Chapter 24: Six

Gianni had the table brought over from the house.

It took six cousins and an afternoon to get it up the stairs at Corsaro's.

They swore the whole way. One of them chipped the red wallpaper on the landing, and the braciole aunt hit him with a dish towel.

But they got it up.

Pop's long dark table stood in the middle of the private room upstairs.

It still had the scratch where Carmine had dropped a knife at nine years old.

Gold balloons this time. Green ones, too, because Archie said gold was "a lot."

A cake shaped like Saturn waited on a side table.

Gianni had once told him Saturn was his favorite planet, and Archie had decided to forgive him for it.

I stood in the doorway before anyone came and looked at it.

The last time this table was laid for a celebration, I'd sat at the far end on a folding chair.

The menus downstairs were new.

The photograph of the judge at table six was gone from behind the bar.

There was a new one up there instead, of an old man in a wheelchair raising a glass of red wine.

"You okay?" Gianni said behind me.

"Yes," I said. "I really am."

They came at six.

The aunts first, with trays nobody had asked them to bring.

The cousins came, and the cousins' kids.

Six boys from Archie's class came down from Boston on a bus Bess had chartered, with their parents looking nervously at everything.

The capo who'd laughed at Lucia that first night, who ran a car wash now in Delaware County and brought Archie a remote-control truck.

The old cook from downstairs, in his whites, who'd hated Carmine more than anybody.

Bess, in a dress, which nobody had ever seen, with her denim jacket over it, which everybody expected.

And at the head of the long table, where Pop had sat for forty years, there was nobody at all.

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