Chapter 5
MARINA
The register at Teresa's is short forty dollars every Friday and has been for a year, and it took me three shifts to work out which of them it is.
It is Gina. Gina with the nails and the kids and the ex-husband who does not pay. Gina, who is nice to me, which none of the rest of them are, and who is nice to me because she is nice to everybody, because a person who is stealing from a till is nice to everybody.
I do not say anything. I move the float to the second drawer and I change the count time to before her break instead of after it, and on Friday the register is right, and Gina looks at me across the bar with her nice face, and I look back, and that is the end of it.
Nobody has to be a thief in front of me. They only have to stop.
That is Friday. Today is Monday, and Monday is quiet, and quiet is worse.
Because when it is quiet the waiters stand at the service end and talk, and they talk with their backs to me, and they talk about me, and they think I cannot hear because there is a coffee machine going, and I have been hearing people talk about me over the sound of coffee machines since I was nine.
Silvestri.
The daughter. The one that.
He's got her living up there. In the house. Frankie Doyle's cousin does the gates and he says.
Shut up. She's right there.
She can't hear.
I can hear. I polish glasses. There are always glasses to polish, that is the first thing you learn, and the second thing you learn is that a bar is a wall you can stand behind, and I stand behind mine and I polish and I let them get it out of their systems, and when the lunch rush comes they stop, because there is no time to hate anybody during a lunch rush.
Carla runs Teresa's. She has run it since before it was Teresa's, when it was a place called Sorrento with a different sign, and she is sixty and small and she wears the same black cardigan every day and she looked at me on the first morning across the empty dining room and said, "You're the Silvestri girl. "
"Yes."
"I knew your mother. She was a good tipper and a bad drunk. Don't steal." And she went into the office and shut the door, and that was my interview.
She has not spoken to me since, except to say the float is short on Fridays, which I already knew, and to put a plate of something in front of me at three every afternoon without asking whether I want it, which I have learned is how the women in this family say anything at all.
Benny sits at the end. He has sat at the end since Thursday.
He drinks club soda with lime and he does not chew gum in here because Rosa told him not to in the hall and he has apparently decided that applies to every building I am in, and he watches the door, and when I go into the walk-in for limes he gets up and stands outside it.
"I'm getting limes."
"Okay."
"You don't have to stand there."
"Okay."
He stands there. I get the limes.
The lunch rush brings a man called Sal Buonocore, who is nothing to do with anybody and thinks he is, and who has had three Peronis with his veal and wants a fourth.
"No," I say.
"No?"
"You're driving. I watched you park."
"I've had three beers."
"You've had three beers and a grappa that Marco brought you from the kitchen because he thinks I don't watch the kitchen. Coffee?"
He looks at me. He is sixty, with a gold chain and a good suit and a face that has been told yes in this restaurant for twenty years, and he looks at me the way that face looks at anything that has said no to it.
"You know who I am?"
"You're Mr Buonocore. You've got the tile business on Richmond Avenue and you come in Mondays and Thursdays and you tip fifteen per cent on the food and nothing on the drinks, and I'm still not giving you a fourth beer."
Behind him one of the waiters makes a sound and turns it into a cough.
"And you're the Silvestri girl."
"I'm the bartender."
"Your father," he says, and stops, and I wait, because I want to hear which way he is going to go with it, and he is drunk enough to go one way and old enough to know better. He picks better. He picks it slowly, but he picks it. "Your father did my taxes one year. Did a good job. Coffee."
"Coffee."
I make it. I put it in front of him with two sugars because that is what he took with the grappa, and he looks at the sugars and then at me and something goes out of his shoulders, and he drinks his coffee, and he leaves twenty dollars on the bar when he goes, and it is the first tip I have had in five days that was not from a tourist.
The waiter who coughed is called Dino and he is about nineteen. He comes to the service end while I am clearing the glass.
"He always gets the fourth."
"Not from me."
"Carmine used to let him."
"Carmine's dead."
He looks at me. It is not a nice look and it is not a mean one. It is the look you give a dog that has done a trick you did not know it could do, and I take it, because it is better than the one I had this morning.
Nico comes in at two.
I did not tell him to come. I told him the opposite of that. I told him to stay in the apartment with the chain on, and he is standing in the door of a restaurant on Hylan Boulevard with his hood up and the good side of his face towards the room, and every waiter in the place has stopped moving.
"Outside," I say.
"Mari."
"Outside. Now."
Benny gets up. I hold one hand out towards him, palm down, and he sits back down, and I do not know why that worked and I do not stop to think about it.
I go round the end of the bar and take my brother by the arm and walk him out into the parking lot and round the side by the bins where the smokers go.
"What."
"I wanted to see you."
"You've seen me. Go home."
"That's it?"
"What did you want, Nico? A tour?"
He looks at the ground. His eye is better, which is to say it is open and the colour of a plum, and the cut on his ear has a butterfly stitch on it that he did himself, badly, and there is something else.
