“Put yourself in my hands.”
That thought was too intriguing. “No problem. I’ll try anything once.”
He talked as he filled the pot with water, then reached for a bag of coffee beans. “My philosophy is half restoration, half renovation. I believe in making a house easier to live in, while still preserving all the things that make it beautiful and unique.”
“You’ve renovated a lot of houses, then?”
“Nope, just this one. At least on my own.”
“You mean you’ve gone off on your own after working with someone else?”
He didn’t speak while he ground the beans. She had the feeling he might not be sure what to say.
She watched him moving with masculine grace. She had been wrong about his feet. He wasn’t barefoot. He wore dark sandals, and not too long ago the cutoffs had probably been perfectly good jeans. The T-shirt had come out of a plastic package of three, not off a designer rack.
She decided that the simplicity of his dress suited his centurion features, although he would also do justice to a tux. She particularly liked the white shirt against his olive skin.
He shut off the coffee grinder. “I worked with my father when I was a teenager. He’s an exacting craftsman. He’s also a poor man, because he refuses to learn new and faster ways to do things. My older brother, Marco, owns a construction company that puts up new houses in six weeks, tops. He refuses to do anything the old way. I fall somewhere in between.”
She watched him guide the grounds into the coffeemaker.
“Tell me what you did in here. As an example,” she added. “Which part’s your father, and which part’s your brother?”
He smiled, and his face went from sober to marvelous. “Well, Marco’s in the walls. This room was half the size it is now. There was a pantry where you’re sitting, and an enclosed stairwell over there. I shamelessly redesigned it from those bits and pieces. I suppose my father’s in the cabinets. They aren’t original to the house. What was here was pure lumberyard clearance. So I bought these at a salvage yard.”
The cabinets, what few there were, were spectacular. Bird’s-eye maple, she guessed. A simple, almost primitive design that highlighted the wood as no trim could have. “Are these all you plan to put in? Or do you have something else in mind?”
He laughed. “You’d have to see the basement to understand. Picture ten more just like these in various stages of reconstruction. They’d been painted harvest gold somewhere along the way. It’s very tenacious paint.”
She whistled softly.
“I got them for almost nothing.” He checked the espresso. “I paid too much.”
“But the kitchen will be gorgeous.” She could imagine the rest of it, too. This was simply the “before” photograph in the magazines she’d loved as a teenager. The “after” would be worth waiting for.
“I hope somebody will think so.”
She cocked her head in question.
“I’m renovating to sell,” he said. “The house is a business venture. Buy cheap, renovate with my own labor, sell high. Although not too high in this neighborhood, I guess.”
She felt an absurd stab of disappointment.
Niccolo poured milk from a fifties Frigidaire into a stainless steel pitcher and set it beside the coffeemaker. Then he turned. Leaning against the counter with his arms folded, he ignored the espresso and focused solely on her.
“You didn’t come for the tour, did you, Megan?”
She tapped her fingers on the table, as if she was answering in code. She forced herself to stop. “No, I didn’t. And not for the coffee, though I’m sure it will be wonderful.”
“What, then?”
She knew exactly what to say and how to say it. It still took her a while to form the words. “You spoke to my uncle Frank yesterday morning. Frank Grogan?”
Niccolo didn’t exactly frown, but his expression changed. “Are you related to everybody in Cleveland?”
“Just a fair number on the west side.”
“I’ll have to remember that.”
“Uncle Frank told me that you’d been asking around Whiskey Island about a homeless man.”
“You and I seem to be standing smack-dab in the middle of the information highway. What else do you know about me?”
“I’d like you to stop asking around, Niccolo.”
“I appreciate people who come straight to the point.”
“Then we’re going to get along just fine, because that’s my point. My only point.”
“Fine, but you’ve left out a few things.
Why,
for starters. You told me yourself there was no man. Why should you care if I indulge my delusion?”
“Because there may have been someone, after all.”
She watched him take that in and wondered how she’d ever believed this man could be led to think otherwise.
