by Marco Rafalà
I dunked a biscotto into my cup of black coffee. She wet a clean rag and began wiping down the tables. “You don’t have to do that,” I said.
It would ruin Salvatore to know the truth about David. But Nella, that woman had an armor against life.
“Go take a nap,” she called from the front of the café. “I can take care of things down here.”
“You,” I said, “get my café ready?” I smiled to show her that I knew my café was in good hands.
Nella pushed the thick sleeves of her snowflake-patterned sweater up to her elbows. “How hard can it be?” she said. “You do it every day.”
“Eh, va bene.” I finished the biscotto and took my cup upstairs to my apartment.
I slept until noon. When I came downstairs, Nella was tending to the midday rush of customers. I stepped behind the counter. The workspace was immaculate, everything in its place. There were no dishes in the sink, the refrigerated case was stocked with glass bottles of soda and Orangina and sparkling water, and the bakery case was filled with neat rows of that morning’s delivery of fresh pastries and cookies.
Nella tapped the counter and held up her index finger. “I need one cappuccino and one cannolu, chocolate dipped.”
“Coming right up,” I said. Then I filled the grinder with espresso beans and got to work.
By midafternoon the café had emptied save for a few regulars-old men from the neighborhood playing cards and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. At the bar, Nella and I shared a plate of soppressata and pecorino, roasted red peppers and green olives.
“I should hire you,” I said. “You looking for work?”
Nella laughed. “You’ve made it on your own this long.”
“Beh, sometimes I had help,” I said.
Nella’s face deflated, her smile pressed into a thin, flat line, and she nodded her head in agreement. I took the last green olive and chewed the meat free from the pit. Nella propped her chin in the heel of her hand, elbow on the counter. She studied the framed map of Sicily. “Did we make a mistake,” she asked, “not telling him?”
“A mistake? No,” I said. I stood up and pushed my stool back under the lip of the bar. “No,” I repeated. My bad leg was stiff, the knee sore. “Freezing rain tonight,” I said. I limped behind the counter and filled a small brown paper bag with pastries and cookies.
“Sometimes, I thought about taking him there,” she said. She stood and pulled on her jacket and buttoned it up. “His father would never go back, but a part of me wanted him to know where he came from.”
I fingered the torn edge of the note, still crumpled in my pants pocket. “He came from America,” I said. I handed Nella the paper bag of sweets. “Besides, there’s no going back, not for us. We are like your brother’s tomatoes, transplanted from one home to the next. This is where we live now. What we did, we did for him and for David. We did what was best for them,” I said. “Don’t ever think different.”
She held her gray-streaked hair up while she wound her scarf around her neck. Then she opened the bag, held it up to her nose, and closed her eyes, inhaling the smell of sugar.
Late in the evening, I sat by the window with a cup of coffee and a plate of tricolor cookies. The last customers had left hours ago. The streets were a mess of dirty slush under the dark, starless sky. Closing time had come and gone with no sign of Tony. I wouldn’t blame the boy for not coming. He was a Morello, after all. I popped a cookie in my mouth as a mix of sleet and freezing rain crackled outside. Then I sipped my coffee. When I looked up again, Tony’s red jacket cut the darkness.
I let him in and then relocked the door behind him.
“Shouldn’t we go upstairs?” he said. He paced the length of the café, eyeing the large storefront windows.
“Take it easy,” I said. “Your father’s not out in this mess. Where does he think you are, anyway?”
“Does it matter?”
“Sit down before you make me nervous,” I said.
Tony grabbed a handful of napkins from the counter and dried his face. He pushed his dark flat curls out of his eyes and slouched into the booth. “I should tell someone, shouldn’t I?”
I slid the plate of cookies in front of him. “You told me,” I said.
“But maybe I should, I don’t know, tell the priest.”
“The priest, he will have to go to the police.”
“Shit,” Tony said. “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?” He scratched the back of his left wrist, already covered in raised red lines, a phantom itch from a cast that was long gone.
I grabbed his right wrist to stop him before he broke the skin. “No one’s telling the police,” I said. “No one’s telling anyone. You hear me? You’ve hurt this family enough. If people knew you were there that night, think what it would do to David’s father. Is that the kind of man you want to be, the kind that kicks another man while he’s down?”
Tony’s head drooped and he sank deeper into the seat back. His mouth fell open. His lower lip quivered. He sniffed back snotty tears. “No,” he said.
I patted the back of his hand. Rocco’s boy needed me to comfort him now, to tell him that everything was going to be all right. And I needed him to keep his Morello mouth shut.
“Good,” I said. “Eat.”
Tony took a cookie from the plate and nibbled at it like a mouse.
“You need to trust me,” I said. “Everything will be all right as long as you do what I say.”
32
That spring, Salvatore gave in to his sister and began attending Mass on Sundays. He went with Nella and Frank, and afterward they would all come to the café for coffee and pastries. Salvatore never stayed long, his garden always called him home. In the winter months, when he didn’t have a garden, he took long walks by himself from the café down to Harbor Park. He sat under the pavilion until the moon’s silver face shone in the river, and then he’d return to the café just before closing time, and we’d share a glass of wine in silence.
