Anyone But You (17 page)

“W
HAT DID YOU SAY?”
Chef paused midway through deboning a chicken to aim a withering glare at Mario.

“I was just suggesting you should—”

“Not. Another. Word.”

“But—”

“Shush,
you
!” Chef practically shouted at the maître d’. “If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it. This is my domain, remember?” He waved his cleaver to indicate the area around him. “Yours is out there,
capiche
?”

Mario backed out of the kitchen with his arms raised in surrender and a “no one ever listens to me” look on his face.

Our first night back in business since the
Zwaggert
critic’s disastrous visit wasn’t off to a smooth start (and I was still shaking with anger after my encounter with Perry), but Chef and Mario’s bickering was at least a return to normalcy. On the bright side, there was some good news to offset reopening night jitters: Our reservation book was respectably inked-in for the dinner rush.

Mario said he expected a decent number of walk-ins, too, and reminded us more than once to turn tables as quickly as we could without giving guests the obvious bum’s rush. The bad news (besides everyone being on edge): Ty was late for work, which meant I had to cover my section
and
pinch-hit with Carmen and Aunt Val to cover the tables that were normally my cousin’s jurisdiction. Carmen moved pretty slow, and Aunt Val was preoccupied by Ty’s whereabouts. That left me to pick up most of the slack, and only a few stolen moments in which to think about my illicit new boyfriend.

Lucky for me, Chef was by now bursting at the seams to get a detailed summary of my afternoon with Roman. Like a gossip-hungry love junkie, he peppered me with questions any time I passed through the kitchen.

“So you saw him today?” he asked while draining a huge pot of boiling fettuccine. “Did you talk to Carmen, like I said?”

“Yeah, and yeah.” I grabbed a chrome-plated pizza tray stand in my left hand and used my other to affix a pan gripper onto the side of a hot-from-the-oven deep-dish order.

“And … ?”

“And Table Twelve is going to chew my arm off if I don’t get this pie out to them. I’ll tell you about it later. Where is Ty, anyway? Did anyone check the office phone to see if he left a message?”

“I expected him here early,” replied Chef. “He said he wanted to come learn how to make my recipe for pasta fazool.”

My mom, who had just approached the pass-through window to clip up another order, glared at me. (She’d been in a horrible mood all day.)

“Gigi, Angelo, enough chitchat. Get back to work,” she said. Chef and I exchanged glances of shared resignation and went about our business.

By nine-thirty, the dinner slam had subsided to a trickle, which was typical for a Sunday night. A handful of tables were still occupied by parties enjoying their entrées or dessert, but it was a relief to know the day was winding down. Finally starting to feel the effects of my sleep deprivation and cute-boy infatuation, I volunteered to help Mario wipe down all of our thick laminated menus. It would at least get me off my feet.

“Would you call it a success?” I asked him as we sat in an empty booth near the entrance.

“We had more customers than I imagined we’d have,” Mario said. “The month off doesn’t appear to have hurt our returning business, but I’m not the authority on the matter.” He nodded in the direction of my father, who stood behind the bar. Dad was lovingly polishing the wine glasses, inspecting them for any unseemly smudges. He looked not so much happy as wistful in his work as he returned the glasses to hang by their stems from the overhead rack.

I set aside the menu I was wiping and walked over to the long wooden bar where I plunked myself down on one of the red leather stools.

“What’ll ya have?” my dad drawled, propping himself onto his elbows and smiling at me.

“Grappa?”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed, picking a cocktail cherry from a condiment tray and popping it in his mouth. “I’d like to see you try swilling that stuff. Need I remind you that you’re sixteen, not twenty-one?”

“I can’t believe Ty’s MIA our first night back,” I said, changing the subject.

“I’d say I could kill him, only your Aunt Val will probably do it for me,” he said. “That boy is always begging me to let him have more responsibility around here, and now this? He’s just too much of a wildcard, that one.” As he groused about Ty, I metaphorically kicked myself for bringing up the subject. Even though my cousin wasn’t speaking to me at the moment, he was still the closest thing I had to a brother, and I wasn’t about to throw him under the bus.

“Dad?” I said, changing the subject.

