“I can tell him you’re not here if you like?”
I shake my head, knowing this isn’t something I can avoid. Better he speaks to me now than to Gio first.
“Just ask him to wait, I need ten minutes to finish up in here.”
She doesn’t come back so I assume Felipe has agreed, and when I’m done in the kitchen I head front of house.
“Go on home, Shen, I’ll lock up,” I say.
She shoots a frown toward Felipe and then a questioning look at me, and I nod a silent yes, it’s okay to leave me here alone with that guy. I wait while she gathers her coat and I see her out, locking the door behind her.
“Another?” I say, looking at Felipe’s empty glass.
He nods and leans back in his chair, watching me as I get myself a tumbler and take the bottle of Jack Daniel’s back to the table with me. He’s silent as I pour us both a drink, screwing the cap on slowly as I wait for him to speak first.
“Listen, let me save us both some time here,” he says eventually. “You are without doubt Vivien and Charlie’s daughter. You look like her, you sound like her—oh, I’ve seen the videos—and,” he touches my hand across the table, “you’re wearing her ring.”
Instinctively, I twist the signet ring on my wedding finger and he knocks his drink back in one.
“And now you’ve turned up here and settled yourself nicely into the middle of my family. I may be getting on in years, but that’s no coincidence, is it?”
He makes it sound cold and premeditated, as if I’m trying to exploit the Belottis, and it stings. I don’t know how much of the truth Felipe deserves. I hear the accusatory tone in his voice and it feels both chastising and unjust, because from what I know of him he’s been almost entirely absent from his son’s life and is hardly entitled to walk in and play the protective father card.
I touch the bottle. “More?”
“I’d prefer answers,” he says, but pushes his glass toward me regardless.
“Okay,” I say, topping him up. “You’re right, I’m Vivien’s daughter.”
“Did she put you up to this?”
I’m offended on her behalf, but of course he doesn’t know. “My mother died a few years ago.” I sit with the pain of saying the words aloud, a wound that never heals.
To give him his dues, he looks genuinely shocked, deep furrows channeling his brow.
“But she would still have been so young,” he says, shaking his head.
“Yes,” I say. “She was fifty-two.”
We sit in silence as he digests the news.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he says, stiff.
“Thank you,” I say, equally clipped, even though the floor is still mine. Regardless of the news about my mother, I still need to provide him with answers to his questions.
“Things were difficult after she died,” I say. “I came to New York for a fresh start. My mother’s best memories were made here, it seemed as good a place to start again as any. I went to Katz’s Deli—she used to tell me about the time she sang—”
“Just down the street from there,” he says, cutting me off. “The cops moved us in the end. I can still see one of them picking your mother up, even as she sang.” He shakes his head and huffs. “Still singing when they put her in the back of the cop car too.”
I didn’t know that last detail. I sit for a second and allow it to embroider itself onto the story in my head.
“I came here because I had nowhere else to go. I wanted to see her reference points, to stand in the places she’d stood, experience the city she’d loved. I had this crazy feeling that I’d feel closer to her here than anywhere else.”
I don’t tell him that I’ve brought her ashes to New York to scatter one day when I feel strong enough to let her go.
“And so I walked, and I saw a ‘chef wanted’ sign in the window here, and that was that. I had no clue that Belotti’s gelateria existed until…” It’ll be easier to show him than tell him. “Wait there.”
I leave him in the closed-up restaurant while I run upstairs for my mother’s scrapbook, pausing to carefully remove the torn napkin first. That secret belongs to Santo and my mother, an indiscretion that’s not for Felipe’s eyes.
“This was my mother’s,” I say, laying the scrapbook on the table when I sit back down. It’s open to the photograph of Santo, the glass door behind him in the background.
“She told me he was the only man she thought she ever truly loved, but never spoke his surname or told me where the photo was taken.”
Felipe finally removes his mirrored sunnies to study the photo, tapping it lightly with his index finger.
“Always the hero,” he murmurs, a story between brothers for another day. The Santo in the photograph is eighties cool and unencumbered, unaware that in years to come he’ll raise his brother’s son.
“It was the glass door,” I say. “The photo could have been taken anywhere, but I walked past that door on Mulberry Street and I knew straightaway that this was another echo from my mother’s story. I couldn’t not see inside. It was as straightforward as that. No agenda or plan, I just walked through the door and met Gio and Sophia and everyone else, and that’s where my mother’s story ended and mine began.”
“And no one knows about your mother’s connection to Santo?”
“I don’t know about my mother’s connection to him, besides this single photo,” I say. “Her history led me through the door, but what has happened since has had nothing to do with the past.”
I think of the photo of my mother in the Belotti family album, her face turned away from the camera.
“You have to tell them,” he says. “Our family doesn’t stand for secrets like this.”
Childish defiance grips me. Why? Why should I tell them? What good will it do? I don’t ask him the questions that thunder through my head.
“Is there something between you and Gio?”
My defiance turns to desperation. I look into the depths of my drink because I don’t want to tell Felipe the truth. I know Gio and I cannot stay forever at the Monday Night Motel, but it seems grossly unfair that this man who is never here should be the reason why it ends.
Felipe reads my silence for what it is and sighs.
“Look, some might say I don’t have a right to steamroll in given how little I’ve been around, but the family seem to genuinely like you and that concerns me. I’m sure you’re a decent kid, but they’ve been through enough already, with Santo. It was a long time ago, but your mother did a number on him, and the shock of seeing your face, given his condition now, worries me. And Maria—she doesn’t deserve to feel like the consolation prize…” He swallows his drink and reaches for the bottle to refill his own glass. I wonder if it’s irresponsible of me not to stop him, but then I think of the photo of him with my mother and realize he’s more than aware of his own limits.
“I haven’t been any kind of father to Gio,” he says. “Maybe this is my one chance to watch his back.” He eyeballs me across the table. “You tell him yourself what brought you through our family’s door or I’m going to have to.” He swills the whiskey around in his glass. “It’s not an ultimatum, Iris, I’m not having a Godfather moment. I’m just trying to do right by my kid for once.”