Anyone But You (20 page)

“I hate that we’re moving to
stupid
Peoria,” I sniffled into Frankie’s shoulder, still thinking of the boy I was leaving behind.

“Oh, but we’re going to kill it there,” said Enzo.

“Yeah,” said his brother. “We’ll be like rock stars in that podunk town, Gigi. The locals will genuflect in awe at our mind-blowing good looks, and they will hang on our every word as if we are prophets—”

“Demigods—” Enzo clarified.

“Thank you, Francis, yes,
demigods
from some far-off civilization. Don’t get snot on my shirt, by the way, cousin. Nose crud on one’s clothing does not play in Peoria, as they say.” I obediently lifted my face off his shoulder.

“You’ll have a whole new, unsuspecting market for your stupid boy band karaoke routine,” I conceded.

“There you go! Why didn’t we think of moving there ages ago?” said Enzo. “To hell with Chicago. Peoria is my kind of town! Ol’ Blue Eyes got it all wrong, man!” With that, the twins launched into an improvised version of the famous Sinatra anthem for the city of Chicago, changing the lyrics, clunkily, to Peoria, as they sang into kitchen tongs they’d pilfered from hooks above the stove. I wiped the remnants of tears from my cheeks and tried, but failed, to laugh at their sad clown antics. Maybe someday I’d figure out how to feel happy again.

S
TELLA TRIED TO COMPOSE HERSELF,
rising shakily and smoothing her skirt—as if decorum even mattered at this point. Benny stood up from the chair he had originally collapsed onto, seemingly in disbelief.

“Nick—you’re alive.”

“And you’re … ” I paused, glancing between his face and hers. “ … married.” She clasped her still-trembling hands behind her neck and gazed up, wearily, as if seeking some divine intervention from the decorative plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling. Benny’s footsteps made the only sound as he walked into the living room and opened a wooden secretary. He returned, unfolding a small piece of paper. I could see “Western Union” emblazoned across the top in large black letters.

“They sent this to your mother, but she couldn’t bear to keep it,” Benny said, handing it to me. “I asked her if … if I could hang onto it.”

The telegram was dated the twelfth of October, 1943—Columbus Day. It made me sick to my stomach to think of Ma receiving this devastatingly blunt missive sometime during the course of the annual Taylor Street festivities. So this was their excuse; I’d been taken for dead. I can’t say such a scenario had never occurred to me during my long internment, but I hadn’t given the possibility much real credence. Japanese officials had taken down my name when I’d first arrived in the camp, and I had imagined, at the time, that the U.S. Army or the Red Cross would somehow be notified of my whereabouts.

“I prayed it wasn’t true, Nicky,” Stella said, her voice cracking, “I bargained with God. I begged, and I pleaded, but everyone told me, over and over, ‘He’s not coming back, Stella. He’s
never coming home
.’ Finally, I had to accept it. The Army eventually sent some of your personal effects. I had no idea—”

“What in God’s name happened to you?” Benny interrupted her. “How are you … here?”

“Our plane got shot down off the coast of Guam. A Japanese torpedo boat dredged me up and hauled me off to an internment camp. That’s where I’ve been.”

“For
two years
?”

“Damn it, why is everyone acting so thunderstruck that I’m alive? I know for a fact that Ma got a telegram after we were liberated.”

“Telegram? That’s impossible,” Benny insisted. “Your mother didn’t get any telegram. She would have let us know something like that. She would have notified all of Cook County with news like that.”

“I’m certain it was sent,” I muttered. “I was standing right there in the ship’s radio room when they sent it! I’ve been trying to call her, too, but apparently she’s not living at the old place on Taylor Street anymore.”

“She said all of the memories there were just too upsetting,” Stella explained, filling me in on what I’d already discovered a half hour earlier. “She needed to move on.”

“Just like you, apparently,” I muttered.

“Nicky, please.” Stella averted her eyes, once more. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at me.

“How long did you wait after this?” I said, shaking the telegram at her in anger. I could feel heat rising up my neck and into my face. “A month? Maybe two? Or was this news exactly what the two of you needed to feel better about what had probably started up long before this telegram ever arrived?”

