Palm shadows move across the hood in slow diagonal stripes, lengthening and shortening as the fronds shift somewhere above us in wind I can't feel down here at ground level. The rental's engine has been off for eleven minutes. I know because I've been counting since Dominic cut it, my splinted hand resting on my thigh like something borrowed that I'm supposed to give back in the same condition I received it.
We haven't spoken since the airport shuttle sign flickered on twenty feet away, its little digital arrow reading NEXT ARRIVAL: 6 MIN and then, a while later, NEXT ARRIVAL: 6 MIN again, like the sign itself gave up trying to be accurate somewhere around four this morning.
I press both palms flat against the dashboard, just to feel something hold still. It does. The dash is warm already, even before real sun, heat coming up out of the vinyl the way it comes up out of everything down here, patient and total.
We left Boca Raton at three yesterday afternoon. That was — I try to do the math and my brain slides off it like a hand off a wet railing. Fourteen hours, maybe. Fifteen. Long enough that the drive itself has stopped being a memory and become a texture, a hum of tires and gas station signs and Dominic's hands at ten and two the whole way, never once at nine and three, like he needed the extra grip.
"You should sleep," I say, because it's the only true thing I have left that isn't a question I'm afraid to ask.
"So should you."
Neither of us does.
---
His phone rings at 5:52. Bruno's name on the screen, no picture, just the letters. Dominic answers on the first ring, the way he's trained me to, the way I still do reflexively even now that the burner's dead in a storm drain somewhere behind us.
"Yeah."
I watch his jaw instead of listening to the words, because his jaw tells me more than Bruno's voice ever could through the tinny speaker. It doesn't move. Not a muscle.
"Say that again," he says, after a while, and this time something does move — not his jaw, his eyes, sliding once toward the windshield and the flat pink light starting to come up behind the parking structure.
He listens for close to two minutes. I count the palm shadows crossing the hood instead of the seconds. Four full sweeps.
"Okay," he says finally. "No autopsy." Not a question. A confirmation, like reading a line back off a form. "Funeral home in Boca. Who told the family?" A pause. "And Nunzio's flying down when." Another pause, shorter. "Fine."
He hangs up without saying goodbye, which I've noticed he never does with Bruno, thirteen years of a friendship conducted entirely without sign-off, like the call was never really going to end, just going to pause.
"Recorded as pancreatic cancer," he says to the windshield, not to me. "Expected. No autopsy ordered — the hospice doctor signed off on natural causes before anybody thought to ask a second time." He rubs his thumb once across the pad of his first two fingers, a gesture I've never seen him make before, and I understand without being told that it's new, that this whole morning is manufacturing new gestures out of him the way a fever manufactures new aches. "Body's released to a funeral home ten minutes from here. Nunzio's flying down tomorrow to handle it."
"Handle it," I repeat.
"Arrangements." He says the word like it tastes wrong in his mouth. "There won't be a viewing. He didn't want one. He told them that months ago, before any of this."
Twelve months and six days he knew what was inside him, and somewhere in there he had time to decide he didn't want people looking at his face in a box. I don't know why that detail is the one that gets me, sitting here in a rental car with palm shadows sliding over my knees, but it does. It gets me low, under the ribs, in the place where I stopped being able to trust my own reactions somewhere around the loading bay in November.
---
Dominic's hands are still on the wheel, though the engine's off and there's nowhere to steer to. I watch them because I've learned to watch his hands the way other people watch faces, and what I see is a fine tremor, barely there, more felt than seen, running through both of them at once.
He notices me noticing. Stills them by pressing his palms flat against his thighs, mirroring my own gesture against the dash without meaning to.
"That's exhaustion," he says, before I can ask. "Nothing else."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
He's not wrong, so I let it go, but I keep the image anyway, filed somewhere I can't unfile it: his father's hands shaking around a plastic cup until they found something to hold onto and stilled completely, and now his son's hands doing the same trembling dance with nothing at all to hold, because there's nothing left in this car to grab that would fix it.
---
My left hand throbs on a schedule I've started to trust more than clocks. Deep pulse, then a beat of nothing, then the pulse again, and somewhere out past the chain-link fence the airport shuttle groans past on its loop — I count eleven minutes between passes, four times running, and something in the regularity of it settles me the way counting exits never quite does, because the shuttle always comes back and the exits never resolve into a number I trust.
