Chapter 6: Five A.M. at the Market

Nonna was at the stove at half past four on Monday morning with a brass key in her apron pocket.

"The shop opens at five," she said. "Your father never missed a Monday."

She held out the key on a loop of butcher's twine.

I took it, and it was warm from her.

"Santo will be there," I said.

"Santo comes at nine. Ignazio comes at ten." She turned back to the pot. "Go and open it."

I drove the old Ford with the Minnesota plates down the hill in the dark.

The City Market was waking up.

Vendors were unloading crates of squash and apples under strings of work lights, and the whole square smelled of cold dirt and diesel.

Cusumano Provisions sat at the north end, a brick building with gold letters on the glass and a loading dock around the side.

I unlocked the roll-up door myself and pushed it up.

The dock light showed a long cutting room with steel tables.

Five old men in white coats and rubber boots stood in a line.

They must have heard the truck.

The oldest one took off his paper cap.

"Signorina," he said.

The others took off theirs.

I stood in the doorway with my father's key in my fist.

"Nobody has called me that since I was nineteen," I said.

"We know who you are," said the oldest. "He counted the cases himself every Monday. We have the sheet ready."

He handed me a clipboard, and I read it by the dock light.

Briskets, ribs, pork butts, three hundred pounds of sausage.

At the bottom, in my father's square handwriting: Costigan, Fri and Mon, standing.

"My father sold meat to the Irish," I said.

"To one Irishman," the old butcher said. "The cook. Since the day he opened. The rest of his people we would not feed."

He looked at his boots.

"Your uncle was always the voice to the Irish, Signorina. Nobody else talked to them."

"Not my father?" I asked.

"Not after the first years. Not even the old men of the Table."

"Why?"

"Because he was good at it." The old man shrugged. "And your father trusted him."

At six the Pit's truck backed up to the dock.

Ronan climbed down in a canvas jacket and work gloves, and he stopped when he saw me in the white coat with the clipboard.

"Morning," he said.

"Monday order's on the dock," I said. "Twelve briskets."

"Fourteen. I added two," he said.

"Fourteen, then."

The old men wheeled out the cases, and they did not look at us.

I counted the briskets onto the truck bed and ticked them off.

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