Dinner at Fiorello’s

by Rick R. Reed

  “What are their names?”

  Vito cocked his head, and the stony stare rushed back in. “I’m not out here to chat with you. The girls need their walk, and I need to get to bed.” He looked pointedly at Henry. “Alone.”

  Henry was shocked by this last remark. What on earth would give Vito the idea he’d want to join him in bed? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because it’s one of your most fervent wishes? It had to be Carmela, she of the perceptive powers and big mouth.

  Vito started walking with the dogs, heading east, toward the lake.

  “Can I walk with you?” Henry asked eagerly.

  “Apparently,” Vito replied.

  They walked in silence for several moments, the dogs stopping to sniff and take care of business.

  Vito at last said, speaking to the air in front of him, “You never answered me.”

  “About what?” The clutching sensation in Henry’s gut told him it wasn’t wise to play dumb.

  Vito blew out a sigh. “About why the hell you followed me home.”

  “Followed you?” Henry laughed. “Is that what you think?”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t insult me.”

  They had come to Sheridan Road. Cars and buses, even at this late hour, rushed by in both north and south directions. Henry was again seized with an urge to simply turn tail and run. How could he answer Vito? What excuse could he make?

  For some absurd reason and almost from out of nowhere, Henry felt tears well up in his eyes. Everything caught up with him at once—how lousy the summer had been so far, losing his best friend Kade, who had turned out to be a user and a complete asshole, and getting in his parents’ bad graces when he needed them most. The only bright spot had been working at the restaurant, where already he was beginning to feel at home.

  And now he’d probably managed to ruin that too. He sucked in a breath and tried to hold off the tears. It would not do to be a crybaby in front of this guy. It wouldn’t win him any points.

  But what could he say?

  The light changed, and Vito started across the street with the dogs. As they got to the other side, the dogs must have smelled the lake because they picked up their pace, almost running. Vito obviously couldn’t help himself. His dour expression, for just one fleeting moment, turned happy. He laughed.

  The four of them trotted toward the beach. Once they got there, Vito stooped down to free the dogs of their harnesses. They dashed off, barking and kicking up sand behind them, to the water’s edge. It was a pretty scene, the dogs splashing and playing tag with the waves lapping at the shore, all lit up by silvery moonlight. Henry wished he could enjoy it.

  Vito walked over and sat down in the grass bordering the beach. Henry had the impression that he didn’t really care if Henry stayed or left. But for better or worse, Henry felt compelled to explain himself. He sat down beside Vito.

  Vito looked over at him and then back out at the dogs, jumping and frolicking at the water’s edge. “You gonna tell me?”

  Henry thought he would sound stupid and stalkerish if he blurted out the truth—that he simply wanted to know Vito better, find out a little bit more about him, so maybe he could discover some common ground that would give him an opening for talking to Vito.

  Henry swallowed and said, “I don’t know how to tell you.”

  Vito was silent for a very long time. He said nothing as he watched the dogs. He said nothing when he got up and whistled for them to come. Henry marveled at their immediate and unquestioning obedience. He said nothing as he got them yoked back up for the walk home.

  Vito turned and began to head west again. Henry followed. Vito stopped and stared at him.

  “What?” Henry let out a burst of nervous laughter.

  “There’s something wrong with you.”

  Henry sucked in a breath, feeling like he’d been punched in the gut. He started to apologize, to offer some kind of excuse for his behavior, but Vito stopped him with an outstretched hand.

  “I want you to leave me alone. You had no business following me.” He turned away from Henry and continued on his way.

  Henry watched Vito and the dogs until shadows and the vehicles hurrying to and fro on Sheridan swallowed them up. He felt deflated, sick. For a while he had to restrain himself from running after Vito and trying to explain himself.

  But there was no good explanation, and to chase after him would only make things worse. Henry’s behavior was crazy, and Vito had every right to be creeped out by it. Especially if he was, as Henry believed, straight.

