Chapter 4
She found the cheap dried noodles the kitchen bought by the case for night staff. Two eggs in the tray in the refrigerator. An onion and a clove of garlic somebody had forgotten in a basket.
She put a pot of water on the stove. Sliced the onion. Sautéed the garlic in a little oil at the bottom of the pot until it went gold, then poured in the water, added the noodles, and cracked both eggs into the center, covering it for exactly one minute so the yolks would stay soft.
She did all of it without saying a word, and he didn’t ask what she was doing.
She ladled it into one of the kitchen’s white porcelain bowls, scattered chopped green onion across the top, set it on the steel table in front of him with a fork and a spoon.
She didn’t tell him to eat. She didn’t say thank you, because it wasn’t a thank you — and if she said those words, then both of them would have to remember that night, and she did not want to remember that night.
“Its hot,” she said. That was all.
Raphael Bandi looked at the bowl for several seconds.
Then he picked up the spoon and ate all of it. Not quickly, not slowly, and without saying anything the whole time. When the yolk broke open, he paused for half a beat before he went on.
Delaney leaned against the sink with her arms folded and didn’t say anything either. There is a kind of comfortable silence that can exist between two strangers in a kitchen at midnight. She had forgotten that such a silence existed.
When he finished, he set the spoon down, stood, carried the bowl and the fork to the sink, turned on the tap, and washed them. Inside and out. Rinsed them again. Set them upside down on the rack to dry.
Delaney watched those two hands under the running water and said nothing.
He picked up his coat, gave her one nod, and left.
·
Bruno was waiting for him at the end of the hallway by the parking area, holding a thin file inside a plastic folder. He handed it over without a word, because Bruno had worked for Raphael long enough to know when nothing should be said.
Raphael stood beside the car and opened it.
Full name. Date of birth. An apartment on the west side. One younger brother, eight years old. A case awaiting a court date. A vocational baking school — second year, withdrawn before completion. And then, further down, in the section listing every place she had worked — a diner, a grocery store, a coffee shop — one line that made his finger stop on the page.
Sales clerk. Flower stand outside the gates of North Chicago Cemetery.
He stood perfectly still beside the car for a long time.
Then he closed the file, handed it back to Bruno, opened the driver’s door himself, and got in.
·
There are some places a person doesn’t need a map to find.
He drove to the cemetery the way a man drives back to an old house, making every turn without having to think about it, and pulled over at the curb, and sat behind the wheel in the dark.
And one morning came back to him whole — intact down to the smallest detail, the morning he had tried not to think about for seven years and had never once succeeded.
It had been raining. The steady, lingering kind of Chicago rain, neither heavy nor light, the kind that comes near the end of the season, and the whole cemetery was mud and wet grass and one grave that had already been dug.
He had been out of prison for three days.
They’d handed him a bag of personal belongings, a piece of paper, and the news about his younger brother, all in the same afternoon.
That morning he stood beside the open grave with both arms at his sides. There was no priest, because their family belonged to no church and there was nobody left to arrange one. There were no flowers, because nobody had thought to buy any. There wasn’t a single relative.
Two gravediggers stood about ten paces off with shovels in their hands, patient in the way of men who have waited like that hundreds of times before. There was a cheap wooden coffin that Raphael had been forced to sign an IOU to pay for.
And inside it was Tobias Bandi. Nineteen years old.
Raphael stood in the rain and didn’t cry, because seven years in a place like that teaches a man that crying is a luxury you pay for, and his body had forgotten how. Rainwater ran down inside the collar of his shirt. The two gravediggers glanced at each other.
Then came the sound of footsteps across the wet grass.
He looked up.
May you like
A girl was walking between the rows of graves toward him — very young, wearing one of those thin raincoats they sell at gas stations, carrying a bouquet of white carnations in her hands.
She walked straight to the grave without asking who he was.
