Chapter 2
He came back Wednesday at seven and told himself it was the numbers.
There were still irregularities in the accounts. There were still follow-ups that needed doing in person, still a report he wanted to read standing on the actual ground. Victor Raldi had built his life on never lying to himself, and every one of those reasons was true, and none of them was why he was standing at the back of a line at six fifty in the morning with his hands in his pockets like a man waiting for a bus.
He waited at the back. Which was a thing Marco would turn over for days afterward, the way you turn over a stone you found in a field.
When he got to the window, Alice looked up.
“Stew again, or do you want the chicken?”
“Chicken.”
She turned to plate it. “You’re here early.”
“I have a meeting at eight.”
“Mmm.” She set the plate on the ledge. “Yesterday you had a meeting at seven thirty. Today at eight.”
Victor took the plate.
She noticed things. He filed that away the way he filed everything — and then, without deciding to, he filed it somewhere else entirely.
A small boy came around the side of the truck with a backpack on, dragging a book. He stopped when he saw Victor.
“Leo,” Alice said, without looking up. “Bus.”
“I know.”
“The corner. Seven forty.”
“I know.” Leo sat down on the crate anyway, opened the book, and began reading with the same absolute concentration Victor had seen the day before.
“You’re here every day,” Victor said.
“Six days a week.” Alice wiped the ledge. “Closed Sundays.”
“Closed Sundays.”
“That’s Leo’s day.” She nodded at the crate. “His father’s shift used to be Saturdays, so we had Sundays. We kept it.”
Victor did not ask. He had learned, somewhere in the space of a single day, that this woman answered questions and did not offer anything she had not been asked for.
“He should be at school,” Victor said.
“He will be.” She looked at him, flat. “The truck opens at five thirty. He’s eight. I’m not leaving him in an apartment above a laundromat from five in the morning until the bus comes, so he comes with me, and at seven forty he walks a hundred feet to the corner and gets on the bus, and he’s at his desk by eight fifteen, and the school calls me if he’s late, and he has never once been late.” She held his eyes. “You asked. That’s the answer.”
Victor looked at her, and then at the boy, and then at the plate in his hands.
The line behind him had grown. He stepped away.
Friday the line was longer, and the mood around it was wrong.
One of the men had brought a friend from a crew two blocks over, so there were fifteen waiting. Alice was moving fast — talking, cooking, making change, three things at once — and Leo had put his book down to hand napkins through the window, small and grave about it, like a man on a job.
Then Victor heard a voice behind him. Loud, the way only uncomfortable men are loud.
“Hey. Hey — is she even supposed to be here? This is private property.”
Victor turned his head, slowly.
A man he did not recognize stood at the edge of the crowd in a contractor’s vest. Mid-forties, thick through the shoulders, talking to nobody in particular and making sure everyone heard.
“She’s taking up space. She’s blocking the—”
“She’s not blocking anything,” one of the younger men said. “She’s been here months.”
“Don’t care how long. Private property. She got permission? From who, exactly?”
The line went quiet.
Alice had stopped moving. Not frozen — gone very straight and very still at her window, both hands flat on the ledge, listening. Victor looked at her face and saw something he recognized, and it was not fear. It was harder than fear. It was the look of a person who has been told, many times and by many people, that she does not belong somewhere, and who has built a wall around the flinch — with the flinch still there underneath, doing its work.
He walked out of the line.
He stopped two feet from the man in the vest, who turned, saw his face, and stopped talking.
“She has permission,” Victor said.
His voice was completely level. Completely quiet.
The man opened his mouth.
“From me,” Victor said.
Three seconds. The compressor kept running behind the fence. A gull went over.
“Right,” the man said. “Yeah. No — that’s fine.”
He left quickly and did not look back.
Victor returned to his place at the end of the line. Half the men were staring at him. He stood there like a man waiting for lunch.
When he reached the window, Alice was looking at him with an expression he could not read all the way through.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“Thank you,” she said, which was not the same as gratitude and he understood that.
“What’s today?”
“Sausage and peppers. Cornbread’s fresh.”
“I’ll take two.”
She blinked. “You hungry, or is there a reason?”
Victor glanced back over his shoulder at the line.
“One for me,” he said. “One for the boy, if he wants it.”
Alice looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached through the window and put something in his hand — small and white, the kind of card you have printed at a drugstore.
Alice’s Kitchen. 617-555-0182.
“If you’re going to keep coming,” she said, “you might as well know the menu in advance. I text it Sundays.”
Victor looked at the card. Then he slid it into the inside pocket of his coat, close to his chest.
“I’ll be here Monday,” he said.
He walked to the crate where Leo sat and crouched down to the boy’s eye level and held out the second plate. Leo looked at it, and at him, and took it.
“Thank you,” he said, clearly, already reaching.
Victor stood and walked to the SUV. Marco was leaning against the door with the expression of a man who had fallen into a parallel universe and was doing his best to navigate it.
“Not a word,” Victor said.
“Wasn’t going to say anything, sir.”
May you like
Victor got in and shut the door. In the quiet of the back seat he reached into his pocket to be sure the card was still there.
It was there. He left it there.
