Chapter 30: Table Nine, a Year Later
A year, Harper had learned, is mostly other days.
It was shifts, and rent paid on time, and a loan balance going down in print, month by month, in Sylvia's good paperwork. It was her mother's hip, better. It was Bianca, eighteen now, applying to study law with a ferocity that made Sylvia pretend to be frightened at family dinners Harper occasionally heard about second-hand. It was learning the map of Providence from the back of an ambulance — every street a possible address, every address a person mid-way through the worst ten minutes of their year — and discovering that the work under all the work was the same as it had always been. Look properly. Say what you see. Do not look away because it is not your business, and do not stay longer than the job requires.
She had a crewmate, Dev, who drove like an angel and made terrible coffee in the depot kitchen, and the terrible coffee had become a ritual, and the ritual had become a life. She had delivered a baby in a lift in February, caught it like a professional and cried about it later, privately, in the depot loo, like a professional. She had been back to Casa Loma eleven times in the year — Rosa's birthday, Ferrante's nephew's christening, ordinary Tuesdays with her mother — and each time she had walked past Table Nine the way you walk past a place where something happened to you a long time ago, with respect and without stopping.
But the anniversary of the signing was not an ordinary Tuesday, and Ferrante had telephoned personally, which meant refusal had never been a real option.
"One year," he had said. "Both families eat here, as families now do, because of a paper signed in this room. You will come as my guest. Not staff. Not — what is Sylvia's word — a party to anything. A guest, Harper. Wear the blue dress."
She wore the blue dress.
On the bus across town she had watched Providence do its early-evening work and thought, with a calm that still occasionally startled her, about how little of the year had been about the families at all. It had been about six in the morning and Dev's coffee and a man on the Pawtucket line who had thanked her with his eyes because he could not yet talk. It had been about learning to be the person who arrives. Tonight, for once, she was not arriving for anyone. She was going to dinner, in a dress she had bought herself for a signing, in a restaurant where she no longer worked, because an old man had telephoned and used her first name like an invitation rather than a summons.
The dining room was full and loud in the good way, candles on a darkening evening, the Kovac and Barone elders at the long table arguing happily about wine like men who had been given back the ordinary subjects. Tomas Kovac, thinner, indestructible, raised his glass an inch in her direction when she came in and said something to Rosa that made Rosa swat the air. Mara Okafor was there in a suit with a glass of something soft, off duty in every way except posture. Sylvia, elegant as a verdict, kissed Harper's cheek and said, "Paramedic Lane. In good standing, in all ledgers," and moved on before sentiment could organise itself.
Ferrante came out of his kitchen himself — an event — and took her elbow with a hand heavy as a book.
"Your table," he said, and steered her, through the cheerful traffic of waiters who were not her anymore, to the corner by the high windows where Table Nine stood set for two.
"Ferrante," Harper said. "That's —"
"Set for two, as booked," he said, entirely bland. "House's choice of booking. Sit, please. You insult an old man by standing."
He pulled out the chair — the same side, she realised, the same chair, the place she had knelt a year and more ago with her heart in her ears — and she sat, because sometimes obedience to Ferrante was the correct clinical decision, and because her glass of water was already poured, catching the candlelight, and for a moment the room arranged itself around the memory the way light does around a familiar window. The murmur of the party went on. Under the table, unseen, was brass.
The chair opposite her was empty for perhaps three minutes.
Nico arrived as he always arrived, without announcement, shedding the evening's business at the door — she had watched him do it for Rosa's birthday, this shedding, the phone put away, the coat given up, the man arriving a half-second after the reputation. He greeted his mother, greeted Tomas with both hands around the old man's one, said something to Ferrante that made Ferrante laugh and point — directly, traitorously — toward Table Nine.
He came across the room and stopped at the table, and he did not sit.
"Good evening," he said.
"Good evening."
"I should tell you," Nico said, with the gravity of a man making a formal report to a regulatory body, "that before I came over, I checked under the table myself this time."
Harper's face did something she could not have stopped. "You did not."
"I did," he said. "On one knee, in this suit, to the alarm of a waiter named Tomas — no relation — who now believes the family has a ritual. It is clear. A plaque, a screw at each corner, nothing else. Ferrante's wording holds up well."
She laughed — properly, helplessly, in the blue dress, at the set table, a year and a world from the night she had not laughed at all in this corner, and he watched her laugh with an expression she had never seen unguarded on him before, simple and pleased, as if her laughing had been the item on his list all along.
"Then since the table is certified," she said, when she could, "you may as well sit down. Ferrante set it for two. He'll be unbearable otherwise."
"Ferrante," Nico agreed, "is unbearable on a schedule." But he waited — a beat, a real one, standing at the edge of the candlelight with his hand on the back of the empty chair, not presuming the laugh had been an answer. "Harper. Is this an invitation?"
"It is," she said. "Sit down, Nico."
He sat, opposite her, a guest at the same table, with the water glass poured and the brass beneath them and nothing under the table that did not belong there, and Ferrante — passing, not passing, a bottle appearing from nowhere in his hand — filled their glasses and went away again without a word, and the anniversary went on around them, loud and ordinary and alive, while at Table Nine two people who had taken the longest, most careful road in Providence began, at last and entirely by choice, to talk about nothing important at all.
The End