I considered the calamari cone Mari shoved through the pass. “I’m eating professionally.”
“That’s not eating.”
“It counts if I charge market price.”
“Antonella.”
“I’ll call you after close.”
“You won’t.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“You might.”
“I’ll send a picture of mozzarella.”
“You know me too well,” she said, but her eyes stayed worried. “Call your brother if you need anything.”
“If I call Vinny, he’ll get on a plane with a duffel bag full of tools and emotional volume.”
“That’s because he loves you.”
“That’s because none of you let a woman fail privately.”
My mother pointed at the screen with a sauce-stained wooden spoon. “You’re not failing. You’re being stubborn far away.”
“Those are different menus, Ma.”
Before she could answer, two women near the entrance shifted sideways to clear space.
Bite Me didn’t pause. The blender shrieked. The fryer spat. The tourists chewed with their mouths open because civilization was a group project Florida had declined.
A man walked in from the white punch of late-afternoon light like he expected the sun, the boardwalk, and all of Miami Beach to move out of his way.
He was huge. He wasn’t tall in a normal, basketball-cousin way. He was huge in a doorway problem way, with dark hair, dark stubble, tanned skin, an open pale linen shirt, designer swim trunks, leather sandals, sunglasses, a heavy watch, and enough gold on his chest to make my mother’s side of the family forgive several misdemeanors.
The man was every bad decision on the Jersey Shore after it moved to Miami, found a tailor, and developed a taste for dark cologne.
I stopped tying the apron knot.
The man took off his sunglasses.
Across my bar, he found me with blue-gray eyes. Then he smiled, slow and sharp at the edges, and I felt one hard kick under my ribs that I refused to discuss with myself.
My mother gasped through the phone. “Antonella.”
I snatched the phone up. “Ma, I’m hanging up now.”
“Who is that?”
“A customer.”
“That’s not a customer. That’s a mistake with a nice watch.”
“Goodbye, Ma.”
“If he’s Italian, find out whose people he belongs to.”
