She huffed. “I can’t imagine what they said when I was born.”
“I’ll tell you. ‘This one doesn’t want to cry; she hides who she is. But anyone with eyes will see the beauty, the courage, the strength of her.’ ” He closed her hand in his. “ ‘And the man who holds on to her will have done the one right thing in his life.’ ”
R
ese hadn’t expected to say any of that. Talking to Lance was like passing too close to a black hole; the void sucked in words she couldn’t ever get back. It had started the moment he walked in her door.
She’d been so rude, he would have hit the road if he hadn’t needed access to the inn for Antonia. He must have clamped a lid on tight, shown a restraint she hadn’t believed he possessed. “So … how badly did you want to deck me that first day?”
“I don’t believe in hitting women.” He kept his focus straight ahead as they left Giovanni’s and strolled the street.
“On a scale of one to ten.”
“Which end’s high?”
She laughed. “I wish I’d known how hard you were working.”
He turned. “So you could have amped it up?”
“Exactly.”
“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “What I thought compulsive competitiveness is really intent to torture.”
“
You
were not being honest. You deserved to suffer.”
“You just wish it had been worse.”
She drew breath to answer but couldn’t continue the tease. Picturing him in her driveway, ready to give up everything, the pain obvious in every word, every motion, she stopped walking. “I don’t want to hurt you, Lance.” That was the most personal thing she’d ever told anyone, and her heart rushed with insecurity. Where was the woman the crew called a stone goddess?
He faced her, taking her hands. “It’s inevitable.”
She started to shake her head.
But he nodded his argument. “Life hurts. Put any two people together and you’ll have strife.” He brought her hands to his lips. “But making up …”
There he went again, taking the little she’d offered and running as though she’d passed the baton. She pulled away.
An orange-haired woman passed with a smile corrugated by too many cigarettes. Lance waved, then sobered as he watched her canting gait. “Wonder how Nonna’s doing.”
Rese was surprised how long he’d managed to go without voicing it. “Is your mom with her?”
He looked at his watch. “Pop or one of the aunts. Mom’s teaching.”
“What does she teach?”
“Dance.”
“Really?” But she could see that; the graceful way she moved, the flair, the figure.
“Pop took a dance lesson just to meet her. Asked her to marry him that night.”
“You Michellis don’t waste any time.”
“We don’t get turned down either. You’ve made history.” He half smiled. “Gina married Tony after three dates.”
“So you’re comparing?”
“Bad habit.”
“I don’t want you to be Tony.”
“You didn’t know him.”
“I know you.”
He seized her with a probing stare. “Yeah?”
“Almost three months’ worth.” She backpedaled before he could make more of that than she intended.
“Gina knew Tony all her life.”
“Unfair advantage.”
Lance traveled her with his eyes, but his thoughts seemed far away.
“What?”
“Wonder what Tony would make of you.” But before she could answer, his gaze jerked away. “Uh-oh.”
She followed his gaze to two old men across the street hollering at each other. Lance rushed across and got there just as they came to blows. Others came out of the social club, a couple still holding pool cues. She thought they would break up the fight as she hurried across the street, but most of them joined in, pushing and hollering. Lance put himself between the combatants, who seemed as willing to hit him as each other as he got hold of one of the old guys and yanked him out of the tussle.
Though blood gushed from the old man’s nose, he kept hollering insults and balling his fists. Lance dragged him away from the mob, who were still pushing but had mostly stopped swinging.
“Porca miseria!”
the old man hollered as Lance pulled his own shirt off and pressed it to the bleeding nose.
“You’re gonna hurt yourself, Carmine, you keep this up.” He eased the old man onto the curb beside a hydrant, and Rese caught a dark shape on the back of Lance’s shoulder. A bruise? She leaned, but he shifted position.
“Whatta you thinking, old man?” bawled a thick sausage-shaped woman in a black skirt, sweater, and scarf. She came down the sidewalk with a passel of dogs and two other women in black.
Carmine raised his fist. “Next time, I take outta hissa eyes.”
“He no gotta eyes. He’s as blind as you.”
