He came early. Paulie drove and did not offer to come in, because Paulie was sixty-eight years old and knew the difference between a man's errands and a man's debts. "I'll be across the street," he said. "Coffee place. Take your time, boss." He had started calling it that less often lately, as if the word were wearing out from disuse.
The mass was the anniversary mass, the one the parish said every year for its dead, the names read out before the offerings in a roll as long as the neighborhood's memory. Families put the names in months ahead. Somebody — Gia, Tony assumed, or the priest's secretary acting on Gia's instructions — had put in Nino Lombardi's name this year, in the parish where his own family had kept their grief the way other families kept good china: brought out seldom, handled carefully, never discussed at table.
Tony sat at the back. It was reflex more than decision. The back pew was where a man sat when he was not sure he was expected, and it was also, he understood too late to unthink it, where his mother had stood for her eleven minutes. He took the end seat, near the aisle, near the door. Men like him always sat near doors. He had sat near doors for forty years, in restaurants, in courtrooms, in other men's churches. It was a habit so deep it felt like anatomy.
The pews filled the way they always had. Widows in black who had outlived three generations of husbands. Men his own age with their fathers' faces. Young couples with babies who did not know yet that this was the church where everything in this neighborhood had ever happened. Pia arrived on Gia's arm, walking the aisle the way generals inspect troops, nodding at pews. She wore her good coat. Her hair had been done. Behind her came the remaining Lombardi kin — a nephew of Nino's, grown grey himself, cousins Tony knew by face and not by name, people who had carried the boy's photograph at family weddings for thirty-seven years, a man at the edge of every picture, forever twenty-four.
They filled the family pew, third from the front, on the left. It was the Lombardi pew and had been since before Tony was born.
The mass began. Tony listened with his hands folded and his mind doing what it did in all ceremonies, which was inventory the room — exits, faces, who was armed, who was grieving genuinely and who was performing it — and then, somewhere in the first reading, the inventory stopped, because the names were coming.
The priest read them the way priests read them, slowly, with space around each one, as if names needed air. DeLuca, Antonio. Marchetti, Rosa. Ferraro, Giuseppe. On and on, the dead of the parish, decade upon decade of them compressed into a litany. Tony found he was listening for it the way you listen for a step on a stair. His mother's name had been read in this church in 1994 and he had not come. His father's name had been read and he had sent flowers the size of a door and not come. He had a whole system, once, for not coming.
Lombardi, Nino.
The priest did not pause or mark it. It was one name among two hundred, and that was the point of it, and Tony felt it go through him all the more completely for arriving unannounced, in plain sequence, between a Lombardi grandmother and a boy from the next street Tony had forgotten dying. Nino Lombardi, read aloud in the hearing of both families, in the church of his christening, thirty-seven years after the men who arranged his death decided his name would be managed into silence.
In the third pew Pia turned around.
She was eighty-nine years old and it took her some time and Gia's hand under her elbow, and when she had done it she looked down the length of the church at him, and she raised one finger, and she pointed — not at him, precisely, but at the empty space beside her in the family pew, where the Lombardi cousins had, without discussion, left a gap the width of one man.
Tony Russo sat in the back of the church and understood that he was being summoned by a woman who had been nine years old in a kitchen with his mother, who had buried a brother and kept a recipe and out-waited two generations of his family's silence, and who was now, in front of the whole parish, spending something. What she was spending was the family's oldest coin: the right to say where he belonged.
He stood. Every head in the church did not turn; that would have been a movie. Most heads turned. He walked up the aisle with his coat over his arm and his father's face and his mother's eyes, past the widows and the men his age and the babies, and Pia shifted along the polished wood and made the space real, and he sat down in the Lombardi family pew between Pia and the grey nephew, who looked at him for one long second and then, deciding something, nodded once and faced front.
Pia's hand found his wrist and stayed there, dry and light as a leaf. "There," she said, at conversational volume, while the priest read on. "That's better. Your mother always said a man at the back is a man planning to leave."
"I'm not leaving," Tony said.
"No," Pia said. "I can see that. It took your family thirty-seven years to walk up this aisle. Slow walkers, the Russos. But you walk." She patted his wrist once and let go, and folded her hands, and closed her eyes for the rest of the names, and Tony sat in the third pew on the left with his enemy's and his victim's family around him, breathing the incense and the old stone smell, and did not plan, for the first time in his life in that church, where the door was.
Chapter 22: The Bianchi Table
Emilio Bianchi's invitation arrived the way everything arrived from Emilio Bianchi: by hand, in pen, on paper heavy enough to have opinions.
My house, it said. Sunday. Bring your appetite and nobody else's. E.B.
Tony read it twice at the kitchen table and laughed once, out loud, which startled Gia, who had learned to read his silences the way other people read weather but was still revising her understanding of his laughter. "He's feeding me," Tony said. "At his table. With his family in the next room and his mother's recipes. Forty years I've known that man and he has never once let me see him eat soup."
"It's an honor," Gia said.