He left the building.
The awning came down on day ninety.
Rosalie watched from the bakery door with her arms folded and said, “Twenty years.
Took a man four hours to hang it and two men four minutes to take it down.”
“That’s about right,” I said.
“That’s about the ratio.”
Carmela came in March.
To the bakery, not the restaurant.
She stood at the counter and said, “I told you to let it go.”
“You did.”
“I’ve been thinking about why.”
“And?”
“Because it was easier for me if you did.
I’d have had to ask him about the bread.”
“That’s the whole answer,” I said.
“Everybody who says it.”
She buys the Christmas bread now.
From me.
With her own money.
She has never once asked for a card on it.
Brianna sent a note in April.
Three lines.
“I asked him what he told the hospital.
He said ‘nothing important.’
I asked who owned the floor.
He didn’t answer that either.”
No signature.
I put it in the folder.
And the restaurant.
It’s called Marchetti’s now.
Not Costa’s.
The half that’s mine and the half that’s Priya’s, with Rosalie in the bakery next door — the wall came out in June, so it’s one room again, the way the building was in 1998 — and a menu that is, page for page, my mother’s school notebook.
We put the notebook in a case by the door.
Under glass.
Open to page four.
The gnocchi.
1961.
Halvorsen’s correction ran in May.
It was short.
“In a 2011 review, this column stated that the chef of Costa’s had developed its menu through international travel.
The menu was developed by Antonia Marchetti Costa at her mother’s kitchen table from a family notebook dating to 1961.
The column regrets the error and the fifteen years.”
He framed it.
It’s on the wall by the case.
I’m at the bench at 4:30.
That’s the thing I didn’t expect.
Twenty years of four-thirties for a man who called it carrying, and it turns out I don’t hate the hour.
I hate who I was doing it for.
Rosalie says my mother was the same.