Uno, due, tre. I lose it there every time. My father's habit, dead ten years, still running in me like a program nobody remembers writing.
"Does it hurt," Dominic asks, nodding at the tape and gauze and paint-stirrer halves strapped across my fingers, "or is that just — there."
"Both." I flex it once, testing, and regret it instantly. "It hurts on a schedule. Like the shuttle."
He almost smiles at that. Almost.
---
"Do you feel anything," I ask him, finally, because the question's been sitting in my chest since the hospice doorway and I can't drive another mile with it unasked. "Right now. Anything at all."
He's quiet long enough that I think he's not going to answer, and that would be fine, that would be its own kind of answer, but then he does.
"I expected to feel twelve," he says. "I've spent twenty-seven years assuming that when this finally happened I'd feel exactly the way I felt standing in the pantry that night. Small. Twelve." He turns his hands over on his thighs, studying the burn scar in the flat early light like it might have an opinion. "Instead I feel thirty-nine. And hungry. That's the whole list, Maya. That's everything I've got." His mouth does something that isn't quite bitter. "It's the worst answer there is. I know that."
I don't tell him it's not. I don't tell him anything, because there isn't anything true to say that would make it better, and I've stopped believing in the kind of comfort that isn't true.
---
The letters are in a manila envelope in the footwell, rubber band gone slack from the drive. I reach down for them without asking, and he doesn't stop me, which is its own kind of permission.
I pick one at random — not the last one, not the six words that started with when you come and stopped me cold in the doorway of room nine. A different one. The ink wanders less on this one, like it was written on a better day.
"Can I read it out loud," I ask.
He nods once, eyes forward, hands flat on his thighs.
Domenico, it starts, and I read it slow, the way you'd read something you were afraid of dropping.
Your mother sewed left-handed even though the nuns tried to correct her out of it. I used to watch her hem a hem and never once did the stitches come out crooked, not one single time in eleven years of marriage. I think about her hands more than I think about anything else now, more than the money, more than the men, more than you, God forgive me for saying it plain. I am not going to tell you it was different than what you think. I think you already know what it was. I am only asking that you come see me before whatever this is finishes its work, so that we can be men about it, face to face, the way it should have been all along instead of a boy sent to a corner store.
There's no signature. Just Salvatore, small, at the bottom, like he ran out of room to be anything larger than his own name.
Dominic doesn't move through any of it. Not his jaw, not his hands, not his eyes. He listens the way you'd listen to weather report for a storm that's already passed over your house — total attention, no use left in it.
---
"I never told Piras this," he says, once I've folded the letter back along its own worn crease. "Not in twenty-seven years of confession."
I wait.
"I hid in the pantry," he says. "That night. There's a door off the kitchen, low shelf, my mother kept the good olive oil on it in a tin can because the glass bottle broke once. I heard — " he stops, starts again, flatter. "I heard enough to know, and I went in the pantry and I shut the door most of the way and I did not come out. Not while it was happening. Not until it was too late for coming out to matter."
"You were twelve."
"I know how old I was." Not sharp. Just tired past sharpness. "That's not the point. The point is I've spent twenty-seven years telling myself I was waiting at that cafe for justice. For her. But yesterday, in that room —" his hands come up off his thighs an inch, then settle back down, like he thought about gesturing and decided against the expense of it "— it wasn't her I was doing it for. It was that boy in the pantry. I know the difference. I've always known the difference. I just never said it to anyone with a face."
The palm shadows have stopped moving, or maybe the light's just gotten too flat and full to throw them anymore. I don't know how much time has passed. The shuttle groans by again somewhere out past the fence, on schedule, indifferent to all of this.
---
"I'm not going to tell you it's okay," I say.
He looks at me for the first time in several minutes.
"You did a murder," I say, and the word sits ugly and correct in the car between us, no softer synonym available, none earned. "I stood in the door and I watched the whole thing and I didn't stop you and I'm not going to pretend that makes me clean either. Neither of us gets to be clean out of this. I need you to hear that I'm not absolving anything. I'm not your priest and I'm not going to do what he wouldn't."
"I know."
