“These are incredible,” I told him, holding one up. “Tell your wife. Tell her I said she should leave you and run away with me.”
“She would,” he said. “She has better taste than her husband.”
That got him. I felt the pins ease an inch. That’s the whole job, if you want to know it—you find the soft thing in a man and you stand near it.
Around me the rest of them suffered in their own particular ways, and you could read every one of them by how they took the cloth.
Pietro stood on the next block of carpet over with his jacket half-pinned and his eyes somewhere middle-distance, patient, still, the stillness he came back from Catania. His wedding. Three weeks out. He’d stand there all afternoon and not complain once, and that alone told you he wasn’t a ghost anymore.
Sal held himself like the tailor was the one being measured. Spine straight, arms exactly where he was told, the iron of him filling out a charcoal suit like the suit had been waiting its whole life to be worn correctly. He’d given the old man two sentences in an hour and both had been about the break of the trouser.
The Carusos took up the rest of the room. Dante by the window, controlled, considering himself in the glass the way he considers everything, like the reflection might be lying and he’d catch it. Santo over by the chairs in a suit that fought him and was losing—a wolf in a costume, the old man circling him with the resignation of a man trying to tailor weather. And Marco, easy Marco, leaning on the counter charming the tailor’s wife on the phone in the back, getting himself the better fabric without anyone noticing he’d done it. I saw myself in him.
“The date holds,” Dante said to the room, not turning from the window. “Don Arturo lands the Thursday before. Palermo’s bringing forty. Rosa’s co-ordinating.”
“Rosa is at war with the florist,” Pietro said, mild, to the middle distance. “Apparently the man delivered the wrong type of lily.”
“There’s a wrong lily?” I asked.
“There is averywrong lily.” Dante’s mouth twitched at the corner of it. “We’re feeding two hundred and forty people from two families that spent the last century not feeding each other. The flowers are supposed to be the easy part.”
“Seat the Palermo cousins who don’t talk near the bar,” I said. “I keep saying it. Drunk men forgive—”
“Everything, yes.” Sal, without moving his head. “You’ve said. Multiplie times.”
“If you listen, I’ll stop saying it.”
“How is the bakery, Tonio?” Marco asked, coming off the phone, smiling that disarming smile he keeps loaded. He didn’t know the half of it and didn’t need to; he can read a man the way I read a man, and he’d read this one off my collar.
“The bakery is a bakery,” I said. “It bakes.”
“He goes every morning,” Pietro told the Carusos, settling in, lit up, betraying me out of pure happiness, which is the worst kind. “Before dawn. Buys enough bread to feed Palermo. There is a girl.”
“There’s no girl.”
“There’s a girl,” Sal confirmed, dry as the biscotti, not moving an inch under the chalk. “The bakery girl. Doesn’t know her name, though. Greek.”
“Leave it,” I said, and the room went off like a struck bell, Santo barking a laugh from the corner that startled the tailor, Marco’s eyes bright with the delight of a man who collectsexactly this, and the old man jabbed me in the shoulder again because I’d moved.
“Should we order her a frock?” Marco asked, all innocence. “I only ask because the seamstress is right here. We could get her measurements. What is she—small? Tall? You’d know. You’ve watched her for, what, fourteen mornings—”
“Twelve.”
“—and never said one useful word to her, by your own report.”
“She fed the dog and called me the second nicest thing in the room,” I said. “After the dog. That’s the entire history. Order her a frock, maybe she’ll wear it to my funeral.”
They laughed, and I let them, because that’s how you survive a room of men who love you—you hand them the joke so they don’t go looking for the wound underneath it. It worked, it always works, the room moved on, back to lilies and seating and which of the Palermo uncles couldn’t be put in the same county as which other one, and I stood there pinned in good wool with a biscotto in my hand making it all sing.
The tailor told me to look up and hold, and I held, and I caught myself in the long mirror—the suit half-made on me, dark and exact, the suit I’d stand up in beside my brother while he married the woman who put his lights back on—and for one half of one second, in the glass, with nobody watching the glass but me, the grin came off my face. Just slid off, like water off her wall. And underneath it was a man in a wedding suit that wasn’t for his own wedding, who’d dance with every grandmother in the building and make the whole thing roar and then drive home, after, to an apartment with no-one else in it.
I put the grin back. You always put the grin back.
But I was already done. I knew it before I’d finished knowing it—the restlessness that had had me eating biscotti since we walked in was the same restlessness that had had me parked across a dark street three nights running.
I had blown my cover putting his face on her glass and I had not been there since, I had been here, getting pinned, joking about frocks, while six miles away a coward picked his moment.
“I have to go,” I said.