“So, what changed your thinking?” he asked at last.
“Time, I guess. I just had some time to think about it.”
“And what happened in those hours to convince you I might have seen someone?”
She’d known this wasn’t going to be easy. “We were all upset that night. None of us was thinking clearly.”
“As a matter of fact, I thought you were thinking very clearly. Clearly enough to try to convince me I’d been seeing things.”
She tried a different tack. “Uncle Frank changed my mind.”
Niccolo turned back to the coffeemaker, sliding the pitcher of milk under a stainless steel nozzle and turning on the machine.
Megan waited until he had finished steaming the milk and coffee perfumed the room. “The truth is, I
didn’t
want to believe it at the time, but the man you saw might be someone we used to know. It’s a small possibility, but real enough, I guess. He’s an old man who used to live in the neighborhood. No one’s seen him in a long time.”
His back was still turned. “How long?”
“Years. We thought he was probably dead. We’d all gotten used to the idea.”
He removed the espresso and divided it between a sizable mug and a small china cup. Then he added the steamed milk and foam to the mug and brought them both to the table. “And now?”
“Well, it’s hard to accept somebody coming back from the dead, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. A fair number of the world’s population believe in at least one resurrection.”
He left and returned with a sugar bowl and spoon. She added her habitual sugar fix to the mug and stirred. “What I’m trying to say is that if this
is
the same man, he’s a sad case. For years people tried to help him, but he refused to let them. He wants to be left alone. He wouldn’t want anyone to find him now and start the process all over again.”
“The man I saw was a hero, Megan. At great personal risk, he came forward to stop a crime. Doesn’t he deserve a little notice, a little assistance? Maybe he wants to be helped now. Maybe that’s why he was in the parking lot that night.”
The table was so small, and he was so close, that she could almost feel the heat from his body. It seemed odd to be sitting this close. Intimate beyond expectation.
She leaned forward anyway. “Nick, you don’t know the man, and you don’t know the situation. How can you insert yourself this way? What’s it to you, anyway? You’re a stranger to all of us, and certainly to him.”
He sipped his espresso for a moment, before he set down his cup. “I like to tell stories. May I tell you one?”
“I thought we Irish were the storytellers.”
“I’ll match you gene for gene, stereotype for stereotype. No one could tell a story like my grandfather. But let me try.”
She realized that if this conversation was to end the way she wanted, she would have to let him.
He sat back in his seat and draped an arm over the table. “I used to live in Pittsburgh. I’m from southwestern Pennsylvania originally, a small town there, so it was natural for me to settle in the region. I had a job in one of the city’s wealthier suburbs. The building where I worked was huge and very old, and it was my responsibility to watch out for it.”
“You were the caretaker?”
He smiled a little. “More like the building manager. I lived…nearby. I watched over it, coordinated events. That sort of thing. Early one morning I walked up the front steps and found a homeless man sleeping in an alcove just off them. The building was locked, of course, but there were alcoves on both sides, protected from the worst weather but still open to the elements. You expect this kind of thing in the heart of a city, but if you live in the suburbs, you don’t expect to be confronted by the world’s social problems. Not right at your front door. For a lot of people, that’s the point of living there.”
She had no idea where this story was going, but she realized she wanted to find out. “Go on.”
“He was an old man. Toothless and dirty. No different from a thousand homeless men just like him. I woke him up and sent him on his way. He was back the next morning, and the next. It was late summer, and the alcove was a pleasant enough place to sleep, I guess. I got into the habit of bringing him coffee and a roll, sometimes a piece of fruit to go with it. I’d give him a couple of bucks, not enough to buy serious booze, but enough for a sandwich later in the day. I learned that he usually ate dinner at a shelter or soup kitchen in the city, but he didn’t want to stay there overnight. He told me once that he didn’t feel safe in a shelter. It was one of the few times he spoke to me about anything in particular.”
“Did you know who he was or anything about him?”
