Chapter 4
The call lasted eleven minutes. Vincent stood in the hallway of his own diner with a bloodstain drying on his dining room floor and an unconscious waitress being lifted onto a stretcher forty feet away, and his voice never rose once and never dropped once,
and every word that came out of his mouth was chosen the way a surgeon chooses a stitch. When he hung up, Tony was waiting.
“What did he say, Mr. Castellano?” “Joey said the boy stays mine. Joey said he’s embarrassed. Joey said the boy will not see another payday from the Morettis as long as he lives. Joey said if I want the boy in a river, the boy goes in a river, no questions asked.” “And what did you say, sir?”
Vincent was quiet for a long moment.
“I told him the boy stays above ground. For now. Because the boy is useful. The boy has a name in his pocket I need.”
Tony crossed himself. Vincent walked back into the main room, where Dr. Russo stood beside Amelia with his flashlight still in his hand and the careful expression that meant he was about to say something true.
“Concussion, a bad one. Hairline fracture on the left side of her jaw — maybe worse, I need an X-ray. Her eye’s going to swell shut by morning.
She’ll need stitches above the temple. She’s going to hurt for a month.” “Will she wake up, Tommy?”
“She is awake. In and out. She knows her name and what year it is. She’s scared and she’s in a lot of pain, but her brain is in there. She’s going to be okay.” Vincent closed his eyes for one long second, and for the first time that night his shoulders came down half an inch.
Then Dr. Russo said, “Vincenzo. This girl — she’s got old bruises. On her ribs, on her left arm. Yellow-green, the kind from a month or two ago.
This ain’t the first time somebody put hands on this girl.” Vincent’s eyes opened. “I know, Tommy.” “You know?” “I know now.” “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to put her in your car, Tommy. And then I’m going to take a drive downtown.”
Amelia was stirring, asking for her purse, her apartment key, her job. Vincent knelt beside the stretcher and told her, in that soft voice,
that her job was safe, her paycheck was safe, her apartment was safe; that for the next six weeks she was going to rest and eat and heal and not worry about a single bill; that he promised it on his mother’s name.
Amelia’s one good eye filled up. “Why?” she whispered. “Why are you doing this? You don’t even know me.” Vincent was quiet for a long second. Then he said, very quietly, “I had a daughter once, miss.”
The words sat in the air between them. Dr. Russo looked up sharply. Angela’s hand went to her mouth. No one in the diner had ever heard Vincent Castellano speak of his daughter. He looked down at Amelia, at the swelling rising along her jaw, at the small pale scar on her eyebrow, and his voice went lower still.
“Her name was Lucia. Twenty-two years ago, she was nineteen years old, and she was in love with a boy I did not like. I told her so.
She said I didn’t understand, and maybe I didn’t. He beat her for a year, and she hid it from me the way children hide broken things, and when she finally told me, it was from a hospital bed with a tube in her arm. She lived for four days. I buried her in the white dress she wore to her first communion.”
He paused. The room was silent. “I spent the next two years doing terrible things to the man who did it and to the people who helped him. And then I built this diner. I made one rule, and I have kept it for twenty-six years: no violence in Castellano’s.
Because I learned too late that a woman should be able to sit in a room with a cup of coffee and a locked door and not be afraid. I was too late for Lucia. I refused to be too late for this city.”
He looked at Amelia. “And then a man walked into my diner and put his fist through my rule, and I knelt down beside the girl on my floor, and she had your eyes — the same tired, careful eyes.” He stopped himself.
“I’m an old man, miss, and I have made a great many mistakes, and I have never once been able to apologize to my daughter.
So I am going to spend the rest of the night, and whatever nights come after, making sure the man who did this to you understands that he picked the wrong floor, in the wrong diner, in the wrong city, at the wrong time in my life.”
He stood up. “Tommy, put her in the car.
Take her to St. Agnes under a different name, private room, and don’t leave her side until I come back.” “Where are you going, Vincenzo?” “Downtown. There’s a man waiting near the bus terminal who thinks a woman he hurt three years ago is about to run to him. I want to be there instead.”
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He turned toward the door, and then he stopped. He looked back at Amelia, who was watching him through the one eye that would still open, tears running sideways into her hair. “I had a daughter once, miss,” he said again, softer this time.
“She had your eyes.” And he walked out into the night, and the bell above the door jingled, and every person left in that diner understood in their bones that something had only just begun.
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