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“Meh. I barely remember that.”
“The incident you toast a round of drinks to once a year?”
I handed my brother a full coffee mug and prepared one for myself. “Do I?” I said with false innocence.
Gio was watching me with a smile. He always had my number. “Come on, what was his name again? Carl Hand?”
“Chris Mann,” I said automatically.
Gio raised his coffee mug. “Well, here’s to Chris Mann.”
“To Chris Mann.” I drained my mug quickly, the haze of sleep dissipating thanks to the healing properties of caffeine.
My brother patted the space beside him. “Sit down. We’ve got a few things to sort out before tomorrow, and I want your attention while you’re in a cooperative mood.”
I sank into the leather with a groan, making a mental note to find some time to visit the gym today. “You shouldn’t bust my balls so much. I was at the new place until three a.m.”
“How’s it looking?”
“Good. The kitchen space is ready for the ovens, the countertops are being installed this week, and most of the electrical issues have been handled.”
Now that the talk had turned professional, I woke up. There was so much going on these days that sometimes it was tough to keep track of it all. If I stopped to think about everything my brother and I had accomplished together, an enormous sense of pride swelled in my chest. Years ago we’d fallen hard, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but we’d risen, and once again the Esposito name blazed proudly over a restaurant door.
Our grandfather, Leo, ran the original Esposito’s in Manhattan for decades before his health started failing. When he transferred management over to his son, Frank, and his grandson Steven, he thought he was leaving the family business in good hands. Gio and I were still boys, so Papa Leo figured that our uncle and cousin would run the place until we were old enough to share in the responsibilities. Our grandfather’s death had been devastating, but I was glad he’d never know how Frank and Steven mismanaged our inheritance and gambled away the family legacy. When it all came crashing down, I was bitter enough to take my own immature form of revenge.
In the end all that bad blood was enough to rupture the family forever. I’d just turned eighteen at the time, and Gio was sixteen, but our tiny, invincible grandmother realized there wasn’t much future left for us in New York. At that point all Donna Esposito had left were a few small investments and a vacation home in Phoenix she and Leo had bought years earlier, before two little boys were dropped on their doorstep. It seemed like the only logical thing for us to do was head west in search of a new beginning.
During those rough times Gio and I made endless plans about opening up our own restaurant someday. Over the next six years, we finished school, worked like crazy, and, with a small deposit of cash, an ambitious business plan, and a sympathetic loan officer, managed to make the new Esposito’s a reality. It occupied a corner of a brick strip mall in Tempe, a college town that housed the huge state university. It bore little resemblance to the elegant Manhattan original, but to us it was the center of the universe. I always knew I’d do whatever it took to see that everything we’d lost was reclaimed, at least in a sense. I owed it to my grandfather, and the long line of Espositos that had come before me, to keep clawing away until that happened.
The food—wood-fired pizza with an incomparable crust and a family-recipe sauce—was its own best advertisement, and there was nothing unusual about a line of customers going out the door on Friday and Saturday nights. We Esposito boys knew what people wanted when it came to food, having worked the counter at the Manhattan place from the moment we hit our teens. The recipes were carefully guarded among the family, but Gio and I had known them by heart since we helped our grandma, Donna, in the kitchen as kids. Two years after opening our own place, we leased the store beside it, knocked down a wall, and doubled the size of the restaurant. Now, less than four years after Gio and I opened the doors to our own pizzeria, we had a staff of twelve, and we were getting ready to open up a second, larger version in downtown Phoenix.
I wouldn’t hit my thirtieth birthday for two more summers, yet together my brother and I had redeemed our family name and made our own dreams come true. It was a history worth celebrating.
These past few weeks Gio had been focusing on running the original store and dealing with administrative details for the second one while I threw myself into the messier tasks involved in getting Espo 2—as we’d been referring to it—renovated in time for the grand opening, little more than a month away. I loved it, though. I loved dealing with the contractors and the grittiness and watching the transformation of the old, abandoned bar in Phoenix’s downtown Heritage Square neighborhood. This new restaurant would bring us full circle. I couldn’t wait to see my grandmother’s face when we showed her that we’d done it—we’d recreated the legendary Esposito’s in a new city.
Gio listened to everything I said about timelines and contractors, nodding with satisfaction when I estimated how much we still needed to complete before we opened our doors.
“That’s good news,” he said. “We’re way ahead of schedule.”
“Don’t get cocky,” I warned. “Remember, we inserted some wiggle room on purpose because something is bound to go sideways in the weeks leading up to the opening.”
“We have four weeks,” Gio argued. My brother was sharp—tough for any contractor or line chef who tried to get around him.
I shrugged. “Four weeks is nothing. It will pass so fast it’ll feel like whiplash.”
He shoved me. He was the only man on earth who could get away with that. “Come on, Dom. It’s time to get a little excited.”
“No, it’s not. It’s time to take exhaustive inventory of everything that could possibly go wrong.”
He raised an eyebrow. “One of these days someone’s going to come along and shatter that damn pessimism of yours.”
“Bullshit. Being cynical keeps me honest.”
“You are that,” he said seriously, setting down his coffee mug. “The best man I’ve ever known.”
I felt a tiny twinge over those words. I thought about Grandpa Leo dying alone by a dumpster because I hadn’t shown up for work that night. I still had nightmares about that, and in my darkest moments, I wondered if he cursed me as he gasped his last breath. And there were other things too. Things I was terribly ashamed of and had never admitted to Gio. But I couldn’t change any of that today.
“You feeling hormonal this morning?” I asked my brother in a joking tone. “You seem awful melancholy all of a sudden.”