“I asked him to tell me about himself, but he didn’t have much to say. I found out his name was Billy, and he had come to Pittsburgh from New York, but that was all. Eventually I stopped trying to find out. Not only did it seem pointless, we had other topics to discuss. His continued presence in the alcove, for one.”
Niccolo sipped his espresso. She wondered if he was picturing these exchanges.
His gaze found hers, and he continued. “Autumn had arrived by then, and the weather was getting colder. Some people who used the building had discovered that Billy was sleeping in the alcove, and they were unhappy with me for allowing it. We discussed what to do with him. He was staying around longer and longer each morning, to the point where people were forced to step around him to get inside. Sometimes he urinated on the steps. I guess finding a better place was impossible. He wasn’t good about cleaning up after himself, either. Every morning he left crumpled newspapers, trash he’d picked through. I couldn’t always get to it before others saw it. Billy wasn’t invisible anymore, and they resented it.
“Finally I told Billy he’d have to move on permanently, but he ignored me. One night, when the temperature was dropping, I called the police and asked them to arrest him for vagrancy so he could spend the night in jail, where he’d be warm. That didn’t deter him, either. He was back the next night, and the next. I found a men’s shelter on the other side of town and drove him there myself. It was far enough away that I was sure he’d become somebody else’s problem, and we could return to our comfortable lives.”
Megan didn’t smile. “Kind of like a stray dog you drop off in somebody else’s neighborhood. Then if it gets hit by a car, you never know about it.”
Niccolo didn’t wince, but she saw the remark had struck a nerve. “Billy was back two nights later. I threatened him with the police again, and when that didn’t make much of an impression I called them. They came and got him, and that time they promised me they’d take care of the situation.”
He looked down at his cup, and his expression was weary. “I didn’t like it ending that way, but I didn’t see any other options. He couldn’t stay there. Winter had come early that year, and the weather had turned bitterly cold. The…other people using the building were adamant. I had to be forceful, and I had to get rid of him.”
Megan leaned back. Niccolo had no way of knowing just how hard her own heart was pounding. “So what happened?”
“The judge threw out the case and put Billy back on the street again. There were treatment programs for people like Billy, but the waiting lists were a mile long. There were subsidized apartments and halfway houses with private rooms, but they were all filled to capacity. The local jail had enough inmates to feed, people with a lot less going for them in the morals department than Billy. So there wasn’t anything that could be done, only nobody thought to tell me. Too few cops, too many cases. I’d been assured it was under control.”
He looked up. “And I thought it was, until I walked up the steps one morning and found Billy frozen to death.”
Megan swallowed. “Frozen?”
“It’s a sight I hope I’ll never see again.”
Her mind was in turmoil. “Look, I don’t see exactly what this has to do—”
“Afterward,” he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I was racked with guilt. I knew I had to do something to prevent that from happening again. There was another building behind ours, a former residence hall that was standing empty. Through all those troubles with Billy, it had been standing empty. So I went to our board and asked them to convert it into a homeless shelter, a humanely run and safe homeless shelter, with counseling and job training and substance abuse programs.”
“They said no,” she guessed out loud.
“They weren’t unfeeling people. Everyone felt badly about Billy, even the ones who’d been most adamant about getting him off our steps. But all of them were in agreement. If we opened a shelter like the one I proposed, then we’d be bringing more ‘Billys’ into our neighborhood, something nobody wanted. So, instead, they decided to hold a fund-raiser for the shelter across town, a dinner buffet with a local orchestra. A formal affair that would be fun for everybody. And after all the expenses were paid, we would donate the excess in Billy’s name. Everybody was certain this would be good enough. More than was expected…”
“Everybody but you.” Megan realized she hadn’t touched her coffee. She picked it up now. It was wonderful, but the liquid seemed to congeal inside her. She set down the mug and noticed, for the first time, that it was emblazoned with the spires of a cathedral.
“Everybody but me.” Niccolo’s finely chiseled lips twisted into a grimace.
She looked down at her mug again. She traced the etching of the cathedral, and as she did, he spoke.