Once every few weeks, Tony came to my café, too. He came late in the evenings after all the customers had gone. He sat in the spot where David should have sat. He asked me the questions David should have asked me. They were questions I never thought I’d hear a boy like Tony ask-questions about first crushes and first heartaches, the things he could never tell his father. If there was a hell, I imagined this would be mine, sitting there with Tony, explaining life to the wrong boy.
Tony grew into the broad-shouldered giant one would expect of a Morello. His voice deepened until he shared the same gruff timbre as his father. But the way Tony spoke, the curve of his shoulders, the way he walked in the world—it all showed how he carried that night with him. Sometimes he tried to bring up David. He did it shamefaced and full of the need for me to tell him that it was okay, that what he put David through was just what boys do, that he wasn’t to blame. I wouldn’t give him that, because I couldn’t give it to myself. No, he wasn’t responsible for the choice David made to go to Harbor Park that night. But David would’ve never been there if Tony hadn’t driven him to it. In this way, Tony and I were alike. He was forever bound up with David’s life as I was with Salvatore’s. Only Tony would never get a chance to set things right, and that would eat him up, if he let it. I didn’t have to like Tony, but I wouldn’t let a man’s curse condemn another boy.
He kept coming to the café, kept sitting in David’s booth, kept trying to make sense of what he’d done. And I let him.
I thought I was being careful, that Salvatore and Nella would never know about Tony’s visits. But one evening, Nella came by at closing with a look on her face that spelled trouble for me. Without a word she poured herself a glass of her brother’s wine and, standing behind the counter, stared at David’s corner booth.
“I saw you last night through the window,” she said. “You and Tony.”
“He’s been coming around,” I said. “I didn’t know how to tell you.” I braced for her anger. She would hate me for letting that boy sit in
David’s place, the way I hated myself.
“The way you were with him—so cruel.” She shook her head, mouth filled to the brim with distaste and scorn. She set the wine on the counter untouched. “He’s just a boy, Vincenzo, a boy with the wrong last name. That cannot be his fault. Whatever happened between us and Rocco, Tony isn’t to blame. David is gone. Salvatore is broken. Tony is the only boy left to protect.”
“I protect David’s memory,” I said. My fist came down on the counter, like a weight dropping. “What that boy did to David, the notes and the humiliation, it wasn’t right. What his father did to you and Salvatore—”
“Is in the past, Vincenzo,” Nella cut me off. She covered my fist with her hands. “Tony was terrible to David, yes, and to lots of other boys. But he’s stopped all that. I hear he even stopped making trouble at school. If he comes to you again, I beg you, forgive him.” She pressed her palms together in front of her chest, a prayer for me. “Show him some compassion. God knows he sees none at home. We know better than most the price a boy pays when he is made to account for his father’s sins.”
I could not do what Nella asked of me. I could not forgive Tony. The best I could be for him was his own Balilla. I would not teach him to fight. But I could show him what it meant to have respect and loyalty, a sense of purpose—all the things his own father lacked.
The next time Tony came to the café, I handed him a mop and told him he had a job. He could start by cleaning the floors.
“You going to pay me?” Tony asked. The mop was a foreign object in his hands. It was clear to me then that he had never done an honest day’s work in his life. Salvatore had always taught David about work, taking care of the house and the garden, helping me in the café. Salvatore had done right by his son.
“This is your first lesson,” I said. “Never do a job for free. Of course I’ll pay you. Now get to work and don’t get smart with me.”
I sat at the bar, drink in hand, stool turned to watch him. I told him what I expected. He would arrive on time. He would do as he was told, and he would do it well. He hadn’t even cleaned half the floor before the complaints started. His back hurt, his feet hurt, when could he sit down and take a break.
“Why do I have to work while you’re sitting there having a drink?” he whined.
“No job is too small to take pride in,” I said. “It does not matter if you are the janitor or the big boss on top. How well you do your job is a reflection of the kind of man you are.”
He was fifteen then. On weeknights he came well after closing. He organized the stockroom, washed the dishes, cleaned the floors and tables and countertop. Soon the complaints went away. He found himself in the work, in being able to set something right, even something as simple as a dirty floor. I didn’t know what he told his father about where he was, and I didn’t care to know. I could not give Tony love, but I could defuse the bomb his father was trying to make him become.
The summer before his senior year, after he’d finished cleaning one night, Tony set a worn hardback book on the table in David’s booth. The Martian Chronicles. “I found it in the library,” he said. “I read the whole thing. Three times. I still don’t get what he saw in it. But I know he saw something.”
I opened the book, took the check-out card from the sleeve in the back cover, and there was David’s name. He’d renewed it twice. “I would’ve bought it for him, if I’d known how much he liked it. How did you find this?”
“He tried to read it on the bus. But I never let him. Why didn’t I let him? I thought, maybe, if I read it—” Tony turned the book over and stared at the cover, a desolate red landscape. He flipped through the pages. He was looking for something. He was looking for David—not the bullied boy, but the person Tony never saw.
