Chapter 12
SALVATORE
Rosa has the tweezers out before I'm through the kitchen door.
"Sit."
"It's nothing."
"Sit down, Salvatore, or I'll have Luca sit you."
I sit. Same chair. Same table. She takes the napkin off, and it's stuck, and she wets it and takes it off again, and there's glass in the heel of my hand and along the inside of two fingers, small, the bowl of a wine glass goes to nothing when it breaks, and she puts my hand flat on a clean towel under the light and bends over it.
"I've done this before," she says.
"I know."
"You were smaller."
"I know, Rosa."
She picks. She's good. She was good twenty-one years ago and she's better now, and she doesn't talk while she does it, and I sit and let her, and through the wall I can hear the dining room emptying.
Matteo, loud. Aldo, saying goodnight to somebody, and the somebody not answering, which means it's Marina.
And under all of it Dominic, not saying anything, which is what he does when he's said the thing he came to say.
"He'll be in the drive," Rosa says.
"I know."
"Don't."
"I'm not going to."
She looks up at me over the tweezers. Then she looks down and takes the last piece out and holds it up to the light, a chip of crystal the size of a grain of rice with my blood on it, and drops it in the saucer with the others.
"You looked at her," she says.
"Everyone looked at her."
"Not like that."
He's in the drive. He's by his car with Paulie holding the door and he's waiting, because Dominic always waits. He doesn't leave a room until he's had the last of it.
"Salvatore."
"Go home, Dom."
"I said what needed saying."
"You said what you wanted to say. It's not the same thing." I come down the steps. Luca's behind me, and Paulie sees Luca and takes his hand off the car door and puts both of them where they can be seen. "And now I know something I didn't know at dinner."
"What's that."
"That when it goes round the family that the Silvestri girl's in Teresa's house, it'll have started at my table, on a Sunday, out of your mouth. That's useful. I'll remember it."
He looks at my hand. Rosa's wrapped it. He looks at it for a while.
"You broke a glass," he says. "Over a rat. At your mother's table."
"Over you."
"You think there's a difference?"
"Get in the car."
He gets in the car. Paulie shuts the door, and looks at me, and looks at Luca, and goes round to the driver's side, and the Escalade goes down the drive and the gate opens for it and it's gone, and the gravel's quiet.
Luca comes and stands beside me. He doesn't say anything for a while. The lights are on in the third-floor window at the end.
"You know what he's doing," Luca says.
"He's making her the reason. Every box that goes missing, every man who talks. She's in the house, so it's her."
"Yes."
"And I let him say it at the table."
"You broke a glass."
"That's not stopping him. That's telling him where it hurts."
Luca folds his hands.
"Then here's the thing," he says. "And I'll say it once.
The men don't care about the boxes. They care what they see.
And what they see right now is a woman on the third floor that you don't touch, that you don't sit next to, that you look at down a table like she's a window you can't get to, and a Don who bleeds over it.
That's a soft spot. That's what Dominic's putting his thumb on.
" He looks at the window. "So you've got two ways this goes.
She's yours, in front of them, so it's not a soft spot, it's a wall. Or she's out. Not in ninety days. Now."
"There's a third."
"There isn't. Not one they can see."
"Then I'll do it where they can't."
"Sal."
"Goodnight, Luca."
Matteo's in the kitchen with his jacket off eating the rest of the meat off the platter with his fingers, and Rosa's letting him, which she only does when she thinks someone's earned it.
"You laughed," I say.
"Somebody had to."
"It was the right thing."
"I know it was the right thing. I've been waiting two years for you to say I did a right thing and it's that I laughed at Dom." He wipes his hand on a towel. "How's the hand."
"Fine."
"You crushed a glass, Sal."
"I've heard."
He puts the towel down. He looks at me, and it's my mother's look, the one she had when she'd decided to say a thing and you weren't going to like it, and he's the only one who's got it, and he doesn't know he's got it, and I've never told him.
"He's been at the terminal," Matteo says.
"Dom. Not for the boxes. He comes down on his own, no Paulie, and he stands by the gate house and he talks to the guys on the morning shift.
My guys. And what he talks about is her.
Where she came from. What her old man did.
How Carmine had to. And he does it like he's telling a story, like it's old news, and then he goes.
" He picks up an olive and doesn't eat it.
"He's been doing it since the Thursday after she came. "
"I know."
"You don't know. I didn't tell you."
"I know he's been doing it. I didn't know where."
"Well. Now you know where." He eats the olive. "Are you going to marry her?"
I don't answer.
"Because Luca thinks you should. Luca thinks that or nothing, and I've never seen Luca think anything he didn't tell you inside ten minutes, so he's told you.