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“Is everything going to be okay? With Cap’s, I mean?” My earlier conversation with Perry continued to unnerve me. Had I done the right thing in summarily rejecting his offer?

“Times are tough, but there were tough times for your Grandpa Sal and his dad before that,” he answered. “If we stick together, we’ll come through it all okay. Cap’s may be a restaurant, but it’s a family first.”

“But if we had to close for good ….”

“Never,” Dad said, looking more serious now. “This restaurant is your legacy, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure this is all yours one day, even if we have to … well, it’s not something you need to worry about.”

I wondered if it would take some of the pressure off my dad if I finally confessed to him that I didn’t
want
the responsibility of running Cap’s someday, that it wasn’t
my
dream and never had been. Though it would relieve my own inner burden, such a shocking admission would probably only make matters worse, I reflected. The sound of street traffic outside caught my attention, and I swiveled on my stool to see two uniformed police officers walking through the double doors. It wasn’t unusual for the men in blue to swing by for a carb-laden dinner when they got off duty.

“Dave! Charlie!” said my dad as they approached, anticipating their first order by reaching for two glass beer mugs.

“Evening, Ben,” one answered in response, clearly not in the mindset for drinks. “I’m afraid we’ve got a situation.”

• • •

My parents refused to let me join them when they accompanied Aunt Val, Frankie, and Enzo to the hospital to see my cousin. Dad claimed it was too late, and Mom insisted they needed me to help close up the restaurant. But the real reason, I knew, was that they were trying to protect me from what I might have to face if I went with them. Ty was in critical condition, the cops had explained to my father. In a state of shock, I’d instinctively jumped off the barstool to go find my Aunt Val, but not fast enough to avoid hearing the words “head trauma” and “brain swelling” tangled up in their devastating dispatch.

Twenty minutes later, I was bawling my eyes out in the back of the restaurant, resting my head on Chef’s shoulder the way I used to as a little girl when things had seemed unbearable. In hindsight, my problems back then had been sweetly insignificant: the sting of a skinned knee, the wounded pride of being told I was “in the way,” or the anger of having my favorite doll flung onto the telephone wires in front of the restaurant by my cousins. Chef would sigh his soothing, “There, there,” lift me up onto the counter and pull a cherry Popsicle from the freezer, thus restoring order to my fledgling little universe. I longed for the days when my problems were so trivial. Last night I’d been caught up in a spiral of existential angst about falling for the wrong boy, and now, almost impossibly, something worse had happened. The fleeting thought of Roman tugged at my soul—an urge to find him and tell him what happened, to have him assure me, in that way of his, that everything would be okay.

“‘Head trauma.’ I mean, that’s
really
bad on the scale of bad things,” I said in full freak-out mode as I helped Carmen and Chef clean up the kitchen for our early closing. “No one’s called us yet. That’s got to be a good sign, though, right? If there’s nothing to really worry about, then they wouldn’t feel the need to call. Or it could be the opposite, and they just can’t face telling us that—”

“Jumping to conclusions is a good way to stumble and fall,” Chef advised me, sternly. He’d been very quiet since we’d gotten the bad news. “Let’s just wait until we hear something definitive. Your father will call as soon as he is able to.”

“Angelo’s right. Don’t you worry, Gigi,” said Carmen, her gentle, careworn eyes trying to bolster my spirit. “I’ve lit so many votives to Mother Cabrini in my lifetime, the old broad owes me a big favor at this point.”

I wasn’t sure if saints worked that way, like a broken vending machine bound to offer up a boon of saving grace if you just fed in more quarters and banged hard enough. But whether Carmen was right or not, I figured there was no better time than now to start praying.

