In Summertime Saga

Tony's Pizzeria was on a corner two blocks past the school, squeezed between a laundromat and a place that sold phone cases and clearly did not make enough money selling phone cases to stay open. The front was red brick with a green awning and a window with TONY'S painted in white letters that were peeling at the edges. A sandwich board on the sidewalk said BEST PIZZA IN SUMMERVILLE and somebody had written "only pizza" underneath in marker.

The bell over the door jingled when I walked in. The place was small. Six tables with checkered tablecloths, a counter with a register, and behind it an open kitchen with a brick oven and a prep station and a woman working dough with her back turned. Italian music was playing from a speaker somewhere, an accordion and a voice I didn't recognize, and the whole room smelled like bread and garlic and tomato sauce so thick you could chew it.

The man behind the counter was watching me before the bell stopped ringing.

Tony Salieri. Mid-fifties, maybe sixty. Thick across the chest and thicker through the middle, the build of someone who'd been strong once and let comfort round the edges. He had a combover that wasn't fooling anybody and a gold chain resting on the V of his open collar and his arms were folded across a white apron that had flour on the left side and sauce on the right. His eyes were dark and flat and they'd been sizing me up since I came through the door.

In the game, this man was a retired Italian mob enforcer who'd watched his best friend get murdered and walked away from the life and opened a pizza shop. In the game, he would save me from the Russians on a street corner and become the closest thing I had to a father in this world. He'd storm a warehouse with a shotgun for me. He'd ask me to get his wife pregnant because he couldn't do it himself and he loved her enough to let another man try.

I was looking at a guy wiping his hands on an apron behind a pizza counter. His mustache needed trimming and there was flour in his eyebrows.

"Help you?" His voice was deep, accented. New York Italian, the kind that turns every vowel into a negotiation.

"I'm looking for work."

His arms stayed folded. His eyebrows went up, which disturbed the flour but didn't move his opinion. "Work."

"Delivery. Whatever you need."

"I don't need delivery help." He said it flat, already bored with the conversation. "I got a system. It works."

"What's the system?"

He gave me the look that men his age give teenagers who ask follow-up questions.

"The system is I make the pizza, Maria boxes it, I deliver it." He jerked his head toward the kitchen where the woman was still working dough. "System works fine."

"You deliver it yourself?"

"What are you, a health inspector?"

"You're making the pizza and delivering it. So while you're delivering, nobody's making pizza. And while you're making pizza, nobody's delivering." I kept my voice even. Respectful but steady. The voice I'd used on the bouncer in Atlantic City, on landlords who didn't want to rent to a twenty-five-year-old with no pay stubs, on every person who'd ever looked at me and seen a kid when there was an adult behind the eyes. "That's two jobs and one guy."

Tony stared at me. His jaw moved slightly, like he was chewing on what I'd said and hadn't decided if it tasted right.

"I'll do delivery only," I said. "Tips. Whatever the customer gives me. You don't pay me a cent until I prove I'm worth it."

"You got a bike?"

"No."

"A car?"

"No."

"A scooter?"

"No."

He unfolded his arms. Folded them again. "Kid, how are you going to deliver pizza with no vehicle?"

"I'll run."

He looked at me. I looked at him. Behind him in the kitchen, the woman had stopped working the dough. She was turned sideways, watching us.

Tony laughed. It started small, a huff through his nose, and then it got bigger and his shoulders shook and the gold chain bounced against his chest. He ran a hand over the combover and the combover shifted and he pushed it back and his whole face had loosened up.

"On foot," he said. "In this heat."

"I'm motivated."

"You're crazy is what you are." He was still smiling. He pointed at me with a thick finger. "What's your name?"

"Arthur."

"Arthur." He said it back like he was weighing it. "You live around here?"

"On the other side of the school. The Cummings house."

His eyebrows moved again. "Debbie's boy?"

"Yeah." I didn't correct the phrasing. In this world, I was Debbie's boy. Close enough.

He looked at me for a long second. His eyes went to the door and then back to me and the suspicion in his face loosened into consideration. He knew Debbie. He knew about Frank. He knew what that house was carrying.

"Okay, Arthur. You want to run pizzas in the heat, I'm not going to stop you." He held up a finger. "One delivery. Today. You bring the box, you bring back the money, the pizza gets there hot. If you can do that, we'll talk about more."

"Done."

"The address is three blocks east. Mrs. Patterson, she orders every Tuesday. Two large pepperoni, extra cheese. She tips two dollars and she's going to look at you funny because you're not me." He was already turning toward the oven. "Maria. Box the Patterson order."

The woman in the kitchen turned around fully and I saw her for the first time.

Maria Salieri. Forties, dark-brown hair piled high and thick, brown eyes, and a figure that her red-and-white apron was working hard to contain. She was wearing a black dress underneath the apron and the dress was tight across the hips and the chest and she moved through the kitchen with the easy confidence of a woman who'd spent decades in this space and knew where everything was without looking.

She set two boxes on the counter. Stacked them, tapped the lids to make sure they were sealed, and slid them toward me.

"Don't tilt them," she said. Her voice was warm and had the same Italian undertone as Tony's but softer, rounder. "You tilt, the cheese slides. Nobody wants a pizza with the cheese on one side."

"No tilting. Got it."

She smiled. Wide, generous, her whole face in on it. "You're young. How old?"

"Eighteen."

