Dinner at Fiorello’s (15 page)

“You know, a thank-you might be nice.”

Vito stiffened at the sink they used for hand washing. Henry watched him dry his hands, and then he turned to Henry.
Damn. Those dark eyes! Even when I’m pissed at the guy, those things can’t help but turn my knees to water.

“For what?” Vito asked.

With the edge of his hand, Henry scooped a row of garlic skins and herb stems into a plastic bin. He slammed his rag down on the counter. “For what? Seriously? How about for helping you out all night? How about for saving your ass?”

Vito laughed, but there was little mirth in it. “Saving my ass? I thought you were, just like me, doing your job.”

“Yeah, but still—”

Vito shook his head. “Should we get Rosalie in here, ask her to clear up your job description? I thought your ‘title,’ if that’s what you want to call it, was something along the lines of all-around help. That means a little bit of everything, kid. Sorry if you don’t get my effusive thanks.” Vito glanced down. “You got basil stems all over the floor. You need to pick those up before you go home.”

Vito turned away from him, and Henry couldn’t help it. Even though he was burning up inside from the dressing-down, he had to smile. This was the most Vito had ever spoken to him.

Maybe the key to opening the man up was getting him mad.

“And stop calling me kid!” Henry said under his breath.

He didn’t know if Vito heard him or not because when he turned around, Vito had slipped quietly out the back door.

Henry hurried to finish cleaning up. By the time he was done, the front of the house was dark, and the rest of the staff had left. He headed out the back door and double-checked to make sure it was locked behind him. Henry took a small measure of pride in that, even after such a short time working at Fiorello’s, they entrusted him with this small but important task.

Out front, on Jarvis, Carmela and Antonio stood together, sharing a cigarette. Henry shook his head. That girl spelled trouble; he just knew it.

As if she could hear his thoughts, Carmela called out to him, “Hey, kid! What you got on tap for the rest of the night?”

Henry turned. “I’m going home—to bed.” What else would one do after working one’s ass off?

Carmela came close, smiling. “One thing you need to learn is that if you work in a restaurant, you gotta blow off steam after your shift. We all do it.” She cocked her head. “Sammy’s been taking that a bit too far of late, but you need some time to unwind.”

Henry nodded. “What are you gonna do?”

“Antonio and I are gonna go get a drink down in the city. One of the bars on Rush?”

Henry shook his head. The singles bars on the Near North Side of the city were a complete mystery to him, and one he was very comfortable with leaving unsolved.

“I thought he was married,” Henry said.

“So? A married man can’t have a drink with a coworker? And who said Antonio’s wife isn’t meeting us?”

“Is she?”

“No, but that’s beside the point. What’s up with you, anyway? You’re acting like a little bitch.”

Henry sighed. He could slap Carmela right now, for calling him “kid,” for calling him “bitch,” but he was just too over her to care at the moment.

She was right on one count. Although he was weary right down to his bones, with burning eyes and muscles that felt like they had doubled in weight during his shift, he realized the last thing he wanted to do was go home.

But where could he go? He was eighteen years old. He turned to Carmela. “Sorry. It was just a long night.”

“But you got to work in the kitchen. That’s good, huh?”

“Yeah, it was.” And Henry surprised himself by smiling. In spite of the silent treatment from Vito and, later, the chewing out, it had been fun. His hands and mind had worked in perfect synchronicity, and he could stand here now and bask in the feeling of not only a job well done, but also the fact that he had fed people that night. He had helped make them happy by putting food in their bellies.

“Well, there you go. You wanna come with Antonio and me?”

“You really want me to?”

And for a moment, he saw fear in Carmela’s eyes and that, most certainly, she was only making the offer out of politeness. Henry burst into laughter. “I’d love to, but you know I’m too young to get in any of those places.”

“Right.” Carmela laughed too, and in it, Henry could hear relief. “But go do something!” She made a shooing gesture with both hands. “What do kids your age do, anyway? Aren’t there parties on the beach? Cafés you can hit up?”

“Sure.”

