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He swallowed hard. Gabriella had done one fine job, leaving him so confused that even he found today’s events touching.
The reception was at their parents’ home, in the big conservatory Cesare had built a couple of years ago.
Anna teased him about looking so grumpy.
“You could, at least, try looking happy,” Izzy said. “This has been like a fairy tale!”
There were no fairy tales, Dante wanted to tell her, not in real life, but he smiled, said it sure was, picked up a flute of champagne and wandered over to Falco and Nick who were standing in a corner, looking out at their father’s sea of withered tomato plants.
“Man,” Nick said, sotto voce, “I think I’m on wedding-cake overload.”
Falco agreed. “I’m glad Rafe’s happy but if he tells me just once more how it’s time I found myself a wife—”
Dante put the champagne flute on a table.
“How about we go someplace where nobody’s gonna talk about the joys of matrimony?”
His brothers grinned.
Twenty minutes later, they were in their usual booth, the last one on the left, at The Bar.
The Bar wasn’t fancy even though it was in a fancy location.
The reason was that the location had once been just a step up from a slum.
Back then, The Bar had been called O’Hearn’s Tavern and was a neighborhood hangout downstairs from the hole-in-the-wall apartment Rafe had rented. But the brothers had liked the place. The beer was cold, the sandwiches and burgers were thick and cheap, and the no-nonsense ambience suited them just fine, though they’d probably have flattened anybody dumb enough to use the word ambience to describe the atmosphere.
Then, right about the time the four of them pooled their resources and their skills to start Orsini Brothers, the area began to change. Tired old tenements, including the one where Rafe had lived, were gutted and reborn as pricey townhouses. An empty factory building became a high-priced club. Bodegas became boutiques.
Clearly, the Orsinis were about to lose their favorite watering hole.
So, they bought O’Hearn’s. Stopped calling it that, started calling it, simply enough, The Bar.
They had the leather booths and stools redone, the old wooden floor refinished and kept everything else unchanged: the long zinc bar, the battered wooden table tops, the thick sandwiches and burgers, the endless varieties of cold beer and ale.
Only the bartenders knew Rafe, Dante, Nick and Falco owned it. They wanted it that way. Their lives were high profile; The Bar was not…although, to their amazement, it became what was known as a “destination,” which made the four of them laugh. It was where they often got together Friday nights and whenever they wanted to down a few beers, relax and talk.
Right now, though, nobody was relaxing. And that was Dante’s fault.
The bar was shadowed, as always. Comfortable, as always. A Wynton Marsalis CD played softly in the background. The bartender, unasked, had brought Nick a bottle of Anchor Steam, Falco a Guinness, Dante a Belgian white. Their usual drinks, their usual booth, the usual cool jazz…but the atmosphere was tense.
Nick and Falco kept looking at each other, raising their eyebrows, rolling their eyes toward Dante.
What the hell’s going on? they were saying in every way that didn’t require speech, because neither of them wanted to ask. Dante’s mood was, in a word, grim. His silence, his flat stare, the very set of his mouth made that painfully clear.
Still, even a brother’s patience went just so far, and at last Falco decided to go for it.
“So,” he said briskly, “you took the last couple of weeks off, huh?”
Dante looked up. “You got a problem with that?”
Falco’s jaw shot forward. He started to answer but Nick silenced him by kicking him in the shin.
“Just asking,” Nick said.
A muscle knotted in Dante’s cheek. “I flew to Brazil last week. And took this week off. Okay?”
“What’s doing in Brazil?”
The muscle in Dante’s cheek took another jump. “I bought a ranch.”
Falco and Nick looked at each other. “A ranch?”
Falco’s question sounded more like “Are you nuts?” but Dante could hardly blame him. His brothers were trying to figure out what was going on. Well, hell, who could blame them? So he nodded, drank some beer, then looked across the table at the two of them.
“Correction. I almost bought a ranch. It was the old man’s idea. I went down to buy it for him.”
“Our old man was gonna buy a ranch?” Falco cackled. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Actually,” Dante said, after a beat of silence, “I ended up trying to buy it for myself.”
