the way he’s leaning forward and glaring at Melody’s chest I think the question might have been meant for her breasts.
“First the table and now this?”
“Jonathan, it’s just a—Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She turns to our server. “A bottle of Chianti. Go.” He disappears.
“This is all wrong,” I say. “I just want the best for you, Melody. The best food, the best table, the best server.”
She leans forward, reaches over and touches my hand. “You’re here, so it is the best table, with the best view. You see? I’m not expecting or asking for anything more.”
In the kitchen, a tray of dishes hits the floor and the crash echoes out to our table, as well as the loud argument that follows.
I rub my temples. “Porco mondo.”
Herman returns with a bottle of Ruffino that’s so warm I’m convinced it was stored above the fryer. I grab the corkscrew out of his hands. “Leave us.” I open the bottle and quickly pour two glasses, hand her one, and say, “To the best table in the house.”
She laughs and we clink our glasses together so hard we spill wine onto the table. “Porco mondo!” she says. “Whatever that means.”
In the first gap in conversation, I offer to tell Melody the story she requested, along with the opportunity to renege; it’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to hear before eating.
When we were out on the harbor, I told her there was one guy who turned out pretty bad. Truth: There were a lot of guys, really. I took my own here and there, but more often served as a deliveryman. As I sit before her now at this moment of confession, I am so thankful I never came to taking another life, so relieved that my résumé is missing that one bulleted line of experience. If she only knew how my wrongdoings paled in comparison to the rest of our crew, how far down on the scale of maleficence my actions were.
As I hesitate to confess my worst-case experience, the story I fear may have her vomiting or running for the nearest uniformed officer, I know what she needs is to hear what a monster I am, how I have displayed my own propensity for savagery and a tendency toward evil.
She needs me to be discardable.
I pour more wine and take an enormous drink before I spread my history over our tablecloth like a bag of broken glass.
Gregory Morrison. I like to remember Greg as a complete nutcase, instead of the miswired or underloved man he likely was. Greg first made himself known to me and my family when he was eight or nine—about seven years younger than I was at the time. He used to hang around some of the places we provided protection for, otherwise he would’ve simply blended into the gray urban background. Far as we knew, his family had nothing to do with ours. His dad was a dentist in midtown, never heard that he’d gotten into any trouble.
Greg, though, upon hitting puberty became loud and obnoxious, from a safe distance referred to most of us as dagos, wops, and guineas. We’d toss him a few Italian insults and laugh it off. But during the summer he would’ve graduated from high school, his obnoxiousness transformed into criminal activity. He became the leader of a pathetic gang in our residential neighborhood whose big claim to fame was breaking into pharmacies and stealing cigarettes and prescription drugs.
We paid him no mind until the day Peter and I caught him and his loser friends trying to break into one of our establishments. Peter confronted the group, but there were six of them and only two of us. So Morrison rolls the dice, pretends he and his gang are going to rough us up. Peter waved him off, told them all to get lost. But this only fueled Morrison, seemed to insult him that we didn’t consider him on the same playing field—so he pushed it, and regrettably pushed Peter’s easily pressable button. It didn’t help that Pete was bored and looking for some action.
And like all good brawls, it was not six-on-two; it was one-on-one. Peter beat Morrison something fierce, really humiliated the guy in front of his buddies. I’d seen Peter do this many times growing up, mostly for fun—but something about this time disturbed me. The entire time Peter is pounding away, Greg keeps telling Pete he’s going to get him, that this isn’t over, that he’s going