Henry looked over to see Antonio take a last drag on his cigarette and then flick it into the gutter. “Carmela?” he said softly.

She smiled at Henry. “I gotta go,” she said softly. She leaned in close and whispered, “Don’t hate me.”

Henry shrugged. “Why would I hate you?”

And for the second time that night, she grabbed his cheeks and squeezed, asking the same question she had asked earlier. “You really are young, aren’t you?”

She gave him a quick peck on the lips, and he could taste lip gloss and cigarettes. He stepped back.

“Have fun tonight, okay?” She winked at him and returned to Antonio. The pair of them walked off together, heading toward the ‘L’ station. Antonio’s arm was draped loosely over Carmela’s shoulder, and she rested her head against him.

Henry shook his head.

He turned and headed east on Jarvis, toward the lakefront. This was his usual route home these days. His father had cut off the allowance he’d had since he was in high school, telling him, “Hey, you’re a working guy. You pay your own way now, bright boy. See what it’s like to make ends meet.”

So walking the two miles or so to his house in Evanston was the obvious choice over spending the money it took to ride the ‘L.’

Besides, the walk, usually late at night, relaxed him and allowed him to wind down from the night working. Even though he was weary right down to his bones, it still felt good to walk in the relative peace of the late evening. Often a lake breeze would buffet him, and when he got along the lake’s ocean-like shoreline, he would sometimes stop to admire how the moon cast the waves’ tips in silver.

He would never have this if he were sitting on a smelly ‘L’ train, surrounded by strangers who may be the source of whatever odor was on offer that night.

Of course, there was some danger in walking home alone. Rogers Park was still a different world from just a few blocks to the north, where the suburb of Evanston also sprawled along the same lakefront. Evanston boasted big houses, some of them rightfully called mansions, and the campus of Northwestern University, one of the finest and most exclusive schools in the Midwest. But Rogers Park, in spite of being gentrified over the past couple of decades, still had its marauding bands of gangbangers who, Henry knew, would find a rich blond boy like himself tantalizing sport. Henry always walked briskly and with purpose.

Something tonight caused him to stop in his tracks. And it was not a group of gangbangers lingering at the corner of Jarvis and Sheridan Road.

It was his mom.

In the weeks since he had begun his new job at Fiorello’s, Henry had just about forgotten that he had seen his mother in the neighborhood, because the sighting had never repeated itself.

Until tonight.

Henry let himself drift back into the shadows as he saw her emerge from an apartment building across the street. Her head was thrown back in laughter, and Henry was once again struck by how young and carefree she looked, so unlike the staid persona she radiated at home.

It was as though she was a different person, and Henry peered closely at her just to make sure, even though there was no doubt. After all, who doesn’t recognize one’s own mother?

The apartment building had a little awning over the front door, and just behind her was a tall man who, for just a second, Henry thought was Vito. But this time, when he looked closer, he was certain it wasn’t. The man had the same tall frame, broad shoulders, and mass of dark curls that Vito had. But this guy seemed several years older than Vito and had a full, heavy beard. He was dressed in a sport coat, white shirt, and jeans. He was laughing too. The baritone chuckles floated over to Henry on the breeze.

There were some bushes in front of the building Henry was nearest, and he moved behind them to shield himself more securely from view. He didn’t know if such a maneuver was necessary, since his mother and this man seemed to have eyes only for each other.

Henry’s heart lurched just a bit, and his stomach did a similar flip-flop as his mom turned to the man when they were out of the light of the apartment building’s front door and he gathered her up in his arms. Sure, Henry wasn’t stupid. It had crossed his mind that his mother could be having an affair, but the idea seemed so ridiculous Henry could never give it any real credence.
Come on, parents don’t even have sex, do they? I mean, like a couple of times, with their spouse on birthdays and stuff and to have kids, but otherwise? Nah….

And parents
certainly
didn’t have sex outside of marriage. The idea was sickening, repulsive. And even though Henry recognized it as horribly sexist, he thought if one of his parents were going to cheat, it would be his father, not his mother. His mother? The ice princess?