Lance stepped back as the women engulfed his charge. He swiped the sweat from his cheek with his arm, but he’d left his shirt with Carmine’s nose. Rese reached him as he thumbed the blood from his lip. At least one shot had found his face.
“Are you all right?”
He rubbed the blood into his palm. “Yeah.”
“Why were they fighting?”
“Sal and Carmine? They hate each other. It’s lucky they’re too old to do any real damage.”
“What are they fighting about?”
“I’m not sure they remember. Probably a woman. It’s usually a woman.”
She thought of the black sausage woman and barked a laugh. “Are you serious?”
He grinned. “You better believe it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s a vendetta.”
He’d used that word before, but it conjured gangster movies and underworld figures as different from those old men as she was. “Be serious.”
“I am.” He tongued the split in his lip. “People think vendetta is a bad thing.” He looked at the women raising Carmine to his feet, shaking their fists at Sal and the others at the club. “But what it really means is, you take care of things yourself. Families band together. If someone is wronged, there’s a duty to right it.”
She searched his face, waiting for him to elaborate, but he turned away from the crowd and started down the sidewalk.
Again she glimpsed something, then leaned over for a better view. A cross and crown of thorns on his left shoulder blade. “You have a tattoo?”
“Sorry, you don’t get one.”
“Me!”
He pulled a wry mouth. “I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
She brought her hands to her hips. “I wouldn’t even have pierced ears if you—”
“Come on.” He took hold of her arm. “I don’t want to make a spectacle.”
She looked back at the still grumbling contenders, the barking dogs and scolding women. “Brawling on the sidewalk isn’t a spectacle?”
“Nah. But standing around without my shirt is.” And by the stares coming their way, she believed it.
Her eyes went to the tattoo again. A three-inch cross, the crown of thorns like a wreath at its connecting point. “Why get a tattoo, then hide it?”
He reached over and rubbed the shoulder. “It’s personal.”
“Personal how?”
“I carry His cross on my back to remember what He did, and be ready to carry my own.”
And his dad thought him the prodigal? Either Tony was perfect, or there was some serious misunderstanding. Fresh blood leaked from his lip.
“Does it hurt?”
“Nah.” He tongued it away, then touched a scar on his side. “This one hurt.”
“What happened?”
“Knife.”
“You’ve been knifed?”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders. “It happens.”
“It happens?”
“When you’re a friend of Rico’s.”
Friend had a new meaning when applied to Lance and Rico. Fiercely devoted. Interconnected. One man’s battle becoming the other’s. Lance had told her enough from their childhood to get that much. But she hadn’t realized the altercations had been life threatening.
She slid her gaze to Lance, who seemed energized by this new altercation. Not, she guessed, that he had wanted to fight, but more what Lucy had said, risking himself for someone weaker. When she looked at him now, she saw him carrying Christ’s cross on his back. What kind of man embedded that reminder in his skin?
————
The music had ceased altogether, but long before that, Antonia knew when Lance left. The magic had drifted away. They were all talented, but Lance and Rico together made the very air tingle. Since they were little boys—Rico’s hands never still, Lance with rhymes for everything—what they did together had been special.
Yes, they could get raucous, but even in the harder songs, she felt the power. And when they blended their voices, bringing life to one of Lance’s ballads, something happened between them that was almost sacred. Rico had rhythm in his bones, but it was her grandson’s gift that transcended. He was a true bard, even if his lute was plugged in and distorted. She almost smiled, but her mouth wouldn’t do it. She was glad no one had seen her try.
Anna was snoring in the chair, the afternoon and the chamomile tea they had shared lulling her daughter now that the noise across the hall had ceased. It wasn’t noise to her, but Anna didn’t know the hearts of the young people as she did. She hadn’t watched Lance’s fingers grow strong on the strings of one guitar after another.
Antonia sank back to days in the kitchen when he rushed in to show her a new chord pattern, a melody line to fit his lyrical thoughts. While she chopped the tear-inducing onions and fragrant fennel, he’d sit right there and work it out, and sometimes she would reword a phrase for him, Nonno Quillan’s poetry in her blood as well.
She sank back again to golden light in the gazebo, and Nonno alive and strong in spite of the silver-headed cane she had never seen him without… .
