Chapter 61 At the restaurant

Chapter 61 At the restaurant
When we finally ordered what we wanted from the menu, the waiter put meal on the table and Bruno did not open his.
He sat across from me with his jacket still on and his hand resting on the table between us and looked at me the way he had been looking at me since the pavement outside Matteo's lawyer's office, like he was working something out and had not finished yet.
"Say it," I said.
"He wrote that letter knowing he might not get to deliver it himself," Bruno said. "He wrote it as insurance. In case something happened before he could fix what he had started." He looked at the table. "He was forty-eight years old and he was writing letters to his son in case he died."
"Yes," I said.
"He was not surprised when it happened," Bruno said. "He had prepared for it."
"That does not make it easier," I said.
"No," Bruno said. "It makes it worse. He sat across from Matteo and handed him that letter knowing Matteo might be the reason he needed it." He looked up at me. "He trusted the wrong person and he knew it and he prepared anyway and said nothing to me because saying something to me would have put me in the same position."
"He was protecting you," I said.
"Yes," Bruno said. "By keeping me ignorant of the thing that was coming." He picked up the menu and put it down again without reading it. "I have spent eight years thinking my father was caught off guard. That Richard found an opening he did not see coming." He paused. "He saw it coming. He just could not stop it in time."
I reached across the table and covered his hand with mine.
He turned his hand over and held it.
The waiter came back and Bruno ordered without looking at the menu, something he had clearly eaten here before, and I ordered the same because I trusted his instincts in restaurants the way I had come to trust them in most things.
The waiter left.
"Tell me something about him," I said. "Something small. Not the business or the money or any of it. Something ordinary."
Bruno looked at me.
"He could not parallel park," he said. "In thirty years of driving he never once parallel parked successfully. He would attempt it three times and then find a different space." He paused. "He refused to acknowledge this was a problem."
I looked at him.
"He sounds like someone I would have liked," I said.
"You would have argued with each other," Bruno said. "He had opinions about everything and he stated them without apology and you would have pushed back and he would have loved it." He looked at our hands on the table. "He would have liked you very much."
The food came and we ate and the restaurant was warm around us and outside the street was properly dark now and the evening had settled into itself and neither of us looked at our phones.
Bruno ate with the focused appreciation of someone who had forgotten to eat properly for several days and was correcting the oversight. I watched him across the table and thought about the man in the photograph on my mother's hall wall, laughing at something off-camera, one hand raised, completely unaware of being seen, and I thought about Bruno's father writing a letter at forty-eight knowing what was coming and protecting his son the only way left to him.
Two men who had loved their children with the particular quiet determination of people who did not make productions of things.
"Bruno," I said.
"Yes."
"The south-facing room," I said. "When I paint in it I want to paint him. Your father. From what you have told me and what I have read and what I imagine him to be." I held his gaze. "I want him on the wall of our home."
Bruno looked at me for a long moment.
Something crossed his face that I did not try to name because some expressions belong only to the person wearing them.
He picked up his wine and held it.
"Yes," he said quietly. "I would like that."
We finished eating and Bruno paid without the usual discussion and we put our coats on and went out into the cold evening and walked without direction the way we did when neither of us was ready for the night to end.
His arm was around my shoulders and my arm was around his waist and we walked close enough that our steps matched without trying.
"Six weeks," I said.
"Yes," he said.
"We paint the room and we visit Daniel and we go to Thursday's meeting with Cole and we live our life," I said. "And then we walk into that courtroom and we say what we have to say and we walk back out."
"Yes," he said.
"And then it is done," I said.
"And then it is done," he said.
We turned into our street and the building was ahead of us and the lights were on in the upstairs windows the way Bruno always left them when we went out, a habit he had never explained and I had never asked about because some habits did not need explaining.
He unlocked the door and we went up and he put his keys on the table and I put my bag on the chair and the apartment was warm and quiet and the plant from my mother's garden was on the kitchen windowsill catching the last of the lamp light.
Bruno stood in the middle of the room and looked at me.
"I want to read the letter again," he said. "Tonight. Properly."
"Yes," I said. "Read it to me."
He looked at me.
"Out loud?" he said.
"Yes," I said. "He wrote it for you but he is not here. Read it out loud and let it exist in a room instead of just on paper."
Bruno was quiet for a moment.
Then he reached into his jacket and took the letter out and we sat on the couch together and he unfolded it carefully and I sat close enough that my leg was against his and he held the pages in both hands and began to read.
His father's voice came through the words the way it does when someone writes from a place of complete honesty, plain and direct and without performance. It was just as if that moment was meant for us without interruption from any angle. 
Bruno reached the last paragraph.
His voice did not change but his hand found mine on the cushion between us and held it without stopping reading and I held his back and the letter ended and the room was very still.
He folded it.
We sat for a moment without speaking.
Then a knock landed on the door.
Not the buzzer from downstairs. The door itself. From inside the building.
Bruno looked at me and we were on the fourth floor already.
Nobody came to the door without being buzzed in first but this was weird.