Yet the ice had all melted around her in a puddle as she responded passionately to the man’s kiss, right there in the street. Henry watched as she reached up to bury her hand in the curls at the back of the man’s neck, to pull him closer.

It made him sick, really sick, and Henry feared he would throw up. It was all he could do to hold down that night’s family meal, which had been roast chicken and sautéed eggplant.

He wanted to run across the street and yank them apart, cry admonishing words to them both, especially his mother, but he stayed frozen to his spot in the shadows, feeling like he was spying yet unable to look away. He saw the impulse to separate them as something a little boy would do, whining and hanging on to the hem of his mother’s sundress.

At last, much to Henry’s relief, they broke their embrace and began walking toward him. Henry sucked in a breath and then shrunk farther into the shadows, feeling a strange mixture of emotions—despair, hysteria, anger, loss, and rage—all alternating, jockeying to be first. These were tempered by nausea and the absurd—or so Henry thought—urge to cry.

He spotted his mother’s car and heard the little beep as she used her key fob to unlock the doors. They stood for a while at her car, talking and laughing. There was such a sense of ease between the two of them, and Henry racked his brain, trying to think of a time when he had seen his mother behave so flirtatiously and girlishly with his father.

He came up empty.

Henry had to bite his lip to keep from crying out as his mom reached up to stroke the man’s face, while gazing at him longingly in the moonlight.

Finally the man opened the door for his mother, and she slipped inside the car. He leaned down and kissed her again. Henry’s nausea morphed into numbness.

He could do nothing but watch as she drove away, the man staring after her, raising his hand in a wave. His mother gave a little toot on the horn.

After the man turned and went back inside his apartment building, Henry allowed a few minutes to pass before he emerged from the shrubbery back onto the sidewalk. He looked around guiltily, as though he had been the one who had been caught in a compromising position.

He continued eastward and even started north when he veered right on Fargo and headed to the beach at the end of the street. There, a broad expanse of concrete steps led down to the sand, and Henry sat, to allow himself time to think.

Quickly, and only because his inner child and sense of the world and his place in it wanted so desperately to be righted, Henry grasped at fantastic straws.

The man was only a friend.

The kiss was just a peck, and Henry had imagined it as more.

There was a relative in Rogers Park his mother had mentioned before, and Henry had only forgotten.

Those things shriveled up and died like a Popsicle dropped on a hot sidewalk at the height of August’s heat.

The hard thing was that Henry could not, as much as he wanted to, convince himself that his eyes had deceived him. There could be no other interpretation for that passionate kiss. No alternative to frame seeing his mother tonight and earlier in the summer here in Rogers Park than she was having an affair. An
affair
. It seemed so tawdry, so lifted out of a television soap opera. An affair was not something that would raise its ugly, lying face in Henry’s own family.

He sighed, staring out at the relentless ebb and flow of the lake along the shoreline. He imagined a tsunami, a giant wave starting from far out on the water’s dark surface, raising itself and steadily gathering force until it was the height of a skyscraper, until it crashed down on Chicago, obliterating the city and its inhabitants.

The affair wasn’t so surprising, really, even though the thought made his stomach roil as if he had eaten something rotten. He had seen his mother and father together for years, and their lives never betrayed so much as a hint at intimacy. When they did kiss, it was little more than a quick peck, when Henry’s dad left for work in the morning. Even that was rare. They seldom shared a meal. They all used to go to the country club together, for holidays and Sunday brunch, but Henry couldn’t think of the last time they did that.

No, the truth was his parents lived more like roommates than husband and wife, existing alongside each other rather than together, if Henry really wanted to be objective about it.

And he did
not
want to be objective about that. These were his mom and dad. His small world depended upon their being together. He had no siblings. Other than Maxine, there was no one he could turn to in that beautiful six-bedroom lakefront house, a house Henry now saw as a sham and a testimony to money and little more.

Was his family a lie?

The rush of grief was sudden and started first as a big lump in Henry’s throat that quickly morphed into tears, snot, and sobs that shook him to his very core. He covered his face with his hands and wept, cried until he could barely breathe, until his eyes burned.