Something in how he is standing. He keeps his hands in the front pocket of the hoodie and he keeps them there and he does not take them out, and Nico never keeps his hands anywhere.
"Are you okay," he says.
"I'm fine."
"Is he"
"He's nothing. He gave me a job. I'm doing the job."
"People are saying"
"People have been saying things about us since you were four years old. Which people, and what."
He shrugs. His hands stay where they are.
"Nico."
"Nobody. Guys. I just wanted to see you were okay, and you're okay, so." He steps back. "So I'll go."
"Who's been talking to you."
"Nobody's been"
"You're standing there with your hands in your pocket like you're holding something in it. I've known you your whole life. Who's been talking to you?"
For a second I think he is going to tell me. His mouth opens. Then a car comes into the lot, some family, some Monday, and he looks at it and the second is over.
"Nobody," he says. "I love you. Chain's on. I'll go."
He goes. I stand by the bins and watch him walk down Hylan with his hood up and his shoulders round, and I count to twenty, and I go back in.
At four o'clock the lunch rush is gone and the dinner set-up is done and the bar is mine and empty, and the door opens, and the smell comes in before the man does.
Cigarettes. Winstons. Wet coat.
I know the smell before I look up and I go on not looking up for as long as I can, because I am polishing a glass and the glass is very important, and then I look up, because there is nowhere else to look.
He is older. Of course he is older. Nine years.
His hair has gone grey and thin and he has kept it long anyway, combed back, and his face has fallen in around the mouth the way it does when a man drinks more than he eats, and he has the same coat.
The same brown coat. He sits down on the stool in the middle of my bar and puts his elbows on it and folds his hands, and there is a lighter in the right one.
A brass Zippo. He is turning it over and over in his fingers the way he always did, click and click, and I hear the sound and I am fourteen years old.
"Little girl," Ray Donato says.
I put the glass down.
"Look at you," he says. "Look at you. All grown up and running a bar. Your mother'd be proud."
"What do you want to drink."
"Rye. Rocks. Whatever they've got that's not the well." He smiles. His teeth are worse. "You can put it on the house, I hear. I hear you've got friends."
I make the drink. I make it the way I would make anybody's drink, because my hands know how, and I put it on a napkin in front of him and I step back to the rail, and he watches me do it, and the lighter goes click.
"Where's your boy?"
"What boy."
"The one at the end. The gum." He tips his head at the empty stool. Benny is in the office doing whatever Benny does at four o'clock, and I have never once in five days wanted him back in his seat and I want him now. "Vitale's got you a babysitter, and the babysitter's on a break. Sloppy."
"Drink your drink, Ray."
"Ray. Listen to her. It used to be Mr Donato.
" He drinks. He puts the glass down exactly on the ring it left.
"Here's the thing, Marina. Here's what I heard, and you tell me if I heard it wrong.
I heard the Silvestri kid ran up a number with Sonny Fusco and I heard his big sister went up the hill and came down with a deal.
Ninety days. Living up there. In the house.
" Click. "And I thought, ninety days. That's a lot of nights.
And I thought, well, now. If Vitale's paying two hundred grand for whatever it is she's doing up there, what's it worth to a man like me to keep quiet about what I know? "
"You don't know anything."
"I know your mother. I know what she was like at the end. I know what you were like." He leans in. Not far. Far enough. "I know things about you that a man like Vitale would want to know before he puts a ring on it. That's what I know."
My hands have stopped.
I notice it the way you notice you have stopped breathing. They are on the rail and they are not doing anything, and they are always doing something, and I cannot make them start.
So I do the other thing. I reach down under the bar to the rack where the dirty glasses go, and I take hold of a rocks glass, and I close my hand round it, and the rim of it is chipped, and I squeeze until the chip goes into the meat of my palm and I can feel something.
It is not much. It is enough. It is a place to put my eyes.
"Get out," I say.
"I'm drinking."
"You've drunk. Get out, or I'll get somebody who'll put you out."
"Who? The gum?" He laughs. He reaches over the bar, and I do not move fast enough, and his hand closes on my wrist. My left wrist. Over the hair tie.
His thumb goes under the elastic and finds the round of the scar through it like he knows exactly where to look, because he does.
He put it there. "You remember this? I remember this.
You didn't even cry. Your mother cried. You just looked at me. "
The lighter is in his other hand. Click.
"Let go."
"I'm not doing anything."
"Ray. Let go of me."
The door opens.
It is not the sound. It is the change in the room.
It is the way the light shifts, and the way the two waiters at the service end stop talking in the middle of a word, and the way Ray Donato's hand does not let go of my wrist but goes still, the fingers still on my skin, the thumb still on the scar, as if the hand belongs to somebody who has just remembered where he is.
I do not have to look. I look anyway.
Salvatore Vitale is standing in the door of his mother's restaurant with the four o'clock light behind him, and he is looking at Ray's hand on my wrist, and he is not looking at anything else.