“Don’t, Nick. Just don’t.” Benny positioned himself between Stella and me, and placed both hands on my shoulders, not so much threateningly as beseechingly. But I wasn’t finished with Stella.

“I don’t care what this telegram says!” I shouted, craning my neck to see around Benny so that I could stare her down. “‘Missing’ isn’t dead.”

“You were ‘presumed killed!’” she cried.

“Presumed? Presumed isn’t a certainty,” I argued. “All this time, I was desperately clinging to hope—the hope of a future with you—just to get through each wretched day. Why? Why couldn’t you have done the same thing for me?” The colors in the room melted into a hazy mixture, and I began to feel woozy, drunk on my own tears. How could I be back on U.S. soil and yet still feel so tortured? “Were you in love with him this whole time? Because you said it was
me
. You said
I
was the one you loved.”

“And I did, Nicky. I do! I mean … oh God, why is this happening?”

“Sweetheart, you’re getting too upset,” Benny said, reaching for her hand. The familiarity of their touch twisted my stomach into knots. “Nick, we can discuss this man to man, but now isn’t the time. I think you ought to just leave.”

“Oh, here we go again. Benny’s got the girl, now Nick has to scram. It’s the ‘sacred pact’ all over again. You know, I see what this is all about. First, she wasn’t good enough for you, so you dumped her. Then the second you found out she actually meant something to me, you just couldn’t stand to see me happy, could you? You had to steal her back, just to prove a point. Or maybe just to prove what you’ve always believed: that you’re better than me.”

“Cut it out. It wasn’t like that, at all. We weren’t … criminy.” He turned from me and kicked a brass-plated umbrella container near the front door. The metal cylinder and its rainy-day contents clattered cacophonously to the floor, then rolled across the hardwood, making a sound like thunder.

“By the way, I got a gander at your new restaurant downstairs,” I noted, my rant picking up speed. “Cap’s—as in
Caputo
? It’s got a nice, selfish ring to it, Benny, ol’ boy. How relieved you must have been to ditch your longtime encumbrance and finally strike out on your own. You got the broad, you got the business … hell, you hit the jackpot the day I was ‘presumed dead.’”

Benny had still been trying to console Stella but as I said this, he turned to me, his features forlorn.

“If you want money from the old pizza place, I’ll give you your cut, Nick. But Antonio’s is gone. It was too painful for me to keep—”

“Painful? Oh, that’s laughable. I don’t want your money, you filthy, thieving crook!” Five years ago, this aspersion might have been a joke, part of our typical boyish banter. Today, this insult was meant to wound, and we all knew it.

“Ben, please don’t let him upset you,” Stella pleaded with him, softly. “Remember what the doctor said.”

“Oh right,” I scoffed. “His so-called ‘fragile heart.’ Don’t worry about it, doll. Funny, doesn’t it occur to anyone that
I’m
the guy whose ticker we should all be worried about right now? After all,
you
broke it, and your husband as good as plunged a dagger through it.”

“Nick, what’s happened is no one’s fault! We’ve all been hurt by this!” Stella broke from Benny’s embrace and tentatively approached me. “Benny and I were at our wits’ end after we found out we had lost you. He picked up all of my crumbled pieces and I gathered up his busted shards, and we found a way to combine all those damaged remnants into a new life—together.” As she spoke, I stepped over the wayward umbrellas and made my way to their framed wedding portrait, which I scrutinized more closely now. They looked like a duo you might see on a movie marquee, the prototypical Hollywood couple so self-possessed and effortlessly attractive. It made me sick. “Nick,” Stella continued, “you’re not the same person that you were when you left. Well, Benny and I aren’t the same people, either. The war didn’t just change you. It changed all of us. It changed everything.”

