"The car draws eyes, boss."
"Then we won't bring the car."
"That's what I'm saying. The car draws eyes because of who gets out of it."
"Walk with me anyway," Tony said. "Thirty years I've had men walk behind me. Today you walk next to me, and if that feels strange to you, imagine how it feels to me."
So they walked, two old men in good coats, down streets Tony Russo had not walked unguarded since he was a teenager with a paper route and a name that was not yet heavy. The neighborhood had shrunk and brightened and changed its languages twice over. The corner store where his mother had sent him for bread was a phone shop now, neon in the window. The bakery was a bakery still, which seemed to him a small act of defiance by the universe, and he bought two loaves he did not need and carried them in a paper bag like any man.
Paulie carried nothing. Paulie's hands were free out of thirty years of habit, and his eyes went to every rooftop and doorway the way other men's eyes go to the sports page.
"You're enjoying this," Paulie said.
"I'm remembering it. Different thing."
They came to St. Rita's, where Tony had been baptized and confirmed and married, where his father's funeral had filled three streets, where his mother's had filled the whole parish. The doors were open. He stood on the steps and did not go in, and after a while he understood that he was not ready to go in, and that there would be a day for it, and that today was not that day, and the plainness of the arithmetic surprised him more than any grief could have.
"You want I should wait out here?" Paulie said.
"You always wait out here. That's the whole sermon, Paulie."
Past the church, the streets narrowed into the rows he had grown up counting. His family's house was three doors of brick with a plastic awning now, a tricycle on the steps, a family inside it that owed him nothing and knew nothing, and he found he was glad of both facts. Then the social club, boarded, its painted sign gone to ghosts of letters — and then, at the end of the block where the row bent, the building.
It had been a bakery first, then a hall the parish rented, then nothing for a long time. The windows were plywood. Someone had tagged the plywood, and someone else had painted over the tag, and the paint had weathered into a third thing that was neither. But Tony was not looking at the windows. He was looking at the narrow door on the side, the one that led up the back stairs to the hall kitchen, and through that door, up those stairs, he could hear — the way a man hears a song in a room that has been silent for decades — two girls laughing over a pot too big for the stove.
His mother had cooked there. Not at home, not after she married power and moved into its house — here, in this rented hall kitchen, every Sunday of his boyhood, shoulder to shoulder with Pia Lombardi, for christenings and funerals and First Communions and the parish's endless appetite. The whole neighborhood had eaten Carmela's ragù up those stairs and believed it came from the Russo house. It hadn't. Home was where she performed it. Here was where she made it.
"You remember this place," Paulie said.
"I remember the stairs. She used to send me up the alley with the basket because the front was for ladies. I thought it was a rule about baskets."
"It was a rule about her," Paulie said, gently. "Everybody knew. Nobody told you. She wanted one place the name didn't get to first."
Tony stood a long time. A kid rode past on a scooter and did not look at them, and the not-looking was the finest gift the street had given him in forty years.
"Find out who owns it," he said at last. "Quietly. No office, no lawyers with my letterhead, no names at all. And Paulie — whatever he's asking, that's what it costs. We don't haggle. We don't scare anybody. We pay the number on the paper like we're nobody."
Paulie took out the small notebook he had carried since before Tony could grow a beard, and wrote the address down in pencil, and underlined it once, which in Paulie's system meant *this one matters more than the others.*
"It'll take a week to do it clean," he said.
"Take two. Clean is the whole point."
On the walk back Tony carried the bread and thought about penance — not the kind the Church sold, the kind his mother had invented in a hall kitchen: feed the people, say nothing, keep the pot on. He had spent thirty-seven years believing the dish had died with her. It had not died. It had been waiting in a boarded building and in an old woman's hands and in a girl who did not know what she was carrying, and now it had come back to his table in front of two armed families and stopped his breath like a hand on his chest, and a man does not get a sign like that and answer it with money thrown at a problem. He answers it with bricks. He answers it with a door that opens.
"You're smiling," Paulie said, alarmed.
"I'm thinking."
"That's what I said. You're smiling."
The purchase, when it closed eleven days later, was as ordinary as paper: a holding company nobody had heard of, a price nobody negotiated, an owner in Florida who told his wife that some church group must have bought the old hall, God bless them, and who never learned otherwise. Tony signed nothing with his own hand. He only stood across the street one grey morning and watched a workman pry the first board off the first window, and light — ordinary, dusty, unremarkable light — fell into the hall kitchen for the first time in nineteen years.
He went home and told no one what he had done. Not yet. Some things a man builds before he explains, because explanations are doors other people close. He had one more visit to make first — to an old woman in a nursing home who had supervised that kitchen by nose for sixty years, and whose wages, he suspected, were going to be the hardest negotiation of his life.
Chapter 17: Pia's Sundays
The nursing home released Pia Ferretti the way it released everyone: with a plastic bag of belongings, a folder of instructions nobody would follow, and a nurse who hugged her and cried a little and called her *our Sunday girl.* Pia bore the hug with dignity and corrected the folder. "I take the white one at night," she said. "Not the night one at white. If you're going to write it, write it right."