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“Hard to put myself there as what little I remember of my relationship with my mother wasn’t cookies and milk. But . . . you come back home, hiding out for five to six years, and your mother—your only living blood relative as far as I can ascertain, excepting the half-sibling she’s had since you took off—is living across the bridge—bloody overcrowded or not. It seems you’d be compelled to see her. To check it out.”
“Might be it wasn’t cookies and milk with his ma either.”
“He kept the medal she gave him, so there was something there, some bond. If there’s a bond, that something, you’d want to see her, see how she was, what she was doing, who this guy is she’d married, see the half-brother. Something.”
“If this is your Lino.”
“Yeah, if.” She frowned over that, wondering if a hunch was worth the trip to Brooklyn during the inaccurately termed rush hour. “First big one. If we get over that one, and he did make contact, did go see her, then she has to know, with all the media coverage, that her son’s dead. How would she handle that? No one’s contacted the morgue on Lino, except for Father López. I checked. No inquiries, no requests for viewing.”
Roarke said nothing for a moment. “I considered, spent some time considering actually, not making direct contact with my family in Ireland. Just . . . checking them out, doing a background on my mother’s sister, the others. Maybe observing, you could say, from a distance. Not making the connection.”
She’d wondered about that. She knew he’d gotten drunk the night before he’d gone to see his aunt. And he wasn’t a man to drink himself drunk.
“Why?”
“A dozen reasons. More, a great deal more against it than the single one for making myself knock on that cottage door. I needed to see them, speak to them, hear their voices. Hers, especially. Sinead. My mother’s twin. And I would have rather faced torture than knock.”
He could remember the moment still, the sweaty panic of it. “It was hideously hard to do. What would they think of me? Would they look at me and see him? And if they did, would I? Would they look at me, see only my sins—which are plentiful—and none of her, the mother I never knew existed? The prodigal son’s a hard role to carry.”
“But you knocked on the door. That’s who you are.” She was silent as she considered. “It may not be who he was. Someone who could do what he did, live as someone else, something else for years. Hard to explain that to Mommy, unless Mommy’s the kind who wouldn’t give a shit what her baby boy’s done. And kills the fat cow anyway.”
“That would be fatted, and calf.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A couple of hundred pounds, I’d say. But, to the point, finding out is why we’re going to Brooklyn in this bleeding traffic.”
“Partly. But, you know, I could’ve kept Peabody on the clock. I figured since we’re going to check out Teresa at work, and work happens to be her Italian brother-in-law’s pizzeria, we could have a nice meal together.”
He spared her a glance. “Meaning you can put a check in the column that reads: Went out to dinner with Roarke, and consider that a wifely duty dispensed.”
She shifted, started to deny. Didn’t bother. “Maybe, but we’re still getting all this time together, and what’s billed as really mag Brooklyn-style pizza.”
“With this traffic, it better be the best shagging pizza in all five boroughs.”
“At least I’m not asking you to go to six o’clock Mass with me in the morning.”
“Darling Eve, to get me to do that the amount and variety of the sexual favors required are so many and myriad even my imagination boggles.”
“I don’t think you can exchange sexual favors for Mass attendance. But if I decide to go check it out, and I get the chance, I’ll ask the priest.”
She went back to her PPC while Roarke battled through the traffic.
By Eve’s calculations, it took about as long to travel from downtown Manhattan to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn as it would to take a shuttle from New York to Rome. The pizzeria stood on the corner of a shopping district on the edge of a neighborhood of old row houses with decorated stoops where residents sat to watch their world go by.
“She’s on tonight,” Eve told Roarke once they’d parked. “But if for some reason she’s not at work, she lives a few blocks down, two over.”
“Meaning if she’s not at work, I’ll be whistling for my dinner?”
“I don’t know about the whistling, but it might be postponed for the time it takes me to track her down and talk to her.”
She stepped into the restaurant and was immediately surrounded by scents that told her if the best pizza in the five boroughs wasn’t to be had here, it would be damn close.
Murals of various Italian scenes decorated walls the color of toasted Italian bread. Booths, two-tops, four-tops cheerfully crowded together under iron ceiling fans that whisked those scents everywhere.
Behind the counter in the open kitchen, a young guy in a stained apron tossed pizza dough high, made the catch, tossed, all to the thrilled giggles of kids wedged into a booth with what she supposed were their parents. The waitstaff wore bright red shirts while they carted trays and weaved and threaded between tables to serve. Music played, and someone sang about “amore” in a rich and liquid baritone.
At a quick scan, Eve saw babies, kids, teens, and right on up to elderly chowing down, chatting, drinking wine, or studying the old-fashioned paper menus.
