"Then we'd better make Saturday worth staying for," she said. "Come inside, Luca. I need you to taste the glaze. And in this house, you know the rule. You eat first."
Chapter 21: The Dinner
The dining room had been built for thirty, and that night it held nine, and Mia had never cooked for a smaller crowd that weighed more.
She stood at the kitchen door with her hands folded and watched the ritual begin. It had been agreed in advance, in the cold language of men who trusted nothing: both houses would send a taster, and both tasters would eat from the same serving dishes, in sight of everyone, before a single principal touched a plate. Vittorio Castellano's man was seventy if he was a day, with a face like a walnut and hands that did not shake. Luca's man was Enzo, back at work with his cleared name and his knife roll restored, and Mia saw him swallow hard when he took his place. It should have been her. In Luca's house, she ate first β that was the rule, the heartbeat of the whole arrangement β but tonight the rule would have insulted the guest, and so she stood in the doorway of her own kitchen like a stranger and watched another man taste her food for poison.
The walnut-faced taster ate. Enzo ate. A full minute of silence turned in the room like a slow clock. Then Luca lifted his hand, no more than a finger's width, and the serving began.
Mia had cooked the whole menu twice already in her head that day β once in the morning, tasting as she went, building each dish a spoonful at a time until the flavor in her mouth matched the flavor Sofia's book had put there; and once again in the hour before the cars came up the drive, when doubt had walked the kitchen with her like a second cook. What if her memory had fed her a village that never existed? What if she had built a bridge out of steam and fennel seed and an old man would taste it and find only a waitress's presumption? Then the first car had come through the gate, and Mrs. Ricci had taken her by the shoulders and turned her toward the stove the way you turn a compass needle, and there had been no more room in the evening for doubt. There was only the work. There had always only been the work, and tonight the work was peace, served hot, in courses.
She had built the menu out of two childhoods, hers only by adoption. Nonna Sofia's book lay open in her head to the page written in 1952, in a hand that had still been a girl's: the dishes of a village above the sea, where Sofia Moretti and the woman who became Vittorio's wife had both been born, had both drawn water from the same well, had both left on ships in the same decade and never seen each other again.
Antipasti first β the marinated anchovies, the caponata dark and sweet. Vittorio ate slowly, without expression, a man giving nothing away out of seventy years of habit. Luca matched him bite for bite and said almost nothing. Marco, at his brother's right, watched the old man's hands the way other men watch a gun. Nonna Sofia sat at the far end in her good black dress, very straight, very small, and ate like a queen receiving tribute she had earned in another century.
The pasta course was Sofia's β hand-torn, with the greens bitter the way the village liked them. Vittorio's fork stopped once, halfway to his mouth, and Mia's heart stopped with it. He chewed. He set the fork down with great care, the way a man sets down something that might break.
"You put the wild fennel in," he said.
"Nonna's book says the village way is the fennel seed, toasted," Mia said from the doorway, because no one else in the room could have answered him. "Not the fronds. The seed."
"Everyone uses the fronds now. The seed isβ" He stopped. "The seed is how it was."
Then came the dish she had built the whole night around, the one Sofia had described to her three times and made her repeat back like a catechism: the slow fish stew of the village, the poor people's feast, tomatoes and the catch and the bread rubbed with garlic at the bottom of the bowl to catch the last of it. It was not grand food. That was the point. Grand food he could have bought anywhere in Chicago. This he could only have gotten from a dead woman's memory, carried across an ocean in another woman's book.
Vittorio Castellano, seventy-eight years old, who had ordered things done in this city that priests still whispered about, lifted the spoon to his mouth β and wept. He did not make a sound. The tears simply came, running down into the lines of his face, while his hand stayed perfectly steady on the spoon. He ate three more bites through them, unhurried, like a man at a grave who has decided not to be ashamed.
"My wife," he said at last, to the table, to no one, "made it with the bread at the bottom. Forty years I have asked cooks. Forty years of restaurants, of chefs with their names on buildings. Nobody put the bread at the bottom." He turned his wet face to the far end of the table. "Sofia. You kept it."
"I kept everything, Vittorio," Nonna Sofia said. "Somebody had to."
The silence after that was a different substance from the silences before it β not a weapon being held, but a weight being set down. When the coffee came, it was Luca who spoke first, quietly, in the tone of a man reciting something he had rehearsed and meant.
"The docks," he said. "It ends. No more blood over the docks β not yours, not mine, not the boys who load the trucks and don't know whose war they're in. The routes split as my grandfather and yours agreed before the feud. Joint say on the warehouse leases. And any man who lifts a hand across the line answers to both of us."
Vittorio turned his cup once in its saucer. "And the boy," he said. "The Callahan boy. You will want something for the trouble my house caused yours, Moretti, so I will say it before you ask. The statement comes from my own people β my lawyers, my name on it. The boy was hired blind and knew nothing, and the Castellano house says so where it counts. His record is clean because we dirtied it, and we will clean it."
Mia, in the doorway, put her hand flat against the doorframe to keep herself upright, and nobody saw her do it, or everybody did and granted her the privacy.