Chapter 3 - THE SILVER DOLLAR AND THE UNCLE HE TRUSTED
The Cadillac smelled like leather and peppermint.
I sat in the back seat with two containers of chicken on my lap and a book that wasn’t mine, between a mob boss and his aunt.
“Ida Romano,” the aunt said, offering a gloved hand. Seventy-two. Silver bob. A voice like a door left open. “Lucia’s sister. I forgot my glasses, which is how all great discoveries begin.”
“Nora Quinn.”
“Where do you live, dear?”
I told her. Pilsen. A third-floor walk-up on Eighteenth Street.
Gabriel gave the address to the driver without a flicker.
For several blocks nobody talked. Rain slid down the window. Ida’s fingers hovered over the green cover, not quite touching it.
“May I?” she said.
I nodded.
She laid two fingertips on the gold letters. Her mouth trembled.
“She carried this in her apron,” Ida whispered. “Every day. The recipes, yes. But she wrote everything in it. Who came. What they ate. Who didn’t come back.”
“A ledger of kids,” Gabriel said.
“Of everyone.” Ida’s eyes shone. “She said hunger is a kind of history. If you don’t write it down, nobody remembers it happened.”
I looked at the book in my lap.
Nine years of other people’s histories had passed through my hands. Bibles with family trees in the flyleaf. War letters. A child’s diary with a pressed violet. I had never held a history that made a grown woman cry in a car.
“Miss Quinn,” Gabriel said quietly. “Where did you grow up?”
“Back of the Yards.”
His head turned.
“Halsted and Forty-Seventh,” he said. “The restaurant was on Forty-Seventh.”
“I know,” I said slowly. “I ate there.”
Nobody said anything.
“Free Tuesdays and Fridays. My mother cleaned offices at night. We…” I looked out the window. “There was a woman in an apron who gave me extra chicken skin. She said, Don’t tell the others.”
Ida made a small sound.
“That was my sister,” she said.
“Lucia’s chicken skin,” Gabriel said. His voice was thick. “She did that for every kid who loved it. We used to joke she’d go broke on skin.”
The car turned onto Eighteenth Street.
I thought I might be sick.
All those years. All those tables. And I had never once connected the woman in the apron to a name, to a face on a news segment, to a boy at a funeral.
“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly.
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
Gabriel looked at me then, and the hardness had gone out of his face entirely.
“Don’t be,” he said. “Please.”
The apartment smelled like cinnamon and radiator dust.
Mrs. Delgado opened the door in her coat, purse already on her shoulder, and took one look at the crowd on my landing.
“I am leaving,” she said, “and I saw nothing.”
“Mrs. Delgado—”
“He was asleep by eight-thirty. Brushed his teeth. Lied about brushing his teeth. Brushed his teeth again.” She squeezed my arm and whispered, “Who is the large man?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I’m not asking.” She went down the stairs very fast.
Gabriel stood in my doorway holding the containers.
My living room was eleven feet wide. A couch with a quilt. A worktable by the window, covered in bone folders and brushes and a jar of wheat paste. A shelf of paperbacks. A refrigerator that hummed like it was embarrassed.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s—”
“It’s a workshop.” He looked at the tools, the magnifier lamp, the strips of Japanese tissue drying on a rack. “You do this here.”
“Since the shop closed.”
A small voice from the bedroom doorway.
“Mom?”
Eli stood barefoot in dinosaur pajamas, hair flattened on one side. Seven years old. Serious eyes. A cowlick that had never listened to anyone.
“Hey, bug. You should be asleep.”
“I heard the door.” His eyes moved over the three adults on my rug. Landed on the bag in Gabriel’s hands. “Is that chicken?”
“It is.”
“With skin?”
Gabriel crouched until he was eye level.
“With skin,” he said. “I’m told you consider that important.”
Eli studied him with the gravity of a customs officer.
“Are you the guy?”
“What guy?”
“The guy Mom said might be nice. She said it on the phone. ‘A man might help.’ She was talking to the landlord.”
I covered my face.
“I’m the guy,” Gabriel said gravely.
“Are you a gangster?”
“Eli.”
“I own hotels,” Gabriel said.
“Mom says that’s what gangsters say.”
Ida laughed so hard she had to sit down on the arm of my couch.
