The other side was a building site. Bare studs, wires, a poured floor, a great black thing in the back wall that I recognized after a second as the bones of a wood-fired oven going in. His fire. He’d told me about it in bed a hundred times, the volume coming up on him the way it does when he talks about a thing he loves—small place, ten tables, twelve, no more, Sicilian, loud, the kind of room his mother would’ve run, the food coming out fast and hot and family-style, no menu some nights, just whatever the fire wanted. His heat to my flour. That was how he said it, every time, like it was a vow. My flour, his heat. And now there was ahole in the wall between us, and through it I could see exactly what he meant by it.
“So,” he said. “Your bread comes through here. Straight off your rack, through the wall, onto my tables. Hot. None of this carrying it round the block business. And the desserts go the other way at the end. And all day”—he reached through the hole and tapped the brick lip, claiming it—“all day there’s a hole in the wall and you’re right there and I’m right here and we work side by side with one wall and one window between us, every single day, for the rest of our—”
“It’s not level,” I said.
He stopped. “What?”
“The opening.” I put my hand flat to the bottom lip of it, the way I put my hand flat to marble, reading it. “It’s not level. The far side’s a good half-inch high. You’ve got a slope on it. Anything I set down here is going to slide toward you.”
“That’s a feature.”
“It’s a defect.”
“The bread will slide right to me. Romantic.”
“The dust,” I said, “is in my proofing room. Look at it. Look at my loaves.” I turned and gestured at the rack, where my tsoureki sat under a fine pale snow of his wall, ruined, the whole tray gone, and I felt the boss come up in me hot and ready to take a strip off him for it. “That’s a tray of proof, Tonio. That’s two hours. That’s gone. You can’t knock a hole through a working wall in the middle of a working morning, you absolute—”
“I know.”
“—you cannot just—”
“I know, baby, it’s awful, I’m awful, I’m the worst.” He was grinning the whole time, unrepentant. “I couldn’t wait. I’m sorry about the tray. I’ll make you a tray. I’ll make you ten. I just—I wanted to see your face when the hole opened. I’ve been thinking about it for three weeks. The look on your face.”
“And?”
“It was worth a tray of proof,” he said, soft, and the grin gentled into something I had no defense against, the thing in his eyes that gets through the wall I keep up no matter how high I build it.
I looked at him through the hole in my wall, grey to the jaw, beaming, dust drifting down between us in the light. And I leaned forward over the not-level lip of the brick he’d just knocked through and I kissed his dusty mouth through the wall.
It tasted of plaster and it crunched and I didn’t care. He made a low pleased sound and kissed me back, his good hand coming up to hold my jaw through the hole, gentle, careful, the killer’s hand that put a man into the tile, the Daddy’s hand, the hand that had crawled across a killing floor to get to me, holding my face like it was the only thing worth holding, and meaning it with his whole chest.
“See you tonight,” he said, when we broke. “It’s six months.”
I knew which six months. It went through me cold and quiet under the warmth, the pang of it, the old man in the linen suit going down in the spreading red, the chair that would be empty at a table tonight. Six months since the killing floor. Six months since everything changed.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got it covered. I’m bringing the loaf.”
He nodded. He knew which loaf, too.
“See you tonight,” I said, and I meant all of it.
Weatethefirstmeal in Tonio’s restaurant before there were lights in it.
The wiring wasn’t done. The oven wasn’t lit. There were studs where the walls would go and a tarp over the front where the glass would be, and the floor was poured but bare, and into allof that they’d carried one long table and two dozen mismatched chairs and a forest of candles in jars, so the half-built room came up gold and shuddering at the edges, the way a thing comes up that isn’t finished but is loved anyway.
There was a chair at the head of it that nobody sat in.
I knew whose it was before anyone said. They’d set it like all the others, plate and glass and fork, and every so often through the night somebody’s eye would go to it and come away again. Don Arturo’s chair. Six months gone. They’d buried him in Sicily, and tonight they toasted his empty chair in a room that wasn’t finished, and I sat among them and belonged.
Sal at one side, the wall, immovable, the graze long healed off his jaw and the grief no longer bolted down so much as carried, openly now, a weight he’d stopped pretending he didn’t hold. Pietro across from him, with Angela tucked under his arm, her hand on his thigh, the brittle vigilance gone all the way out of her into something I could only call home. Marco, warm and wicked, refilling glasses he hadn’t been asked to refill, watching the room the way he watches everything, missing nothing, the charm a thin coat over a mind that frightened me a little if I thought about it. Dante grave at the far end with Gemma small and bright beside him, her hand in his, the don and his wife. Donatella with her red lipstick and her phone face-down for once. Santo and his dark quiet woman, Cora, and at her feet, asleep with his great grizzled scarred head on her boot, a chihuahua the size of a loaf who had bitten three waiters before the soup.
And under the table, sprawled across the bare poured floor in the exact spot guaranteed to inconvenience the most people, taking up half the room with his sheer grumbling bulk—
Olimpo.
Alive. Scarred down his whole left flank where the fur had burned off and grown back wrong, patchy and grey, a long baldroad of shiny skin he’d carry to the end of his days. They’d told me, in those first weeks, that he might not make it, that his lungs were full of it, that they wouldn’t promise anything. And he’d made it. The dog who’d gone into the fire after me , the one who got there, the one who tried. He slept now with his head on Cora’s foot and a leg in everyone’s way and he was the most beloved animal in two crime families and he knew it.
I had a hand down on his great side, on the scarred flank, and he sighed in his sleep and leaned into it, and I thought I might not deserve any of this.
