“Not until later. Mind if I join you?”
He turned his chair to face the room and gestured at his bed.
Luca had not arranged his room the way I’d expected. I wouldn’t call it disordered, but he layered the decorating in a way that the rest of the house, shaped by Dominic’s minimalist aesthetic, wasn’t. He’d packed shelves on two walls tight with books. Some spines were turned the wrong way.
A 45 lay on the nightstand in its sleeve. “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups. The paper had gone soft at the corners from being handled.
On the wall above the desk, framed in plain black, was the original 1994 theatrical release poster forPriscilla, Queen of the Desert. It hung at eye level where Luca sat every day.
I pointed at it. “1994,” I said.
Luca glanced over his shoulder. “I didn’t see it when it was first released. I was too young, but my mother took me to see it in a theater when I was nine. She told my father we were going to a nature documentary.”
“Did he believe her?”
“No, he brought it up for years.” A pause. “Fondly.”
I looked at the poster again. I thought about a nine-year-old in a theater in New Orleans, watching those three figures cross the Australian desert, his mother beside him, who had already decided what he needed to see and wasn’t afraid to take him.
“And ‘Iko Iko?’”
“The Dixie Cups. Found it at an estate sale in Metairie. Box lot.”
“You listen to it?”
“We do.” He smiled. “Dominic has an old record player he refuses to replace. Says music should have a little friction in it. He likes when I put it on.”
“He loves you.”
Luca looked at me.
“He loves me,” he agreed.
We were quiet for a moment.
“The dog’s name was Gravy,” Luca said.
I rubbed a sweaty palm on my jeans. “I’m aware.”
“Not Biscuit, Gravy.“ He was fighting back an instinct. “Just—and then he sat on a stranger’s foot.”
“Gravy, not again—“ I delivered my best imitation of the voice from the kitchen, and Luca laughed, full and unguarded, filling the room.
Through final, choking laughs, he said, “Dominic’s jaw during the bread transaction—“
“He was assembling a statement.”
“Seven years,” Luca said, leaning back in his chair. “He still finds new occasions to be exquisitely appalled.”
Our laughter gradually faded, and I looked at my hands. “There was a woman on the sidewalk,” I said. “During the dog.”
Luca leaned forward.
“Her phone was up, but the framing was wrong. She didn’t focus on the dog.”
He placed his hands on his knees.
“Profile only. Dark jacket. She was moving before I could stand—“