“Why did you become a poet, Nonno?”
He looks at me, gray eyes deep with emotion, and I know he will tell me truly. “Because some experience can’t be expressed in common speech.”
“Is it all your own experience?”
“Mine and those around and those before me.”
“Like Wolf ’s pictures?”
He nods, seeing, I know, the paintings his father made on the walls of a cave high in the Rocky Mountains. A child captive of the Sioux, Wolf had expressed his life on those walls, and Nonno Quillan had remembered them with his remarkable visual recall.
I am part of them. The thought swells inside me.
Antonia carried the feeling into her waking, almost seeing Nonno still.
You are reborn in Lance, Nonno. Your tender heart, your yearning spirit. Your experience and his, expressed in uncommon speech
. She could not deny the connectedness, and as her thoughts went to Papa, she knew that piece also must be woven in. Her heart clutched. Why didn’t Lance bring what she’d asked for? And could she bear it when he did?
————
Smoke haloed the hooded lights, big-band music emanating from the background system. Rese stood back watching Lance shoot pool. She suspected he’d gone down after supper to the social club to make good with the guys he’d sided against that afternoon—though he hadn’t thrown any punches himself. Now the same men who had snarled and cursed and shoved when he pulled Carmine out of their grip, laughed and schmoozed him like one of their own.
Sal wrapped an arm around his waist and grabbed his jaw in an avuncular grip with just a hint of intimidation. “You make this shot now, and we get double.”
But it was no ordinary pool they were playing. It was trick shots, balls set out and lined up that had to go into the pockets in some kind of order as the cue ball ricocheted around the table. Lance had earlier explained that the social club was more than a pool hall, including a back room for activities not endorsed by the State of New York. It was about numbers, bets, and money.
He and Sal were up a hundred and ten dollars, and he could double it with a successful shot. People bet on pool games, she knew, putting their ten dollars at the end of the table, winner gets it. But this worked a little differently, and the stakes were certainly higher.
Lance left Sal’s grip and went around the table, setting up the balls as delicately as birds’ eggs, nudging one imperceptibly closer to another, bending low to eye the alignments. He blew on his hands and rubbed them together, gave her a wink, then chalked his cue and leveled it with the table.
Rese held her breath as he slid the cue between his fingers back and forth no more than half an inch. Then, almost faster than she could see, he struck, and the balls scattered, running for their pockets like frightened rabbits. All but the yellow number one that tottered on the edge, then rested without dropping. Lance’s shoulders sagged.
The room exploded with cheers and invectives. Lance bore the back pounding and good-natured jeers, Sal’s tongue-lashing and grudging admission that it was closer than he’d have gotten. They hadn’t doubled, but he and Sal pocketed their fifty-five bucks, and Lance refused to get sucked into another bet, saying, “Sorry, Tino. It’s past my bedtime.”
She didn’t think he’d meant it that way, but every eye turned to her and the loud off-color comments started.
“Get outta here.” Lance waved them off, hooked her shoulders, and sauntered out, carrying his bravado to the street. “So, I got fifty bucks burning a hole in my pocket. Wanna spend it?”
“I thought it was past your bedtime.”
“That’s a throwback to when I started playing with them. Had to be home by twelve or face Momma’s wrath.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
“And she let you out till midnight?”
“On the weekends. She knew one of them would see me home.”
The neighborhood family.
He cupped her shoulder as he walked. “I’d been shooting pool since I could reach the table, but the gang in there wouldn’t let me play until I proved myself.”
“How could you, if they wouldn’t let you play?”
“I challenged them. Put my money where my mouth was. A hundred bucks for the privilege of losing it.”
“Smart.”
He smiled. “I didn’t always lose. Sal and Tino adopted me. Taught me how to set up, how to put the English on. Sal was a lot sharper in those days. He’s lost some power.”
“Where did you get the hundred dollars?”
“Tips clearing tables at the restaurant, running errands for everyone, beating the other kids at everything.” He shrugged. “I saved up the whole summer, then went in and made my play. They figured if I was old enough to lose big, I was good enough to learn.”