“I like him,” she told me. “Keep him.”
Gabriel’s mouth twitched.
We ate at midnight.
Eli sat cross-legged on the couch with his container balanced on his knees. Ida sat beside him, sharing her roll, solemnly negotiating its division. Gabriel stood at the window because there was nowhere else to stand, a mob boss in a black dinner jacket eating herb-roasted chicken from a plastic container in my living room.
“Potatoes,” Eli said, pointing his fork at them with disgust. “Proof God wants children to survive vegetables.”
“I’ve heard that,” Gabriel said. “Someone told me.”
“Mom.”
“Smart woman.”
“She’s okay.”
My keys lay on the table. Eli had grabbed them, the way he always did, and was spinning the silver coin on the ring across his knee.
“It’s old,” he told Ida. “It’s got a V on it. For victory.”
“For vanilla,” I said.
“Mom won it at a church raffle.”
“I did.”
Gabriel’s eyes dropped to the coin.
He crossed the room and picked it up. Turned it once over his thumb. A Morgan silver dollar, its face rubbed smooth, a crooked V scratched across the eagle’s chest.
He said nothing.
He set it down so carefully you would have thought it was made of glass.
Then his phone rang.
“Teddy.” He listened. His face did something I couldn’t read. “Say that again.”
He listened for a long time.
“Keep him there,” he said, and hung up.
In the quiet, Eli scraped the last of his potatoes into his mouth, wincing.
“Dennis talked,” Gabriel said.
“He’s been padding the invoices for eleven years,” Gabriel said. “Four thousand two hundred a dinner. Forty dinners a year. He sends the pantry truck away at the dock. He throws the food in a dumpster. Then he bills the foundation for hauling.”
“Who told him to?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t say.” A muscle jumped in Gabriel’s jaw. “He kept starting a name and stopping.”
“Vincent,” Ida said.
Gabriel didn’t answer.
His phone rang again at 12:41.
He looked at the screen. His thumb hovered.
“Uncle Vincent,” he told the room.
Ida’s hand stopped halfway to her roll.
Gabriel answered.
“Uncle.” His voice went easy, warm, the voice of a nephew. “No, nothing’s wrong. A kitchen matter. Dennis was rude to a waitress.”
“Which book?”
Ida closed her eyes.
“I see,” Gabriel said. “Who told you that?” He listened. His jaw barely moved. “Dennis is a talker. No, I’m with a friend. Breakfast would be lovely. Eight. Goodnight.”
He ended the call. For a moment nobody breathed.
“He knows about the book,” Gabriel said.
“How?” I asked.
“Dennis texted him from the kitchen the second it hit the floor.” His voice flattened. “Vincent says he’d love to see Lucia’s keepsake. He says I must be overwhelmed.”
“He’s not stupid,” Ida said quietly.
“No.”
“He wasn’t stupid in 1999, either.” Ida folded her napkin into a perfect square. “Gabriel, there’s something I have never said aloud.”
“Aunt Ida.”
“Not tonight. Let the boy sleep.” Eli had fallen asleep against her shoulder, fork still in his fist. “But Vincent calls me every Saturday to ask about my health. Every Saturday. For twenty-seven years. He has never missed one.” She looked at me. “A man who never misses calling a woman who lost her sister has either a very big heart or a very big debt.”
Gabriel crossed to the window and stood with his back to us.
“The pantry shelves were empty on Mondays,” he said suddenly. “I used to think it was because the neighborhood needed more than we could give.”
“Gabriel—”
“I put him in charge of her name, Aunt Ida.” His voice broke at the edge and he caught it. “I handed him my mother’s charity and thanked him at Thanksgiving.”
Nobody spoke.
I had never known what it looked like when a powerful man discovered he had been the fool. It looked very quiet. It looked like shoulders.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
He turned. His eyes were red. His face was perfectly steady.
“I’m going to find out what’s inside that book,” he said. “And then I’m going to let him give the toast.”
“What toast?”
May you like
“Saturday,” Ida said. “The Memorial Gala. March fourteenth. The night before…” She stopped. “He gives the eulogy. Every year. He weeps beautifully.”
“Then we’ll let him weep,” Gabriel said. “In front of four hundred people.”
