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Rafael Barba hadn’t had time after dinner with Bella Carisi and Tommy Sullivan – he still couldn’t quite piece them as “the Sullivans” – to call Violet, the Carisi matriarch, about Sunday dinner. Apparently Bella had found time to call her mother immediately after he had left the Sullivan apartment, because by the time he had made it back to his apartment, there was a message from Violet Carisi on his home phone’s voice mail.
“So Bella says you’re coming for Sunday dinner, finally? Good, I’ll make braciole. Maybe some gemelli with cauliflower and garlic. Bring two bottles of lambrusco grasparossa – you ought to be able to find it in midtown, and you’re probably the only one of the children who can do something I ask them.”
The only one of the children. Apparently the senior Carisis had indeed determined to adopt him somehow. Did they realize, he wondered, that he wasn’t a replacement for their own son? He wasn’t Sonny, couldn’t take Sonny’s place. He wasn’t all sweetness and light the way Sonny was; like a decent Cuban espresso, he leaned towards bitter and dark, and that was on a good day. The good days since Sonny had died were few and far between.
His assistant, Carmen – Carmen had turned into the Della Street of prosecutorial assistants. She wasn’t getting paid to get his shirts to the cleaners, to call for grocery delivery for him, to… he shuddered to think of those mornings, right after Sonny’s death when she’d wheedled the building superintendent into letting her into Barba’s apartment, bearing coffee and migraine-strength painkillers to pull him together for work after ugly nights of too much scotch and not enough sleep. Those hadn’t been good days at all. Sonny’s birthday he’d spent with Bella, staring vacantly at each other and at the cake they’d bought at the café. That had wound up being an especially not-good day, and Carmen had been there the next morning, without being summoned; of course, he’d wound up giving her a key to his apartment, and her name to the building’s front desk, for access. He’d been coasting on Carmen’s survival tools and an ability to perform in court regardless of anything.
Really, what the hell was he supposed to do without Sonny Carisi? For all the time he’d fought Sonny – the too-bright eyes, the too-happy smile, the too-eager personality – Sonny had wound up invading every corner of his life, and his apartment, and his heart, the one Sonny had once decreed “three sizes too small” until he’d been brought to see Bella’s new baby, Dominick, and had been asked to be godfather. “I saw your heart grow three sizes,” Sonny had said. Sonny had never figured out that it hadn’t been the baby that had done that for Barba; it was only that Sonny had been too close to see what he’d done to Barba until there was someone else there to reflect it on.
He opened the laptop on the kitchen table (Sonny would have killed him; a kitchen table was for cooking, for eating, sometimes for paying bills, and occasionally… well, occasionally Barba had been gratified to see just how sturdy the table was, once Sonny and he had found some new uses for the kitchen furniture), checking on just what on earth a lambrusco grasparossa was; the senior Carisis knew their Italian wines, so it couldn’t be that awful fizzy sweet stuff that he and some of the other 1Ls had killed entire jugs of with piles of cheap spaghetti in their apartment every week or two. Barba was supposed to know wine far better than he really did; he knew whiskey, bourbon, and, out of necessity, rum. If the Carisis wanted it, he was sure it was passable.
Whether dinner itself would be passable – not the food, but the company – was another question.
It was hard to face mountains of love that you plainly didn’t deserve to have.
The Carisis shouldn’t have accepted him – what good Catholic family wasn’t going to accuse an older man with at least the appearance of money of corrupting their only son? Yet they hadn’t. By all rights, there should have been a lecture about going to Hell, not a lecture about not vacationing in Fort Lauderdale because of the irritating college students that had ruined the senior Carisis’ trip. Violet Carisi should have thrown one of her high heels at him when they met, not thrown her arms around him with a wild cry of “Oh, you’re Rafael! Sonny never told me you were so handsome! At least Bella should have!” Dominick Carisi should have threatened him, not slapped him on the back and asked him into the den for a drink. He and Sonny’s father should have been at loggerheads, but their worst argument… admittedly a deep-seated one with tinder underneath it and matches everywhere to light it… was over the Mets and the Yankees. The Carisis were Mets fans. Barba, a Bronx boy, had been raised in the shadow of the house that Ruth built.
The Carisis were never supposed to have opened their door, their table, their hearts, to Rafael Barba. The man-chasing, grasping Theresa was supposed to have demanded a copy of his investment portfolio and then gouged his eyes out for his inavailability, not to have shown him Sonny’s high school yearbook. Gina should have dismissed him outright, not have asked him if Sonny had ever learned to make a bed.
Christmas cards. Birthday cards. Bottles of wine from Dominick Senior, and gift cards, clearly inspired by Theresa’s various men, for Brooks Brothers, for Barney’s, for Pink’s. What was one to make of it all? With Sonny gone, there should be no reason for the Carisis, perhaps other than Bella, to care about Barba’s existence, to worry if he was doing well, to want to see him at all. He was, at best, a third wheel of some sort; at worst, the family could now indulge the feelings they should have had about him all along – the man who’d obviously, from their point of view, ruined their sainted only son and brother.
But no. Complaints that he never came to dinner. What the hell was that?
He found himself on the Staten Island Ferry that Sunday, four bottles of wine in tow rather than two. God forbid they run out; the Carisis had reason enough, certainly, to be irked by him, whatever that reason might be.
The way from the dock to the Carisis’ was burned into his brain; he could get there in his sleep, he was certain, though why he should make his way there at all baffled him.
Navigating Staten Island wasn’t like navigating Manhattan; Tottenville didn’t have bumper to bumper traffic, and parking existed. These were unimaginable luxuries, even if it meant being out in one of the boroughs, and the one furthest out with the roughest accent, at that. The Bronx abutted Manhattan, even if you didn’t want to be there; Brooklyn was a place, at least, and a bustling, interesting one at that. Queens was dubious, full of extremely non-urban life forms. Staten Island? Might as well be in the Adirondacks, only with a population and with traffic lights.
Walking from the sidewalk to the Carisis’ front steps was perhaps the longest walk Barba had ever made. It was longer than the walk for either of his Harvard diplomas, longer than the walk back to his office after losing a major case. And the length of the journey provided far too much time to think. To think about the first time he’d come there with Sonny, then the second, then the third. To remember that he’d found his being accepted such an unusual thing that it was harder than being snubbed – for being gay, for being Cuban, for being poor, for being short, for being a lawyer, for whatever reason; he’d been snubbed for any number of reasons by any number of people for so long that unconditional welcome had been the most frightening experience of his life.
No wonder, then, that he’d retreated when Sonny died.
He wasn’t supposed to have this.
Finally, years after he’d started walking up the flagstone path, he came to the door of the old Victorian home, the heavy, carved and painted, doorframe seeming as sturdy as the bricks themselves. Perhaps it was a fortress, designed to keep out intruders such as Barba.
Stomach churning, he reached for the brightly polished brass door knocker. His eyes were blurry; surely a migraine was indicated. It couldn’t be anything else.
The door opened, with Dominick Senior at the other side, in a plaid cotton shirt, a cardigan, and corduroy trousers. Barba’s stomach bottomed out; something was stinging at his eyes, and certainly that was migraine-induced blindness, for it could be nothing else.
Someone was lifting the wine bags out of his hand, while Dominick Senior was throwing an arm around him, possibly the only thing holding him up. “Rafael. It’s been too damn long since you’ve been home. Come on inside, son, and let me get you a drink.”
Barba choked. It suddenly dawned on him that he was crying.
It was hard to face mountains of love that you plainly didn’t deserve to have.