  He shook his head and turned north. The walk home would be long and arduous. At least the pain in his feet and his weariness would keep his mind off the fool he had made of himself tonight.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  VITO COULDN’T sleep, even though he’d tried—for hours. Those hours passed like days, and Vito realized, in retrospect, that he had experienced brief, tortured patches of sleep, because he recalled dream imagery that made him anxious—empty arms, darkness, a sense of foreboding coming from just a telephone.

  He felt crowded by the girls, one lying too close and making him hot, the other horizontal at the foot of the bed, so he had nowhere to put his legs. Neither of them were having any trouble sleeping, though. They snored like truck drivers.

  Sighing, he got up and went into the kitchen, turning on only the dim light over the stove. He pulled the cork from a bottle of Chianti that was on the counter, half finished, and poured himself a glass.

  He looked around the kitchen and thought how it no longer suited him, with its butter-colored walls and the alphabet magnets on the refrigerator, holding artwork that would never be admired by its maker again. This was a room for a happy man.

  Vito thought he should throw this stuff away, make the kitchen sterile, barren, utilitarian, a place simply for meal preparation. Paint the walls white. Haul out the old plank table he had built and stained with his own hands and bring in a simple stainless cart.

  Oh, quit feeling sorry for yourself. It’s pathetic. Vito got up and dumped the wine he had poured in the sink. He watched it run down the drain, thinking he was being wasteful. He’d had only one sip. But that swallow had made his head pound, with a sharp pain behind his left eye as a flourish. He had hoped the wine might offer at least oblivion, if not comfort.

  He’d been turning to wine for those things a lot lately. And he never learned. Every time he was disappointed, coming away feeling no better but only sicker and more morose. Wine betrayed him, but it seemed it was taking Vito forever to learn that lesson.

  But the wine did do one thing, at least until tonight, pretty successfully—it helped him sleep. Knocked out was probably more like it. But tonight the red tasted sour in his mouth, and, with its promise of a full-blown migraine, he knew he couldn’t turn to its burgundy embrace to forget. He sat down, closed his eyes, and kicked out one of the kitchen chairs to put his legs up on it.

  Connie padded out to the kitchen. The click of her paws on the floor made him open his eyes again. She stared at him with a mournful expression, as though to say “Why don’t you come to bed?”

  “I’ll be in soon, bella.”

  As though satisfied, the dog turned and walked away. Vito could hear her hop up on the bed in the other room.

  He sat there, not thinking, not drinking, barely breathing, until the kitchen grew lighter—that dim, fuzzy, and grayish light that portended dawn. He glanced over at the clock on the range and saw that, somehow, an hour or so had passed. It was almost 5:00 a.m.

  Vito sighed and said aloud to himself, “It’s not too early. She’s up. She’s always up now. Even if she didn’t want to get out of bed, that damn Pomeranian would make her.” Vito smiled.

  Vito was no different from many Italian men. His mother was central to his life. She was the one he had always turned to, in good times and bad, the one he always thought of first when he had news to share. His mom, Cora, showed more interest in his life than any other person on this earth. It had always been that w
ay—for better or worse. Sometimes her fascination with Vito’s life, easily putting it ahead of her own or even her husband’s, God rest his soul, could be suffocating or nosy to an extreme.

  But there was the other side of the coin. That interest, or what should be more properly called love, was like an embrace, a lifeline in a confusing and often threatening world.

  It was this lifeline Vito now craved—and he thought that, in an absurd way, this new kid, this Henry, had brought it on, awakening feelings in Vito that he thought he had long since buried.

  He went into the living room, where he’d tossed his phone when he came home from his shift. He picked it up and pressed the Home button to bring it to life. He scrolled through his contacts and found the one labeled simply Mother. He tapped the word, and it brought up her picture.

  She had once been a beautiful woman, and still was in many ways, defined and elevated by her Sicilian heritage. Her hair, once glossy and black, was now cut short, and it looked dryer. She kept the gray away by having it colored a deep shade of red. But you could still see the girl in her green eyes, still see the strength in her strong chin and broad Italian nose and full lips. He recalled when he had taken the picture, a few years ago, when he had begun work at Fiorello’s and she had come as his guest to dinner. She had been so proud! She had cried when he placed the lasagna with béchamel he made in front of her, not because it was sublime—it was—but because her husband, Johnny, wasn’t there to share it with her. This was a few years ago, and she had just lost him to a heart attack.