"Eighteen." She considered that. "You're doing a good thing, getting a job. Tony doesn't hire easy."

"I noticed."

"He likes you. I can tell." She wiped her hands on a towel hanging from the apron and nodded toward the door. "Go. Before the pepperoni gets cold and Mrs. Patterson calls."

I picked up the boxes. They were warm against my palms and the weight was manageable but awkward, wide enough that I had to hold them out in front of me like I was presenting a gift. I pushed through the door with my shoulder and the bell jingled again and the afternoon heat hit me like a wall.

Three blocks east. In this heat. Carrying two large pizzas I couldn't tilt.

I started walking. Then I started jogging because walking wasn't going to keep the pizzas hot and Mrs. Patterson apparently ordered every Tuesday which meant she had expectations. The boxes bounced slightly with each step and I held them level and my arms started burning after the first block because it turns out holding two large pizzas perfectly flat while running is a core exercise that no gym on earth teaches.

The streets were quiet. Afternoon sun on asphalt, heat shimmering above the pavement in the middle distance. A dog was lying on a porch with its tongue out, watching me jog past with pizza boxes like this was the saddest thing it had seen all day. A pickup truck passed me going the other direction and the driver slowed down to look and then sped up again. I was sweating through my shirt by the second block and my forearms were shaking by the third and Mrs. Patterson's house was a yellow bungalow with a screen door and a garden gnome out front that was missing a hand.

I knocked. A woman in her sixties opened the door in a housecoat and bifocals and looked at me and then at the boxes and then at me again.

"You're not Tony."

"I'm the new delivery guy."

"Tony delivers his own pizzas."

"He's expanding."

She squinted at me through the bifocals and then took the boxes and opened the top one right there in the doorway and inspected the pizza like she was looking for structural flaws. The cheese had held. She closed the lid. Went inside. Came back with a fifty and a two, and the fifty was the pizza money and the two was the tip and she handed me both like she was doing me a favor and not the other way around.

"Tell Tony the crust was better last week."

"I'll pass that along."

She closed the door. The garden gnome stared at me with its one hand raised in what might have been a wave or might have been a warning. I pocketed the two and held the fifty and jogged back.

By the time I pushed through the pizzeria door again my shirt was soaked through and my hair was stuck to my forehead and I was breathing hard enough that Tony and Maria both turned from the kitchen and looked at me like I'd just washed ashore.

I put the fifty on the counter. "Mrs. Patterson says the crust was better last week."

Tony's mouth twitched. He picked up the fifty, checked it, put it in the register. "Mrs. Patterson says that every week." He closed the register and looked at me. Looked at my soaked shirt, my red face, my chest going. "You ran."

"You said hot."

"I said hot." His mouth twitched again and this time it turned into a full grin, wide and sudden. "You ran three blocks with two large pepperoni in this heat."

"The cheese didn't slide."

"The cheese didn't slide." He was still grinning. He reached under the counter and pulled out a towel and tossed it to me. "Wipe your face. You look like you just lost a fight with a sprinkler."

I wiped my face. The towel smelled like flour and clean cotton.

Tony opened the register again. Pulled out a fifty and put it on the counter between us.

"Delivery rate's a hundred a run when you got a bike," he said. "You don't got a bike. So fifty. That's the deal until you get wheels."

I looked at the bill on the counter. Fifty dollars. For running three blocks with two pizza boxes in the heat.

"Same time tomorrow," Tony said. He'd turned back to the oven and was pulling out a tray with the practiced motion of a man who'd done it ten thousand times. "And the day after. We'll see how your legs hold up."

"They'll hold up."

"We'll see."

Maria came out of the kitchen with a glass of water. She walked up to me and held it out and when I took it her fingers brushed against mine on the glass. Her hand was warm from the kitchen and her fingers were soft and she smelled like flour and basil and underneath those a perfume that was warm and sweet and lived on her skin.

She looked at me while I drank. Her eyes were on my face, searching it, trying to place where she'd seen it before.

"You remind me of someone," she said.

I lowered the glass. "Yeah?"

"Mmm." She took the glass back and her eyes stayed on mine for a second longer and then she turned and went back to the kitchen and the moment was over.

She meant Frank. I knew that because I'd played the game and Frank had worked at the bank down the street from this pizzeria and Debbie was friends with Tony and Maria and the kid whose body I was wearing had probably been in this restaurant as a child sitting in a booth eating pizza while his foster father talked to Tony about whatever men talk about over beer. Maria was looking at me and seeing a ghost. A boy who should have been grieving and was instead jogging pizza deliveries and negotiating his own terms and looking straight at her when he talked.

I didn't say any of it. I finished the water. I thanked Tony, thanked Maria, and walked out into the afternoon with fifty-two dollars in my pocket and a shift tomorrow.

Fifty-two dollars. I needed two hundred for a bike and two hundred for the PC parts and five thousand for Debbie's payment and a quarter million for the mortgage and I had fifty-two dollars. The math was still a joke. But it was a less funny joke than it had been this morning when the number was zero, and I stood on the sidewalk in my sweat-soaked shirt with the bills in my pocket and the sun was hot and my legs were already sore and I started walking home.

I had a job. I had a man behind a pizza counter who'd grinned when I told him the cheese didn't slide. And I had four deliveries between me and a bike that would make the next delivery less stupid.

I walked home and my shirt dried stiff from the sweat.