“Coffee,” I said, “and I’ll fix that other matter for you, the one with the slips.”
His shoulders came down an inch. “You’re serious.”
“I’m a generous man on a cold morning.” I slid onto a stool. “The number you couldn’t cover from the weekend—forget it. Gone. I’ll square it upstairs, it never happened.” I watched him not quite believe it, then believe it, then get embarrassed at how much it meant, which is the exact face I’d come to see. “On one condition.”
“Here it is,” he said, but he was smiling now, pouring the coffee, easy.
“You talk to me while I drink this. That’s the whole condition. I’m lonely and you’re handsome.”
He laughed—a real one, surprised out of him—and that was the door open. From there it was nothing. From there it was justa man and a man and a dog and the smell of bleach and last night’s beer, two guys shooting the breeze before the world woke up.
I let it wander. That’s the part the impatient ones never learn. You don’t go at the thing you want; you go all the way around it and let the thing you want come to you. We talked about his knee. We talked about the Bears, who are, according to him, an ongoing tragedy. We talked about his daughter’s husband, who he didn’t care for, and I agreed the son-in-law sounded like a stronzo, and he liked that, liked having an Italian agree with him about something, and somewhere in there I said, easy as breathing, that the street looked rough lately, all those shutters, and wasn’t it a shame.
“Tell me about it,” he said. And thenhetoldmeabout it.
He told me about the two men in the good coats who’d come around in the fall, polite, very polite, with an offer on his lease that was insulting and a follow-up that wasn’t an offer anymore. He told me about the dry cleaner, who’d held out until somebody put a brick through the back, and the grocer, who was holding out still but wouldn’t be by spring, you could see it on him. He told me they all came with the same paper. Same lawyer. Some company with a nothing name, sounded like a furniture catalogue, and the checks—here, this is the part, this is the part I’d walked half a mile in the cold for, and I didn’t lean in, I didn’t even slow down, I reached down and scratched the dog’s ear instead—the checks all cleared through the same outfit. A logistics company. Trucks and a yard down by the freight line. He knew because his nephew drove for them a while and didn’t like what got loaded.
“Furniture,” I said, amused, like it was a small thing. “What’s a bar got to do with furniture.”
“That’s what I said.” He topped off my coffee without asking. “Nothing moves in that yard you’d put in a living room, I’ll tell you that.”
I had it now. The shape of it, and the name of the thing under the shape, and a yard with a fence around it where the threads of three months of cold mornings all ran into one knot. I felt the click of it land somewhere behind my ribs the way it always did—clean, cold, satisfying. But I didn’t show him any of that. I gave him the wide-open face, the one that’s never thinking anything in particular, and I drank my coffee and asked about his daughter’s wedding, which I knew was coming up, and let him talk about a hall and a dress and how much it was all costing him, the bandit caterers, the open bar.
And then his phone went, and it was her—the daughter—and his whole face changed, lit up, went soft in a way nothing else had touched it all morning, and he said into the phoneI’m coming, I’m coming, give me ten minutes,and to me,I gotta get home, she’s stopping by before work, I haven’t seen her in two weeks.
“Go,” I said. “Go, get out of here.”
He got his coat. He was hurrying now, full of somewhere to be, full of someone waiting, and for one second I felt the cold of the empty room where the warmth had just been standing. He had a daughter calling at dawn. He had a wife who wanted him home and a son-in-law to disapprove of and a whole loud crowded life on the other end of that phone. All I had was a dog who wasn’t even mine.
“Hey.” I caught him at the door, grinned, clapped his shoulder. “Your son-in-law? At the wedding? Get him drunk early. Bad men dance worse. You’ll get great pictures.”
He laughed all the way out to his car. That’s the job, that’s the whole job—you leave them laughing, and you leave with what you came for, and they never once feel the second thing happen.
Olimpo got up off the floor with a groan of complaint and came to lean on my leg. The bar was empty now and going cold without its owner in it. I crouched, took the dog’s heavy head in my hands, looked into his disappointed amber eyes.
“A logistics company,” I told him quietly, in Sicilian now. “A yard by the freight line. Same paper, same lawyer, eating the whole block.” I scratched behind his ears. He didn’t wag. A verdict. “Yeah. I don’t like it either.”
I stood. I folded the name away inside me where the cold useful things go, next to the warm window I wasn’t thinking about, and I clipped the leash, and we went out into the morning to find my brothers.
Byeleventhebackroom of the restaurant looked like a war zone—albeit one with excellent coffee and countless dining options.
I came in out of the cold with the dog, who immediately abandoned me for Sal, the traitor, and I stood in the doorway for a second and just took the noise of it. After the dead block and the empty bar, the noise was a thing you could warm your hands on. A long table laid with little plates. A vendor in an apron sweating gently. My cousin Pietro on the phone holding it away from his ear while Palermo shouted into it. My brother Sal at the head of the table with a list, a pen, and the face of a man auditing God.
And the wedding everywhere, in every plate and every phone call and every fight. Pietro’s wedding. My brother, who two years ago I’d have bet money would never marry anyone or anything, who came back from Catania with the sound turned off on his whole life and stayed that way so long I stopped expecting him back—that Pietro, marrying his Angela in three weeks, and methe best man, and the menu apparently going to be the death of all of us first.
“Toe,” Sal said, not looking up. “Sit. You’re late.”
“Dont’tyour’re lateme! I was working.” I dropped into the chair across from him and snagged an arancino off the nearest plate before anyone could rule on it. “I bring news of the outside world. There’s a sun. It’s cold. The Bears are still bad.”
“The fish,” Sal said, ignoring me completely, “or the meat. Rosa wants both. We cannot do both for two hundred and forty people, it’s obscene.”
“Rosa wants both because Uncle Arturo’s people will count the courses,” I said, with my mouth full, “and report back to Palermo whether the Scordatos did it cheap. So we do both, and we do it loud, and the old man hears we spent like kings on the boy. That’s not a menu, that’s a message.” I pointed the arancino at him. “Trust me, I speak Rosa.”
Sal looked at me for a long moment. Then he wrote something down. A swear in another life he lives as a fucking accountant.
Pietro got off the phone looking like a man surfacing from deep water. “She wants the cousins seated by branch,” he said. “By branch. There are nine branches. Two of them don’t speak.”
“Three,” Sal said.