She was right. The war had changed me. I thought back to the apprehensive and high-strung person I used to be. Benny had practically dragged me kicking and screaming onto that Sky Ride at the World’s Fair. If he hadn’t twisted my arm, Stella and I would never have crossed paths in the first place. Had she truly been destined for me, or had fate intended her to end up with Benny all along? My maelstrom of thoughts failed to dissipate the rage that had been slowly building, and this new reflection proved the capper. Thinking back to that day when we were kids, I suddenly realized that only one thing was going to make me feel better, so I walked over to my former friend and did it. I belted him, just the way he’d slugged me when we were twelve. Stella shrieked, and Benny reeled backward, grabbing at his jaw. The sound it had made upon impact with my fist let me know I had fractured it. He stumbled against the front door, knocking his head against the glass doorknob on his way to the floor. I reached down and picked him up by his collar. My intention had only been to move him out of the way, so that I could exit through the door, but Stella must have thought I was going to pummel him. She hurled herself onto my back, screaming for me to stop.

“Let go of me, Stella!” I shouted. She kicked and flailed and screamed, but would not let go of my neck. Still conscious, Benny’s eyes looked up at me with a new sense of urgency. He was saying something, but over Stella’s cries, I couldn’t hear him. I yanked hard at her elbow, finally releasing the hold she had on me. The momentum of my arm movement sent her tumbling backward just as I finally deciphered what Benny had been groaning: “Don’t hurt her, Nick!” he attempted to shout, his voice garbled by his own broken jaw. “She’s pregnant!”

G
ROUP HUGS WEREN’T EXACTLY MY FAMILY’S SHTICK,
but on this, our last night of dinner service, Dad had called everyone together in the kitchen and told us to “huddle up.” True to form, Frankie and Enzo were trying to stomp on each other’s toes as we all stood encircled, arm in arm. Aunt Val was already crying, and my mom rubbed her back consolingly. On my right, Chef glanced at me with a bittersweet “this is it” expression, while Carmen, immediately to my left, had her eyes closed as if in prayer.

“You, too,” said Dad, beckoning across the room to Mario, who was hanging back near the doorway.

“But guests are starting to filter in,” he protested. “I should be at the front of the house.”

“They can wait. Come on, ya big lug, get in here.” Chef and I unclasped our arms to let Mario stand beside us.

“Don’t forget the focaccia in the oven,” Mario whispered to Chef as he joined us.

“It’s never burned in the twenty-three years I’ve worked here—it won’t burn tonight,” Chef grumbled under his breath.

“Shhh … quiet everybody,” said Enzo, suddenly a paragon of seriousness. “Uncle Benji wants to say something.” Silence wasn’t my family’s forte, either, but in a rare moment of solemnity, everyone ceded the floor to my father.

“This is Cap’s closing night on Taylor Street, as we all know,” Dad began. “It’s going to be tough to get through, but we still have a tradition to uphold. I want our patrons to get top-notch service, and, of course, remind everyone to spread the word about our new location. Val,” he said, glancing at my aunt, “enough with the waterworks. Everyone needs to put on a happy face out there. Remember this isn’t a tragedy; it’s a celebration, of everything and everyone that got us here, and everything that’s to come. My grandfather would be so proud of us—of the legacy we’ve managed to maintain, through good times and bad.”

Dad’s voice began to crack. Despite his pep talk, I couldn’t help but wonder if he felt that he had failed his granddad. I looked around at the precious faces that hovered so close to mine. Only Ty—who was still recuperating at home, having just been released from the hospital—was missing. It was hard to believe what my father had just said. How was this a celebration? It sucked, plain and simple. This moment was the last of its kind. Life would go on—but not
this
life. “All right, everybody, that’s all I’ve got, so let’s wrap this up,” Dad continued. “Let’s get out there and do it. It’s
ciao
time!”

“
Ciao
time!” we all repeated, with as much forced enthusiasm as we could muster.

As everyone returned to their duties, my mother approached Chef at the stove.

“Are you sure we can’t convince you to come with us?” I heard her ask.

“If only I could,” he said, shaking his head.

“I know it’s wishful thinking,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “But I can’t imagine the new Cap’s without you. Other than Ben, you’re the only one who—”

“—knows the family recipes?” Chef said. “You’d be surprised at what Val’s boys have picked up from me over the years—Ty, in particular. They can pitch in at the stove, I’m sure of it.”

“What will you do?”

“That I can’t answer, yet. But I promise you, I’ll be looking after Carmen, and the old Tin Man,” he said, referring to the always stoic Mario. “And I know you’ll take care of my Ladybird.” He glanced at me from across the kitchen and winked.