Chapter 10
Salvatore Romano was sitting in the corner booth when Emily got there, both hands folded over the head of his cane.
The diner was closed.
Margaret stood behind the counter with her arms crossed and her jaw set, and Denise stood beside her, and nobody had taken off their coats.
“Miss Harlow,” Salvatore said. “Sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
“As you like.” He looked around the room—the checkered floor, the chrome stools, the jukebox, the wall of children’s drawings near the kitchen.
“It’s a nice place. Sentimental.
My father used to bring me to a place like this. Not this one. One in Newark. It’s a parking garage now.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to understand something.” He leaned back.
“My nephew has given away a company worth nine figures, resigned from a board his grandfather built, and signed a lease in Montclair.
For a boy who doesn’t speak.” He tilted his head. “And now he tells me the reason is a waitress.”
“The reason is his son.”
“The reason is you.” Salvatore’s voice was soft. “You’re not from our world, Miss Harlow.
That’s not an insult. It’s a fact. And facts are useful things. I bought this building because I wanted to see what you would do.”
Emily felt the floor tilt under her. She kept her voice level.
“And what am I doing?”
“You’re standing there looking at me like I’m a man who can be stared down.” He smiled.
“I like that. I don’t respect it, but I like it. So here is what happens next. The lease transfers to me on the first of the month.
The rent for this space will be four hundred thousand a year, which I’m told is somewhat above market.”
He spread his hands. “Margaret can pay it, or she can close, or she can sell to me. Those are the choices.”
“You’re doing this to hurt Vincent.”
“I’m doing this because he needs to learn that the things he loves have a price, and the price is paid to me.” He stood. “Tell him I said so.”
The front door opened.
Vincent came in out of the rain without an umbrella, his coat dark with water, his hair flat against his forehead.
Tony came behind him and stopped just inside the door.
Salvatore looked at him and sighed. “There he is.”
“Leave her alone.”
“I haven’t touched her. I’ve made an offer. It’s business.”
“It’s not business.” Vincent walked to the counter and stood beside Emily, and he did not look at her when he did it. “You want me to come back.”
Salvatore said nothing.
“That’s what this is.” Vincent’s voice was quiet. “You don’t care about a diner in Clifton.
You care that I left.
You care that a Romano walked out of the room and everyone saw.” He took a breath.
“So here’s what I’ll give you. I’ll come to the house on Christmas Eve. I’ll sit at your table.
I’ll let the family see that there’s no war. And when the accountants ask why the name is still on the door, I’ll say nothing.”
“And in exchange?”
“The building. Signed over to Margaret today. And you never come near my son.”
Salvatore studied him for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes—not anger. Something older and colder and, for just a second, tired.
“You’ll say nothing,” he repeated.
“I’ll say nothing.”
“About the past.”
“About all of it.”
Salvatore looked at Emily. Then at Margaret. Then at the drawings on the wall, the crayon lighthouses and rainbows and stick-figure families taped up by children who would never know his name.
“Fine,” he said. He took a pen from his coat, and he wrote something on the back of a napkin, and he set it on the table. “My lawyer will have the papers at your office by five.”
He walked to the door. He stopped beside Vincent, close enough that no one else could hear.
“You gave away everything for a boy who can’t say thank you,” he said. “I hope he’s worth it.”
“He’s worth more than the everything.”
Salvatore put on his hat. “Then you’re a fool,” he said, and the bell jingled, and he was gone.
The first of December came. The Montclair house was small and drafty and had a kitchen with yellow cabinets and a back door that stuck.
Maria came three days a week and complained about the stove.
Diane came every Wednesday and every weekend and filled the refrigerator with things nobody asked for.
Tony did not come.
He had stayed with Salvatore, and Vincent had shaken his hand at the gate and told him he understood, and neither of them had believed it.
The diner reopened on the third. Margaret put a sign in the window that said UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP — SAME COFFEE.
The regulars came back. Mr. Chen ordered his eggs over easy and then, after a long look at the menu, changed his mind and ordered pancakes.
On the second Tuesday in December, at eleven-fifteen, the gray sedan pulled into the lot at Rosy’s.
Not the Escalade.
A sedan with a car seat in the back and a crack in the windshield that Vincent had been meaning to fix.
Luca held his father’s hand across the parking lot. He was wearing the green sweater, which was now too small at the wrists.
The bell jingled. Emily looked up from the counter.
“Well,” she said. “There he is.”
She had their booth ready. She had the coffee ready.
She had a fresh coloring book and a box of crayons, and she set them down in front of Luca and said, “I heard somebody’s been drawing lighthouses.”
Luca looked at her.
Then he opened the book.
They ordered. Vincent got the same thing he always got.
Luca pointed at the picture of the chocolate chip pancakes, and then, after a moment, at the picture of the banana walnut, and then back at the chocolate chip, and Emily said, “Both? Ambitious. I respect it,” and wrote it down.
She brought the food out herself.
She set the plate in front of him and said, “Okay, buddy.
I have to tell you something.
Jimmy made these, and Jimmy’s been in a mood all morning because the griddle’s acting up, so if they’re terrible, it’s not my fault, and if they’re perfect, it’s entirely because of me. That’s how it works.”
Luca looked at the pancakes.
Then at her.
Then he laughed.
It was not a smile.
It was not the twitch at the corner of his mouth that Vincent had spent two years praying for.
It was a laugh—small and startled and real, a boy’s laugh, bright and sudden, and it filled the diner from the counter to the jukebox.
The whole room went quiet.
The construction workers turned on their stools.
Mr. Chen set down his coffee.
Denise stopped with a plate in her hand, and Margaret came out of the back office with her glasses halfway down her nose, and Diane, who had come because it was a Tuesday and she had decided Tuesdays counted, pressed both hands over her mouth.
Vincent did not move.
He could not.
He sat in the booth with his coffee going cold and his son laughing across from him, and something in his chest that had been clenched for two years opened all at once, and he put his face in his hands and cried in front of a room full of strangers.
Emily came around the counter.
She did not make a fuss.
She set a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, and then she went back to work.
Luca picked up the green crayon. He opened the coloring book to the lighthouse page—the one with the ocean and the spiral of light—and he turned it over, and on the back, in careful strokes, he drew four figures.
A tall man in a gray coat.
A woman with a ponytail. A woman with short gray hair. And a small boy in the middle, holding all their hands.
He tore the page out along the perforation and pushed it across the table.
Vincent looked at it for a long time.
May you like
Then he reached over and took his son’s hand, and the bell over the door jingled as someone came in out of the cold, and Emily called out, “Sit anywhere you like, honey,” and the jukebox started something slow and old, and outside the window the first snow of the year began to fall on the parking lot in small, unhurried flakes.
THE END.
