By nine the building had achieved its full Sunday weather. Danny was on dishes at the deep sink, sleeves to the elbow, whistling tunelessly through the steam — Vic's son, the exile's boy, who had come to that door to ask if his father's sentence included him and had been fed first and answered second, and who now ran the sink the way other young Russos once ran corners: entirely, and as a point of pride. Anna, between clinic shifts, worked the pass with a ladle in her hand, arguing gravy consistency with Gia in the shorthand of two women who had decided to be sisters about it. At the door, Paulie was losing an argument about football to Stefano Bianchi, loudly, happily, with hand gestures, while signing in a christening party of thirty and a troupe of Russo cousins who had driven down with coolers, as if the kitchen had ever once run out of food.
And Pia's chair stood where it had always stood, angled toward the pass, with its cushion.
It was not kept empty. That had been Gia's ruling, delivered in the first month after the funeral with her grandmother's own lack of sentimentality about furniture: a chair in a kitchen is for sitting, and Pia Lombardi had not supervised thirty years of Sundays so that a piece of furniture could retire in her honor. So the chair was claimed, weekly, by whichever child climbed into it first — today a Bianchi great-granddaughter of six, all elbows, enthroned with her legs swinging a clear foot off the floor, sampling the minestrone from a spoon too big for her and delivering her verdict in a voice that carried to the door.
"Almost," the child announced.
"You hear that?" Danny called from the sink. "She's coming for your job, Gia."
"She can have it in forty years," Gia said. "By then I'll have taught her everything except the last thing."
The child's mother, horrified and delighted in equal measure, began an apology that no one required. The chair had a cushion, and a claimant, and a line of succession. It was the most living thing in the building.
The sauce had gone on at six. By one o'clock the ragù had reached the hour Gia trusted — the peel long lifted out, the star anise removed and set on the windowsill until the pot was empty. The tagliatelle was rolled and cut by a relay of grandmothers and conscripted teenagers; the long tables, pushed together in the arrangement the ledger called THE FEAST and everyone else called Sunday, were filling with the week's census: Russo and Bianchi, Lombardi kin up from Delaware, clinic grandmothers, the christening party, two off-duty nurses, and a priest.
Tony arrived at twelve-fifty, in shirtsleeves, through the kitchen door, the way family did. In the old years men had appeared at his elbow at moments like this — a coat, a car, a word. Now he came alone, carrying nothing: he checked the bread, moved a chair for an elder with his own hands, submitted without comment to a tablespoon of sauce from Gia's spoon and her raised eyebrow, and said, "It'll do," in the voice of a man who has learned that this, from her, is a conversation.
"It's better than it'll do," Gia said.
"It is exactly what it'll do," said Tony, "until it's on the table. Then it's the best in the city. Even a sauce has to know when it's Sunday."
When the moment came — the tables full, the noise cresting — Gia turned to the big bowl out of a year's habit and found Tony already there. He did not make a speech of it. He simply took the bowl from the pass with both hands — the great bowl, the feast bowl — and said, quietly, in the working noise, "This one's mine to carry."
A year and a half ago, in a neutral restaurant across the city, the most feared man in Philadelphia had sat down at a table of peace and taken one bite of a stranger's cooking and stopped breathing in front of two armed families, and the whole world had stood up reaching for its guns. There were men in this room who had been in that room. Stefano, who now set down his argument mid-sentence — a thing no living person had seen him do — had been in that room.
Tony carried the ragù to the table himself, past his daughter and his exile's son and his old enemy's great-granddaughter, and set it down at the center of the feast, and the room — thirty years of penance and one year of Sundays — settled around it into a silence that had nothing held in it at all.
He did not sit. He stood at the head of the long table with his hands resting on its edge, and the people at it looked back at him the way people look at the head of a family: with appetite, and patience, and no fear.
"We'll say grace," Tony said. "My mother's grace. I haven't said it in a house full of people since I was nineteen years old, so if I get it wrong, the two women over the door will have to correct me." He closed his eyes. The room closed with him. "Bless the hands that made it. Bless the mouths that eat it. Remember the ones who set this table before us and couldn't stay for the meal — there's a chair for them anyway. And leave the door open, Lord, when we're done being grateful — somebody we love is always still coming."
"Amen," said the room — Russos and Bianchis, Lombardis and strangers, the priest and the nurses and the child in Pia's chair — and the amen had the sound of a door opening rather than closing.
Tony served the first spoonful himself, down the table, hand to hand, bowl to bowl, and then he sat at last in his place, and his daughter passed him the bread, and Danny, coming from the sink with his sleeves still wet, took the seat that was his now without asking anyone's permission, and Stefano leaned across two cousins to tell Paulie the argument was not finished, merely postponed for pasta, and the noise rose again over the long table like a city breathing out.
Gia ate standing at the pass for the first minute, the way cooks do, tasting from the edge of the feast she had made — orange peel and star anise, patience and penance, her grandmother's hands and her own — and looked down the hall at the whole improbable congregation of it: the mafia boss at the head of the table with gravy on his cuff, laughing; his daughter home; his enemy's family fed; his exile's son in a seat of honor; the dead named over the door and a child reigning from the dead woman's chair. The dish that made the mafia boss stop breathing, served now in the open, in daylight, to anyone who came hungry — and the only thing it stopped anymore was the argument, the feud, the long held breath of two families and one whole neighborhood."Almost," said the little girl in Pia's chair, to her second helping, with enormous satisfaction, kicking her legs.
"Almost," Gia agreed, and picked up her ladle. "There's another Sunday. There's always another Sunday."
The End