  Vito shook his head and decided much more thinking like this would defeat the purpose of calling his mom, so he pressed the button that would connect him.

  She answered, as she almost always did, on the first ring. And as soon as their hellos were out of the way, she said the same thing she always did. “I was just gonna call you.”

  “Isn’t it funny how that works, Mom? Every time I call, you were just gonna call me. Yet my phone never rings.” He laughed to show he was teasing.

  “Did you just call to give me a hard time? I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

  “Well, you have to admit, it’s usually the other way around. Isn’t it the parent who’s supposed to bug the kid about keeping in touch?”

  “Oh, Vito, is my boy feeling lonely? What made you wanna call me up at the crack of dawn? I could have been sleeping.”

  “Oh, come on, we both know Brenda gets you up at four every morning for her breakfast and a tinkle.” Why his mother had named her dog Brenda was a mystery Vito had never been able to unravel.

  “She’s a good girl.”

  Vito could imagine, and knew he was right, that his mother had the phone tucked between her shoulder and ear and was bending over in her kitchen chair to sweep the little dog up off the linoleum to cuddle her.

  “Yes, she’s my baby,” she cooed, confirming what Vito was imagining. He smiled.

  “So what’s up? You wanna come down for breakfast? I’ll make you bird’s nests. I baked bread yesterday, and I got some nice roasted peppers to put on top.”

  Vito grinned at the mention of the egg dish, thick-sliced bread with a hole hollowed out in the middle for an egg, fried in a cast-iron skillet in lots of butter or bacon grease. Not all that healthy, but God, was it comforting. Vito was tempted to throw on some clothes and head out to the western suburb of Cicero, where he had grown up and his mother still lived, just to sit in her kitchen and have her make that for him.

  He could practically smell the toasted bread and hear the sizzle of the butter.

  “That’s tempting, Ma. But I have to go to work today.”

  “So what? You don’t go in until the afternoon, right? They hired that new cook, Elizabeth, right? To take lunches?”

  Vito nodded, and when he realized his mother couldn’t see him, said, “Yeah, but I didn’t sleep too good last night, and I probably should take another run at it.”

  Cora was quiet for a moment. “You thinking about them again?”

  “Ma, I’m always thinking about them.”

  “And you always will, son. Just like I always think about my Johnny, your dad. The world got a little darker without him in it. But you know what?”

  “What?” Vito asked, even though he knew what his mother was going to say. Despite the fact he had heard this same speech over and over again, he let her say it. It showed she cared, and next to a hug, words like these made Vito feel loved.

  “Everybody says it, but it’s true. Life is for the living. You gotta move on, boy. It’s been over a year now, hasn’t it?”

  Vito said quietly, “One year, three months, and six days.”

  “You have to think about not just the joy they brought into your life, but the joy you brought into theirs. You made them happy. You drove them crazy sometimes! But I know they always felt loved. That counts.”

  “I know, I know, Ma.”

  “If you need to, you go to church and light a candle for them. You think of them up in heaven, waiting for you. They’re okay. They wouldn’t want you moping around.”

  She paused, and Vito could imagine the wheels turning in her head.

  “I wanted to do the same thing when your father passed, just shut myself up in the house, crawl under a blanket. For good. But the girls, your aunts, wouldn’t leave me be. They made me come out to bingo on Sundays at the Sons of Italy. They made me go shopping at North Riverside. They even got me to get on a plane to Vegas! Ha! Remember that?” She didn’t wait for her son to answer. “They made me live. You gotta do the same. It’s time.”

  At her words, a sudden, unbidden image popped into Vito’s head: Henry, piling dishes up to load into the dishwasher. Strands of his blond hair were glued to his ruddy forehead with sweat. He had stripped off the short-sleeve shirt he had worn in and had on only a ribbed tank that clung to him. He had caught Vito looking and given him a smile. It was a simple moment, but that connection stayed with Vito. It touched his heart. The moment was frozen because it was like they were the only two people in the busy kitchen, for just that fraction of a second.

