In the pantry, Aggie poured coffee with a hand that was not entirely steady. "Sixty years I've watched that family do business," she said to no one. "First time I ever saw it done with the shutters open."
Chapter 27: The Café on Magazine Street
The café was on Magazine Street, halfway between his city and her life, and June chose it the way she had chosen everything in this errand: for its exits, its light, and its ordinariness. It had a tin ceiling and a counter with stools and a chalkboard menu, and at eleven on a Thursday morning it was full of people who had no idea that anything was about to happen in it.
Vittorio arrived first, because he had arrived first at everything for thirty years and did not know how to do otherwise. Benny parked across the street and stayed with the car. June sat with the King at a corner table — his choice, back to the wall, though he had tried to give her the chair and she had refused it with a look — and they ordered coffee neither of them drank.
"You do not have to wait," he said, for the third time.
"I know," June said. "I'm waiting anyway."
He had brought no gift, on June's advice, except the one thing that was not a gift but a return. The deposit box in Baton Rouge had been opened the day before, with the small brass key and a bank officer and a great deal of quiet paperwork, and now the ring sat in a plain envelope in his inside pocket, beside the pills June pretended not to know about. His hands lay flat on the table. She had seen those hands sign a settlement, pour wine, grip a doorframe in the grey dawn. She had never seen them unsure of their occupation until now.
Anna came in at eleven-oh-four, in scrubs under a denim jacket, her hospital badge still clipped to her pocket, because she had told June on the telephone — two calls, both short, both hers to end — that she would come straight from a shift and would not dress up for a ghost. She stopped just inside the door. June had watched her across a hospital courtyard and thought: Celeste's eyes. Now Vittorio saw her for the first time since she was three weeks old, and the King of New Orleans stood up from a café table with the careful slowness of a man rising in church.
"Anna," he said.
"Mr. Salerno," she said. It was not cruel. It was worse than cruel; it was factual. She took the chair June vacated, and June carried her coffee to the counter and sat on a stool with her back half-turned, near enough to be a witness and far enough to be furniture, and did the hardest work of her life, which was not listening too hard.
She heard pieces anyway. Café noise carried what it carried. She heard him say her mother's name the way a man says the name of a country he was exiled from. She heard Anna ask the questions she had plainly rehearsed in the car, in order, not to be kind but to be accurate: Why didn't you write. Why didn't you come when she was sick. Why now. She heard him answer the terrible one without defending himself — "Because I told myself a grave was a kind of protection, and by the time I knew it was only a grave, I had built my whole life on believing it" — and she heard Anna say, "That's the first true thing. The letter had some pretty ones."
She heard Anna tell him about the ward, too — unwillingly at first, the way you hand over something you had not planned to give. A boy named Ellis, seven years old, three weeks into a stay that kept extending itself, who had appointed himself the mayor of the pediatric floor and ruled it from a wheelchair. "He asks about you," Anna said, and June, at the counter, felt the whole café tilt on its axis. "Not you-you. He found the drawing's twin — he draws houses. Houses with too many windows. He says a house needs somewhere for everybody you love to look out of." A silence. "I didn't tell him anything. I just thought — if I'm going to sit here for an hour, you can sit there and know that the world went on being ordinary. That's what you bought with your thirty years, Mr. Salerno. Ordinary. She made sure of it. Mom did."
At twelve o'clock, almost to the minute, Anna stood to go, and June saw that she had stayed the full hour she had promised herself and not one minute of charity beyond it. At the table, Vittorio rose too, and took the plain envelope from his pocket, and held it out with both hands, like an offering and not a claim.
"This was your mother's," he said. "It was never mine to keep. I kept it anyway. That seems to be the history of everything I have of hers."
Anna opened the envelope at the door, in the light from the street, and looked at the ring a long time. She did not put it on. She closed her hand around it, and turned back — not toward the table, exactly; she stood between the table and the door, in the country between two lives, and spoke clearly enough for June to hear every word and understand that she was meant to.
"Mom hummed when she cooked," Anna said. "Scat, sometimes, under her breath, off the records she used to sing. Twenty-nine letters and you never wrote that. So maybe there are things you don't know either."
It was not forgiveness. It was not even, yet, an invitation. But it was a fact handed over, the first coin of a real currency — the things a daughter knows that a king does not — and June watched him receive it the way a starving man receives bread: without grabbing.
"No," he said. "I never knew that. Thank you."
Anna nodded once, as if a point had been fairly scored in a game she had not agreed to play, and went out into Magazine Street, and got into an old blue car, and drove toward Baton Rouge. Vittorio stood in the doorway until the car was gone. Then he sat down again at the corner table, and finished, at last, his coffee, which was cold.
"One hour," he said.
"One hour," June said, "is fifty-nine minutes more than three weeks, if you do the arithmetic the other way."
He laughed then — a real one, startled out of him — and Benny, across the street, lifted his head at the sound like a man hearing weather change. On the drive home, with the river on their left, the King of New Orleans said, to the window, very quietly: "She hums. Did you hear. All these years I have been writing to a woman made of paper, and the living one hums in a kitchen." He folded his empty hands in his lap, the hands of a man with twenty-nine years of catching up to do, and was silent the rest of the way, but it was a silence like a field after rain.