Chapter 8: Cranston

I read it twice.

Then I folded the paper back around the brick and put the rubber band on it.

"What are you doing?" Nick said.

He was still crouched over me. There was glass in his hair.

"Packing it."

"Lia."

"He sent me something. It's polite to send it back."

I got up off the floor, slowly, with one hand on the counter.

Nothing hurt.

I checked anyway. I stood there with my palm on my stomach and waited.

Nick watched me do it and didn't say a word.

Then I got a white bakery box from under the register. The big one, for sheet cakes.

I put the brick inside on a gold doily.

Antonia's car pulled up outside twenty minutes later. Nick had called her.

She came through the broken front door in her slippers and a long black coat.

She looked at the glass, and then at me.

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Is the baby hurt?"

"No."

She saw the box on the counter.

She lifted the lid, looked at the brick on its doily, and closed it again.

"Where?" she said.

"Wherever he eats dinner on Tuesdays."

Paolo Carbone ate dinner every night at a restaurant on Atwood Avenue in Cranston with his name over the door in gold script.

White tablecloths. Red leather booths. A man playing piano near the bar.

Tuesday night it was full.

We walked in at eight.

Antonia first, in her black coat and pearls. Then me, with the bakery box in both hands. Nick behind us, close.

The hostess saw Antonia and went pale and didn't say anything at all.

The piano player missed a note.

Paolo sat in the big round booth at the back with four men and two women.

One of the women was my sister.

She had on a cream silk blouse I'd never seen before. Her hair was blown out.

There was a glass of red wine in her hand.

She saw me and the glass stopped halfway to her mouth.

I walked through the dining room between the tables.

Forks stopped. People stopped chewing for the second time that week.

I put the box down in the middle of Paolo's table, between the bread basket and the oil.

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