"I'm staying anyway."
It comes out plainer than I mean it to, no decoration on it at all, and it's the plainness that seems to land — his hands finally still completely, no tremor left in them, like the sentence did something the exhaustion couldn't.
"Say that again," he says, quiet.
"I'm staying anyway." I don't blink saying it the second time either. "Not because it's forgiven. Because I already decided, back in Providence, before any of this, and I don't get to un-decide it just because the version of it that actually happened is uglier than the version I imagined."
He reaches over — slow, careful of the tape and the paint-stirrer splints — and takes my right hand instead of my left, and holds it, and doesn't say anything else, because there isn't anything else that would improve on what's already been said.
---
We settle the last of it in short sentences, the way you'd read off a checklist neither of you wants to be reading.
"No funeral," he says.
"No funeral."
"No church on the Hill. No goodbye to any of it."
"Bruno knows we're headed north," I say. "That's all he gets."
"That's all anybody gets." He looks at the manila envelope still in my lap. "Throw those out. There's a can by the shuttle stop."
I don't move to throw them out.
"Maya."
"I'm keeping them," I say, and I mean it the way I meant the staying, flat and final, no negotiation folded into it. "Not the trash. The door pocket."
He watches me tuck the rubber-banded stack into the door beside my seat, between an unused parking receipt and a rental company map gone soft at the folds, and he doesn't argue. He just lets me do it, which from him is its own kind of agreement, the only kind he ever really gives.
---
The sun comes all the way up while we're still parked there, light climbing the concrete parking structure floor by floor until it finds the windshield and turns the whole car gold for about ninety seconds, dust motes lit up in it like something briefly worth photographing. Neither of us has a phone out. Neither of us wants to remember this on purpose.
I get out at some point — I don't remember deciding to — and cross to the little gas station kiosk at the lot's edge, and come back with two coffees gone lukewarm before I've even made it across the asphalt, and a bag of cashews split at the seam because the register kid rang it up wrong and gave it to me half price rather than fix it. Neither of us can face a real meal. The coffee's terrible, thin and burnt, nothing like Gennaro's, and I drink it anyway, sitting back down in the passenger seat with the door still open to the warming air.
Dominic eats cashews three at a time, out of habit, the same way I've watched him eat oranges off his dresser in a house that's gone now, sold or signed away or burned along with everything else that used to be in his name. I don't ask which. It doesn't matter anymore which room used to hold what.
Our shoulders touch across the console. Nothing more than that. Just weight, leaned in, two people too tired to hold themselves fully upright anymore, letting the car's frame take some of it instead.
---
The shuttle comes at the top of the hour, brakes sighing, doors folding open twenty feet from where we're parked. Neither of us moves toward it.
"That's ours," I say, not moving either.
"There'll be another in eleven minutes."
I laugh — small, worn thin, more breath than sound — because he's timed it too, apparently, same as me, both of us running the same private arithmetic without ever comparing notes.
The doors fold shut again. The shuttle pulls away empty of us, taillights winking once at the turn.
"You've been doing that the whole time," I say. "The eleven minutes."
"Habit."
"Since when."
"Since the cafe." He says it like it's obvious, like there was never a version of him that didn't count intervals against a door he was watching. "You learn to clock how long a thing takes to come back around. Saves you flinching at the wrong ones."
I think about him at that back table for eleven months, watching Atwells Avenue through the window glass for the exact shape of a man he'd know from any distance, in any coat, at any hour, and I think about how none of that watching prepared him for the actual small shrunken shape of his father in a hospice bed, hands finding a plastic cup because there was nothing else left to hold.
"Don't sit where I can't see the door," Dominic says.
It isn't tender, not the way the word usually means it. It comes out flat, almost instructional, the closest thing to a rule he has left to give me now that there's no cafe table to enforce it at, no back wall to put himself against. But I know what it is underneath the flatness. I've had five months of learning to hear the thing he means instead of the thing he says, and this — this is the only love word he's ever going to hand me outright, dressed up as tactical advice, delivered in a rental car with cashew salt on his fingers.
I laugh again, quieter this time, real.
"Deal," I say.
The next shuttle groans into the lot eleven minutes later, right on schedule, and we sit there in the full climbing light and let that one go too.
