to fill a doorway.
He used to fill a kitchen. Now he’s sitting hunched in a red vinyl booth in a Bruins jacket two sizes too big for him, both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee to keep them still, and he looks like a coat somebody hung up and forgot.
He sees me. His face crumples.
“Maggie.”
I slide into the booth across from him. Theo slides in beside me. He doesn’t take off his coat. He keeps his good hand in his pocket.
My father looks at Theo. At the sling. At me.
At the camel coat. The veil. The ring.
“Jesus,” he whispers. “Look at you.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“You look—” He can’t finish. He shakes his head. His eyes are wet and bloodshot and his breath, even across the table, smells like the bottom of a bottle. “You look like your mother. At the end. When she got thin. You look like her in her good coat.”
I don’t say anything.
The waitress comes. I say, “Just water.” She goes.
“I’m sorry,” my father says. “I’m so sorry, baby. For everything. For all of it. I know I— I know what I did. I know.”
“Do you?”
He flinches.
“Two years ago,” I say. “Nine days after a funeral at St. Agnes. You sat at Conor Kavanagh’s table and you signed a bar napkin. A hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Secured against daughter.”
He goes white.
“How do you—”
“And a man paid it. And then he paid you to disappear. And you took his money.” I keep my voice very even. “And two weeks ago you sat down at the Ironside and did it again.”
“I was scared—”
“Monsignor Albright was going to take me to his office on a Tuesday night and put me on a boat.”
“I didn’t know about—”
“You told him to.”
My father puts his hands over his face.
The radio behind the counter is playing something about sleigh bells. A man at the counter laughs at something the cook says. Outside, the snow keeps falling on the green awning.
“I have one question,” I say.
He takes his hands down. His face is wet.
“Did you ever once,” I say, “in twenty-two years, look at me and see anything but money?”
He opens his mouth.
His eyes go to the clock over the counter.
Just for a second. Just a flick.
Then back to me.
I see it. Theo sees it. I feel Theo’s whole body go tight beside me in the booth.
My father sees me see it.
“Mae,” he says. “Baby. I’m sorry.”
He isn’t talking about the last twenty-two years.
He’s talking about the next twenty seconds.
“Theo—” I say.
The cook comes over the counter.
That’s the thing I remember afterward. Not the gun. The cook. A big man in a white apron with a spatula still in one hand, vaulting the counter like he’s done it before. The man who laughed at his joke turns on his stool, and he has a gun too.
Theo’s out of the booth before I can move. His good hand comes out of his pocket with a pistol in it, and he fires, and the man on the stool goes backward off it in a spray of coffee and blood.
Then the front window explodes.
Glass everywhere. The sound of it is huge. Outside in the lot, more shots, a lot of them, fast, and car alarms, and a man screaming. The two cars. Ronan’s two cars.
Theo grabs my arm and hauls me out of the booth. “Back! Kitchen! Go—”
The cook hits him.
Not with the spatula. With his shoulder, full weight, the way a man hits a door. Theo goes into the pie case, and the glass goes, and the sling tears, and his bad arm bends under him, and he makes a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.
I don’t run.
I look for something. Anything. A brass snuffer. A pencil. There’s a sugar dispenser on the table, heavy glass with a steel cap, and I pick it up and swing it at the cook’s head.
It catches him behind the ear. Sugar everywhere. He staggers.
Then hands.
From behind. Arms around my waist, lifting me off my feet. I kick. I twist. I get one hand free and claw backward and feel skin under my nails, and whoever it is swears, and his hand comes around over my mouth.
I bite it.
I bite down on the meat of his palm with everything I have, and I taste blood, and he screams in my ear and doesn’t let go.
Theo is on the floor in the pie case glass, trying to get up, his face gray, his pistol gone. He’s reaching for me. His fingers close on the hem of the camel coat.
It slips out of his hand.
They carry me past the counter. Past the radio. Past the booth.
My father hasn’t moved.
He’s still sitting in the back booth with both hands around his coffee mug. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking down at the table, where someone has put a thick envelope in front of him, and he’s opened it, and he’s counting.
His lips are moving.
He’s counting the money in the envelope while they carry his daughter out of the diner by the kitchen door.
Someone pulls something down over my head. Rough cloth. Dark. It smells like diesel and fish.
The last thing I see before the hood is my father counting money.