“Let him be okay,” I silently beseeched God who, so far at least, seemed to be pretty fickle in who he helped out in this world. He couldn’t manage to keep people from starving or countries from killing each other, so was he really competent enough to save my cousin? I sent a second mental shout-out to my Uncle Greg, Ty’s father, just for good measure. Maybe he had the wherewithal, wherever he was, to fix this by putting in some cosmic request. I half-shuddered at the fact that tonight didn’t feel too different from that morning four years ago when we’d found out Uncle Greg had suffered a heart attack in his sleep. Neither saint nor deity had bothered themselves to intervene that night, and Ty and his two younger brothers had been twisting in the wind ever since. No one really wanted to admit that my cousins’ antics had transformed in recent years from typical boyhood precociousness to something darker and somehow more troubling. But we’d all seen it. I know death is a part of life, but my three cousins had gotten a raw deal losing their dad. Whatever his faults, Ty shouldn’t have been fighting for his life in some hospital bed. He’d already suffered enough.

Carmen and I froze in our task of disinfecting the counter when we finally heard a cell phone ring. It was Chef’s, and he retrieved it from the pocket of his gray checkered uniform pants. I strained to hear the voice on the other end of the line while simultaneously struggling to interpret Chef’s less than telling responses.

“Holy Mother of God,” he slowly said, making it impossible to decipher whether the news he’d just received was good or bad.

“Is he okay?” I said loudly, frantically beckoning so that Chef might at least shoot me a simple thumbs up. (He didn’t.)

“Uh-huh. I see,” Chef continued, holding up the palm of his hand to silence me. “At least he’s not in any more pain.” I felt a chill run from my tailbone up through the base of my neck. “‘Not in any more pain’” as in heavily medicated, or “‘not in any more pain’” as in
dead
? I wanted to tackle Chef to the ground in order to rip the stupid phone out of his hand and talk to my father myself. Instead, I waited as Chef began asking questions. “Medically induced? So how long will they keep him like that? And they’re sure they can bring him out of it when his condition improves?”
Thank God. At least he was still alive.

Mario, who’d been putting the front of the house back in order, poked his head through the swinging kitchen door at that moment.

“Gigi? There’s a young man out front who says he needs to see you.”

Roman. My eyes began to brim with tears, prompted both by sadness and some strange semblance of relief. We hadn’t planned to meet up tonight. Crazy as this sounded, I knew he must have sensed how much I needed him. Still, I was surprised that he’d come back to Cap’s, knowing he was
persona non grata
after last night, and, if we’re being honest, long
before
last night, too. Something didn’t seem right.

The dining room was deserted when I entered, save for the skinny blond guy standing by the bar. He was facing away from me, but I knew in an instant who it was.

“Mark?” I asked, approaching him. He turned to face me, startled by the sound of my voice. His upper lip was bruised and swollen, and there was a large abrasion across his forehead. “Where’s Roman? Why are you here?”

“You know who I am?”

“Yes, you’re Roman’s friend. Where is he?”

“He sent me here to tell you,” said Mark, his voice starting to tremble, “it was an accident.” Accident? No. He couldn’t mean ….

“Where is he?” My throat started to constrict. I didn’t want to acknowledge the obvious implications, the dots that were beginning to connect in my mind.

“They took him away. I told him—” With his thumb and index fingers, Mark rubbed the outer corners of his eyes as if to stop the tears in their tracks. His expression was a strange combination of anger and grief. “—I told him not to get between us. But your cousin had me pinned. I couldn’t ….”

“Ty?” I felt my skin ignite like a hot furnace, and my arms started to shake. “You? And Roman?” I could hear the tinge of hysteria in my voice. “
You
did this to Ty?”

“No! I mean … Roman was confused and out of it when the cops showed up, and now they think he’s responsible, but they’re wrong. He did it … but he didn’t. It just happened. Ty fell, but Roman didn’t push him. I swear.”

“
Push
him?! What are you talking about?”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain. We were at Polk station,” Mark answered. He looked confused, as if he thought I’d already know all these details. Suddenly it all came together: The ‘L’s’ Pink Line station on Polk Street was elevated, perched like a bridge about thirty feet over the road. Only a waist-high metal railing separated the train platform from the street below. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted Mark to be gone.

“Get out,” I said, stepping forward, my arms outstretched as if to shove him. It was only the eviscerating mental image of Roman, doing the same to my cousin, that stopped me from laying my hands on him. “Get out!”

“Roman was trying to keep
me
from going over,” Mark tried to explain. “Your cousin was totally out of control. Roman had my back, and—”