And I'm not Luca. I'm just the brother. But I sat across from her tonight, and she cut off Sal Buonocore, and she didn't flinch when Dom did the toast, and I looked at you looking at her.
" He shrugs. "And I thought, he's going to have to do something, or that girl's going to walk down the hill one morning and he's going to let her. "
"Go home, Matteo."
"I am home. I live here."
"Then go to bed."
He goes. He takes the platter with him.
Benny's on the chair outside her door and he gets up when I come down the hall, and I say, "Go to bed," and he goes, and he doesn't look back, which is the right thing, and I knock.
Nothing. Then, "It's open."
It's not open. It's shut. I open it.
She's on the edge of the bed in the black dress with her shoes off and her hair coming down, and she's not crying, she doesn't do that, but she's been sitting very still for a long time, I can see it in the way she's holding her shoulders, and she looks at me in the door and then at my hand.
"How bad."
"It's nothing."
"Rosa did it?"
"Rosa did it."
"Does she do everything in this house?"
"Yes."
She nearly laughs. It doesn't get there. She looks down at her own hands in her lap and turns them over, palms up, the plaster still on the right one, and then closes them.
"He said it like it was true," she says.
"He said it like he believes it."
"Is it true?"
I come in. The door closes behind me and I put my back against it, the way I stood in Donato's room, and I look at her, at the dress and the shoulders and the hair, and I answer the thing she asked and not the thing behind it, because the thing behind it is a room I'm not opening tonight.
"My father believed it," I say. "He believed it enough to do what he did. That's all I can tell you about whether it's true."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the only honest thing I've got."
She looks at me for a long time.
"You didn't look at me," she says. "For an hour. I counted."
"I know."
"Why."
"Because if I'd looked at you I'd have looked at you the way I looked at you at the end, and Dominic would have seen it an hour sooner, and he'd have started an hour sooner, and I wanted you to eat."
Her mouth opens a little. She shuts it.
I cross the room.
I don't decide to. It's not a decision, it's the thing that was going to happen when I came up the stairs, and she sees it coming and doesn't move, and I stop in front of her, and she's sitting and I'm standing and she has to tip her head back to look at me, and I put my good hand on her face.
Just that. My hand on the side of her face, thumb along the cheekbone, the way hers was on mine in the kitchen. She closes her eyes.
"Marina."
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't say it like that."
"Like what."
"Like it's mine. Like you're giving it back to me."
I bend down and I kiss her.
Not like the kitchen. Slow. I've got time.
I've got all the time there is, and I take her mouth like I've got it, and her hands come up and take hold of my shirt, both of them, and she stands up into it, off the bed, and she's against me.
All of her. The dress is thin and she's warm through it and she makes a sound, low, into my mouth, and my bad hand's in her hair and it hurts and I don't care.
I get the zip at the back of the dress. I get it halfway.
She's pulling my shirt out of my trousers and her hands are on my skin, on my ribs, on the ink over the ribs, and she stops there, on the viper, with her fingers spread, and I take my mouth off hers and put it on her neck, under the jaw, where she's fast, and she says my name.
The dress comes off her shoulder. One side.
I put my mouth there. Her collarbone. The top of her breast, where the black lace of something stops, and she arches into it, her hand in my hair now, holding on, and I've got her half undressed and I've got her pressed against me and I'm going to put her back on that bed and I am not going to be slow about it, and she says, "Stop. "
I stop.
I stop with my mouth on her skin, and I don't move, and I don't take my hands off her, and I say against her, "Say it again."
"Stop. Salvatore. Stop."
I straighten up. I take my hands off her. I step back, one step, and she stands there with the dress off one shoulder and her mouth swollen and her chest going and her eyes on mine, and she pulls the dress back up. Slowly. Like it costs her.
"Not like this," she says.
"That's my line."
"Not while I owe you." Her voice is steady.
It's costing her that too. "I've got seventy-one days on a paper with my brother's name on it and I'm sleeping in your house and eating your food and I've got your man on my door.
I'm not doing this from there. I'm not going to be a woman who does this from there.
I've watched what that is. I grew up in it. "
I look at her.
"Wait," I say.
I go out. I go down two flights and along the hall to the study and I open the drawer on the left of the desk where Sonny brought it up on the Wednesday, the marker, the paper, Nico Silvestri's name in Sonny's handwriting and the number under it and a signature at the bottom that's a twenty-year-old's signature, big and stupid, and I take it out and I go back up the two flights, and Benny's gone, and her door's still open, and she's standing exactly where I left her.
I hold it up so she can read it. She reads it. Her face does the thing.
Then I tear it in half. And in half again. And I drop the four pieces on the floor of the room where her father's daughter is sleeping, and she looks at them, and looks at me.
"You owe me nothing," I say. "Now say no."