Chapter 1 - The Woman Who Knew My Name
The first mistake I made that Friday was taking a seventy-six-year-old woman's prescription bottle out of her hand.
The second was assuming nobody in a Philadelphia pharmacy would dare tell Sal Bellini to give it back.
I had cut the line because I was late. That was the excuse I offered myself. Behind me stood Tony Russo, twenty-eight, buzz-cut and silent in his black suit, watching the crowded fluorescent aisle as if somebody might be waiting between the cough drops and the blood-pressure cuffs.
The woman ahead of me wore a beige cardigan with one sleeve rolled above a medical bracelet. White hair curled along the nape of her neck. Her cart contained a loaf of bread, two cans of soup, and a pharmacy bag with a label she was trying to read through scratched glasses.
"Excuse me," she said when I reached across her. "There's a line."
"I see it." I put my prescription card on the counter. "Mine first."
The pharmacist, a young man named Daniel, looked from me to her. "Sir, I can't just—"
"You can." I reached for the bottle in the woman's hand and lifted it away as though confiscating a toy. "I don't care who you are."
It was an ugly thing to say. Worse, it came easily.
Tony nudged her cart out of the way with his knee. A wheel squealed against the tiles. She braced herself on the handle rather than fall, but the movement made me aware of how much smaller she was than I'd first noticed.
"Mr. Bellini," Daniel warned, "please return her medication."
The woman ignored him. She studied me through the scratched lenses, the way a teacher looks at a boy caught stealing chalk.
"You still have your father's temper," she said.
I nearly laughed. My father had been dead for thirty-eight years, and strangers only mentioned him when they wanted something. Then her bracelet slid down her forearm, and a narrow metal plate caught the hard greenish light.
It was a medical-alert bracelet, engraved on the outside with her allergy information. Fastened beneath it was a second piece of metal: a worn military identification tab with the initials A.B., U.S. NAVY, and the service number I had memorized from the one photograph my mother allowed me to keep.
A man can forget the sound of his father's laugh. He doesn't forget the numbers he traced with his finger while his mother cried.
The woman watched my eyes move from the bracelet to her face. "Little Sal," she said.
Nobody had called me that since I was eleven. Not even my uncle Frank, who had helped raise me, dared to use it anymore.
"Nobody calls me that." My hand tightened around the pill bottle.
"I know." Her voice softened, though she did not step back. "You grew up thinking the loudest man in the room was the strongest. Anthony made the same mistake."
I felt the heat rise up my throat. The store went strangely quiet. Tony looked at me for instruction, but he couldn't have known what instruction to obey.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Ruth Kessler. I lived three doors from you on Mercer Street. Your mother brought you to my kitchen when Anthony was working nights. You used to ask for honey on toast and eat the crust first."
The bottle slipped from my hand. It struck the tile and rolled beneath the counter, rattling like a handful of nails. Daniel hurried to retrieve it.
Ruth leaned close enough that I could smell rain on her cardigan. "Your father is alive," she whispered.
I had ordered people out of rooms with a nod. I'd watched men lose contracts for crossing me. None of that kept my knees from weakening.
"You're lying."
"I wish I were lying about the way he left." She straightened, breathing carefully. "But being cruel to an old woman won't change the truth."
Daniel put the bottle back in her hand. I saw its name for the first time: apixaban, a medication Ruth needed for a heart condition. I'd made a show of withholding a stranger's medicine without even knowing what was in it.
The pharmacist lifted his phone. "You need to leave, Mr. Bellini. I've called the store manager."
Instead I backed away from the counter.
Tony followed me into a damp afternoon. On the sidewalk, a delivery bike hissed through a puddle. I stood beside my black SUV, staring at the pharmacy doors. The man I had buried in my mind was suddenly walking somewhere beyond them, wearing somebody else's clothes and breathing somebody else's air.
Ruth came outside without her cart. Her hands shook slightly as she settled her prescription into her cardigan pocket.
"If he's alive, why didn't he come home?" I asked.
"Because he was frightened. And because people you trusted helped keep him frightened." She glanced at Tony. "I'm not discussing the rest in front of hired hands."
Tony took the insult without moving. I told him to wait by the car.
"I'll meet you tomorrow," Ruth said. "Ten in the morning. Saint Bridget's community kitchen, back entrance. Come without your uncle. Without his lawyer. And without anyone you've paid to do your talking."
I asked whether she knew what sort of man she was threatening.
She looked down at her bottle, then at me. "Yes," she said. "That's what worries me."
She turned toward the bus stop. I could have called after her, offered her money, demanded an address. Instead I heard my father's name rolling in my head, unfamiliar and intimate at once.
When I reached the car, Tony was holding the rear door open. "Boss, the pharmacist filmed part of that."
"Let him."
"He might put it online."
I glanced at Ruth climbing slowly onto the bus. "I know."
May you like
Then my phone rang. UNCLE FRANK filled the screen, though I hadn't told him where I'd been.
His first words were, "Don't go to Saint Bridget's, Sal."
