Ben leaned over and vomited. Instead of comforting him, Mr. Falso kept talking.
“My point isn’t that they died a terrible death, which they did. My point is, Frank Cillo was the lawyer who helped many of those families sue for lost income after their husbands died. He’s a hero to many of these families. It was decades ago—way before you were born—but they remember.”
At that moment, Ben realized there was only one way out, and to get out, he was going to have to rely on his belaying partner.
“So you can understand your father’s unpopularity when he squealed on Frank Cillo for not reporting everything to the IRS. Frank Cillo is a hero in this town. You don’t cross him. You especially don’t cross him if you’re Paul Lattanzi’s kid.”
Ben dragged his wrist across his mouth hard.
Mr. Falso leaned over. “And you definitely don’t cross him if you were schtupping his dead daughter.”
Ben scanned the other climbers, in stages of resting, or making their way back up or down. He wondered if they would help him, if it came to that. More than anything, he wanted to get out of Little Q. He tried to make eye contact with the closest climber, a guy with wraparound sunglasses who seemed to be watching them. Ben struggled to see exactly where his eyes were. Suddenly the man waved. Ben’s stomach sank as Mr. Falso came from behind Ben and greeted the man by name.
As Mr. Falso passed, he leaned into Ben, his breath yeasty at Ben’s neck. “You need to leave this alone, Benvenuto.”
JANUARY 2016
Francesca’s eyes narrowed as she stood alone in the far corner pretending to survey for tables that needed salt and pepper. Usually when she served meals at the soup kitchen, she felt good about what she was doing. Almost noble. Today, she felt cynical, finding fault with everything. She had served the poor, shown compassion to the vulnerable. It had even made her feel virtuous, like Saint Clare, whom she was into lately. Saint Clare, who said to Saint Francis, “Dispose of me as you please. I am yours.” The website said that Saint Clare became more radiant as she served, and Francesca imagined herself becoming more beautiful to Mr. Falso with every globule she scraped into the steel sink.
It should have been the perfect time to confront Mr. Falso about what he’d witnessed. But so much had gone wrong. First: Francesca felt disgusting. Much as she tried to channel the glorious piety of Saint Clare, dish duty sucked. Her nose was shiny. Steam hung in her hair. Her jeans were crusty with white sauce from the chicken tetrazzini, gelatinous gunk heaped on plates that the busboys tossed in plastic bins shoved through the window to the dish room. Dishwater had seeped through her plastic gloves and mixed with the powder inside, and her bandages smelled funky. Second: Connie had insisted on coming. Francesca had tried to tell her the people who came to the soup kitchen for their free meals stank. They chewed with their mouths open. Didn’t have teeth. Sometimes, they even groped. Connie should stay home. Francesca’s issue with Connie was her potential for distraction. It wasn’t that Connie attracted men; not like Mira, whose cool incandescence drew boys like moths. In fact, Connie suffered (unjustly) in comparison to her cousins, always battling something (a zit, a bad-hair day). Connie knew this, but she didn’t believe for a moment that she couldn’t change her lot. The key lay in studying her cousins’ ways—Francesca’s fiery dignity and Mira’s airy detachment, neither of which Connie was capable of attaining. Francesca knew Connie’s habit of observing her every interaction with boys would make conversation with Mr. Falso nearly impossible.
Francesca scanned the room with barely veiled disgust. The overweight man with the undersized Boston College varsity sweater forever asking for seconds was a fraud, she was sure. She didn’t feel sorry for the weary couple with their premature baby making kitten noises. The baby needed its milk warmed, and if they didn’t know enough to warm it, well, she wasn’t going to tell them. She didn’t identify with the strung-out junkies who might have been her age, ignoring their table, and they ignored her, pushing powdery dinner rolls around their plates. Beyond the main dining room, the smell of warm dishwater and powerful detergents was repulsive and alluring, and the laughter that slipped out over the mechanical chug in the back room pricked her nerves.
Mr. Falso was laughing at her. Remembering the way she’d rolled around on her sheets, like she was having a seizure, caught in some sort of trance. She’d embarrassed herself, she was sure of it. But there was a word for what she’d experienced; she heard him use the word to her father as she lay on her back drenched with sweat—ecstasy—a word he wouldn’t have used unless he thought that was what was happening to her. He had labeled it, and she had heard him.
Francesca twirled the apron string around her finger and smiled. The night wasn’t over yet.
“What are you standing there for?” Mira said. “The five stoned guys in the corner are asking for more bread. It’s your turn, I think.”
Francesca looked at her sister, who, instead of folding her apron down like everyone else, wore hers over her chest and tied neatly beneath her chin. Mira approached soup kitchen service with genuine fear, locking her purse in the director’s desk and covering her body so nothing was left exposed, as if the patrons were going to gang rape her rather than get a meal.
Not saintly at all. Not Christian.
Francesca untangled her finger and spoke in a harsh whisper. “Nick hasn’t spoken to me. Not once. And the fact that Connie’s in there with him makes it ten times worse.”
Mira frowned. “Connie’s not interested in Mr. Falso.”
“Connie likes men,” Francesca said.
Mira moved closer, looking over her shoulder. “You actually think Connie would betray her blood that way?”
Francesca sighed. “Of course not. I’m worried about the fact that he hasn’t spoken to me since he came to our house during my ecstasy. He’s blown off our check-in meetings, and my hands are drying up.” She showed both sides. The bandages, smaller now, were four pristine, nude circles. Across the room, the man in the BC sweater bellowed for more pudding. The girls looked up in sync. Mira grabbed Francesca by the arm and pulled her to the small room off the main dining area where the furry-faced woman with cataracts sat folding napkins. Privately, the girls called her Catwoman because of her resemblance to Connie’s cat, but her real name was Donata. They had never served the poor without Donata in the background. She was already in her seat when they came, and still there when they left, folding and unseeing. Francesca felt sorry for her; Mira thought she was terrifying. Every third or fourth napkin Donata would stop and flex her gnarled hands and rub her thumb along the grain of her palms, massaging. Mira speculated Donata’s presence at the soup kitchen was a mercy job, since she only ever folded about twenty-five napkins in the entire five hours the St. Theresa’s kids worked there.