  “You’re right, Ma. You’re always right.”

  She scoffed. “Yeah, that’s me. So, speaking of which, you’re off on Sunday. I’m making sewer pipes, sausage, and gravy, and you’re coming over. You can bring somebody.”

  “Like Connie and Gabby?”

  “Well, I was thinking maybe a nice boy. That would make me really happy.” She was quiet for a moment. “Besides, those two monsters are gonna eat my Brenda for a snack one of these days, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts.”

  “Ma, they’re afraid of Brenda.”

  They both laughed. Somehow the little five-pound dog always managed to ride herd on her much bigger “cousins.”

  “But I’m serious, Vito. You got anyone you can bring? Seeing anybody? A handsome man like you shouldn’t be by himself.”

  And again, Vito thought of Henry. Oh, he’d been “seeing” him, all right. Almost every night for the past two weeks. And then again, in his dreams sometimes. Once he even woke from one of those dreams with come in his shorts, an experience he hadn’t had since he was a boy. He had a feeling he dreamed of Henry because he pushed him away so consciously at the restaurant and even out of his waking thoughts. But his mind refused to let him go.

  “No, Ma. I’m not ready to date anyone again.”

  “I didn’t even necessarily mean date. But you got friends, don’t you?”

  Vito thought sadly, or maybe gratefully, that the answer was no, beyond friends of the four-legged variety. The friends he used to have, in that other life that now seemed to belong to someone else, had all turned away. Not because they hated him or didn’t want to be around him, he knew that much for sure, but because they didn’t want to face his pain, didn’t know what to do with the longing and loss in his eyes, the hurt he wore like an apron. What could they do? What would they say? His life only brought theirs down. So one by one, they stopped seeing him.

  He d
idn’t blame them.

  “It’ll just be me and the girls. Is that enough?”

  “Oh, let’s not have a pity party here. Remember when you told me you were a fanook?”

  “Ma, we don’t use that word. We say gay.”

  “Whatever. The point is, do you remember?”

  “Yeah. I was twenty. I wrote you a letter.”

  “And I cried. And I went to church and lit a candle for you, praying that this gay thing would be ripped out of you.”

  “Nice.”

  “You know it took some adjusting. You weren’t who I thought you were. But so much happened over the next few years. There was—”

  And Cora went quiet, her voice stilled for several moments, and Vito knew she was trying to catch her breath, to hold back tears. He knew because his own were springing to the corners of his eyes and running down his face.

  In a choked voice, she went on, “I learned that I was wrong. That if Jesus granted my wish and did rip this thing out of you, you wouldn’t be you anymore. And I wouldn’t have had—well, you know.”

  “I know. I know.” Vito held a hand to his eyes to stem the flow. “I’ll be there on Sunday, and I’ll bring a nice antipasti. I got some of that good sharp provolone like you like.”

  “Okay, son. I gotta go. Brenda’s tap dancing at the back door.”

  “Bye.”

  “And Vito?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  Vito’s heart gave a little leap. He never, ever doubted his mother loved him, but she seldom said so. It wasn’t her way. She showed it more through hugs and pinches, sometimes too hard, on the cheek, but most of all through her food. Before he had a chance to return the sentiment, though, she had hung up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE KITCHEN was hot, blistering hot, at least ten degrees hotter than it was outside, where the temperature that night hovered around ninety-six degrees, with humidity to match.

  Henry was glad he’d been “promoted” after only a month on the job and was now no longer washing dishes, at least on a regular basis. He was—wait for it, his dad would be so proud—busing tables, filling water glasses, and if they were really slammed, delivering plates of food to the table. For this position, he got to wear black Dockers and a white button-down with a skinny black tie. He knew his parents would have been horrified to see him in the uniform, but he took pride in it, making sure the clothes were ironed before his shift and his black leather Converses were scuff-free.