Page 70 of Masked Don
I sip my coffee and try to push it all out of my head. I’d been calling the hospital every few hours, checking on Marcus, so much so that his parents were starting to wonder who the hell I was. He’s fine, thankfully.
Matthew’s on the swing set Enzo had built for him, calling out to Marta to push him higher, higher. When she’s had her fill, he hops off and rushes over to the big wooden playground set, eager to climb up and slide down over and over.
Marta comes over to sit with me on the stone bench, watching him play. “You should make him stop,” she says, but she’s smiling. “Only a matter of time before he goes down the slide with such gusto he lands in my flower beds, and I’ll have to explain that to the gardener.”
“He’s got good hands. He won’t fall.”
“No.” She watches him a moment. “No, that one doesn’t fall.”
The door opens, and a voice none of us expects says, “Is that the boy?”
Marta stills and I turn. An old man stands in the garden doorway. I know who he is before anyone says it, because I’ve seen his face in an oil painting in the library. It shows him standing with a hand on a small solemn boy’s shoulder.
Michael Accardi.
He’s smaller than the portrait, bent, a cardigan over his shoulders against the cool morning, leaning on a cane he clearly wishes he didn’t have to use. But the eyes are the same, black and flat and taking in everything, me, the coffee, and most of all the boy on the playground, whom he’s looking at like a man looks at a ghost.
“Mr. Accardi,” Marta breathes, “you came down.”
“Don’t make it an event, Marta.” But there’s no heat in it. He can’t take his eyes off Matthew. “Leave us a minute.”
Marta looks at me as if to wordlessly ask, Are you all right with this? I give her the smallest nod, because Enzo and I already decided this. Two nights ago, in the dark, after the shooting, both of us too rattled to sleep, I’d pushed for it and he’d resisted, the way he resists anything to do with his father.
“He should know he has a grandson,” I’d said.
“You don’t know what he is,” Enzo had replied.
“Then tell me, or let him meet Matthew and let me find out for myself.”
In the end, he’d agreed reluctantly on two conditions. The first was that the old man would never be alone with Matthew. When I asked why, Enzo looked out the window for a long time. “Because the last child he was alone with was me,” he said, and that was all. The second was that he couldn’t tell Matthew that he’s his grandfather.
“He’s going to put it all together on his own,” Enzo had said. “He’s bright and observant, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“I know. We tell him everything soon but not yet.”
Marta slips inside and Michael Accardi slowly crosses the grass to me, the cane sinking into the soft ground. He lowers himself onto the bench with a grunt.
“You’re the one,” he says. There’s no unkindness to his tone, just certainty. “The mother.”
“Stevie Callahan.”
“I know your name. I know everything that happens in my house, even from all the way up on the fourth floor.” His eyes are still on Matthew. “My son thinks I don’t. My son underestimates how much I know these days.” Then, in a lower voice, almost to himself, he says: “He has the Accardi face, God help him.”
“Mama, watch!” Matthew launches himself off the slide, lands in a tumble on the grass, and pops up grinning, delighted with his own daring. He sees the old man and stills the way he does, studying this new person with his head tipped.
“Who are you?” he asks directly, the way only children are allowed to be.
Michael Accardi looks at his grandson for a long moment, and something happens to the old man’s face that I don’t think happens often anymore. It cracks, just slightly, around the eyes.
“I’m Enzo’s father,” he says.
Matthew considers it seriously. “You’re a lot older than him, huh?”
The corner of the old man’s mouth moves. “Much, much older.”
“Okay.” Matthew accepts this with the total ease of the very young, files it away, and moves on to what matters. “Do you want to see me jump again?”
“I would like that very much,” Michael Accardi says.
