Banished at Dad's Wake, So I Came Back to Run the Boardwalk novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Pier

I broke rule two on purpose, at eleven o'clock on Thursday night, in a rolling chair.

The pusher asked no questions and took me the length of the Boardwalk with the ocean breathing on my left.

Out on the pier the neon still burned over the entrance.

TADDEO'S PIER ARCADE, in red script my father had first drawn on a napkin when I was six.

The old night guard let me in.

The arcade was dark except for the machines, lit and waiting and humming to nobody.

My father's picture hung over the change booth, in a frame gone yellow.

I was halfway through telling him I was home when I heard the office door open.

Nunzio came down the stairs with a man behind him on each tread.

He was heavier than I remembered and thicker in the neck.

The scar ran white through his left eyebrow.

It pulled that side of his face a little, so that he seemed always about to wink.

"Cousin," he said, pleasantly.

"Nunzio."

"Ten years, and you walk into my arcade," he said.

"My father's arcade."

"Papa says the roof is paper," he said. "Papa says you can't hide behind a Sklar hotel for the rest of your life."

He reached the bottom step and held out his hand, palm up.

"Come up to the office," he said. "We'll talk about the old days."

"No."

He took my wrist.

His fingers went around it, hot and damp, and he squeezed until the bones ground.

It was the same grip, the same breath, with the same smell of cologne on a gym shirt.

I was nineteen again, with the coats at my back, and I felt every inch of the hallway close around me.

Then I was twenty-nine.

I had the rod in my other hand before I knew I had moved.

It was a brass stair rod, three feet long, the kind that pins the carpet to the tread.

It had slid out of its clips at the bottom step with one tug.

I swung it up and across his face.

It cracked on the scar.

The old line split open, and the blood came out of it in one bright line down into his eye.

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