I knew that regret. It never left you. We were all children of our fathers’ curses.
33
Two months before what should’ve been David’s high school graduation, Tony walked into the café on a Sunday evening. There was only one customer left, a long-haired boy from Wesleyan University nursing an American coffee, thin nose stuck in a paperback. I’d set two glasses on the counter and a bottle of wine, expecting Salvatore to return from his afternoon in the garden any minute, when Tony sidled up to the bar.
He stood a couple of inches taller than me now and had lopped off his black curls for a short military haircut. “I screwed up,” he said. He scratched behind his ears like that rabbit had, just before Salvatore caught it all those years ago in his backyard.
I came around the counter and led him by the elbow into the stockroom. “I’d say you did,” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I didn’t know where else to go.” Under the bare bulb of the stockroom, Tony appeared jaundiced.
“What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow night?”
Tony leaned against a metal shelf of canned coffee and folded his arms across his chest. “My girlfriend’s pregnant,” he said. “She wants to keep it.”
I wiped my hand over my face. “On a Sunday,” I said. “This is why you come to me? Christ. Go tell your father.”
“No way, he’ll kill me. That’s why I came to you.”
“I’m not your friend, Tony. I’m not your father. That’s not what this is.” The words were as hard as any slap. And as soon as they were out, I wanted to stuff them back in my mouth. Show him some compassion. That’s what Nella had asked of me.
The boy’s jaw clenched and his back stiffened and he spoke through clenched teeth. “Fine,” he said. He opened the door, but I grabbed his bicep and held him back.
“Do you love her?” I asked him. I let his arm go, patted him on the shoulder. I didn’t know what he was to me, but I didn’t hate him. Not anymore. He was more than his father’s son, at least he was trying to be.
“I guess.”
“If you love her,” I said, “don’t run away.”
That night I told Salvatore about Maria. I told him he was lucky to have had Eileen for as long as he did, and David, too.
34
Long ago-so long now that no one alive remembered-men ran naked through the streets of Melilli with only a cloth to hide their modesty. In this way, they commemorated Saint Sebastian, who was clothed only in his faith the day he died. Sicilians called these men the Nuri. They ran from every village and city in the province to join the men of Melilli in the festa dei Nuri-the festival of the naked.
But those old times, they were gone. Now the Nuri covered their bodies with white clothes and dressed their heads with white scarves. They wore red sashes from their shoulders to their hips and tied them around their waists to mark the places where Roman arrows had pierced their saint.
David should’ve been there when his father finally carried the statue. David should’ve known. He should’ve known how his father was a Nuri in the Saint Sebastian festival before the end. How Salvatore had swayed in the wind of that crowd. They lifted him up, just like the breeze lifted tree limbs, made the trees taller.
NELLA
EPILOGUE
May 2000, the last day of the festival of Saint Sebastian dawned, and the sunrise did little to warm the chill settling into Nella’s bones. A boy of about nine years old climbed over the sagging wire fence in her brother’s backyard. She watched him from the end of the driveway-his dark, wild hair, his thin shoulders under a too-big T-shirt-setting down in the fallow garden.
Nella called out to him.
“Shit,” the boy said. For a second he looked at her, and she recognized the straight line of his nose, the thick, curly hair-Tony Morello’s son.
“Wait,” she said. But the boy was already scrambling back over the fence. His shirt caught on a broken loop of rusty wire and tore as he lost his footing and fell into the opposite yard. He picked himself up, dusted off his blue jeans, and then darted away. The downy parachutes of dandelion seeds swirled in his wake.
Salvatore’s house had stood locked up and empty now for a nu
mber of years she dared not count or remember. People in Middletown, they talked of hearing strange noises coming from the property-the howls of a child sobbing long into the night, the back screen door clanking shut, creaking footsteps.
Nella never heard or saw anything out of the ordinary. She wanted to believe that Tony’s son was just here for the ghost stories, to see the truth for himself. But there were other stories that might have drawn him here. Other truths.
She found the front door open and called out for Vincenzo. The house answered her with a creaking floor joint. She walked down the hall, trailing her fingers against the wall, tracing a crack in the plaster. So many times she had come here to see Salvatore and David. They were both boys still in her mind, boys she had fed and cared for the way Salvatore watered and cared for his garden. Or at least she had tried. And now-now all she had left of them was their silence.
Taped cardboard covered a square of windowpane in the back door. A plate of new glass cut to size leaned against the wall where Frank had left it for Vincenzo. The toolbox sat open on the kitchen counter.
She took a pair of work gloves from a drawer and stripped away the masking tape. Then she removed the cardboard and cleared glass fragments from the sash bar. By the time Vincenzo arrived, clomping unevenly down the hall, she was fitting the new pane into the frame.
“Let me do that,” he said by way of greeting.
Nella waved him off. “Sit,” she said without turning around.
Vincenzo pulled up a folding metal chair. Nella held the glass in place with one hand, while pressing glazier’s points into the frame. She asked for the thin wooden stops and held out her hand. He passed them to her one at a time. She tapped the stops into place with nails as delicate as needles.
