by Cora Brent
But all of that happened a long time ago, and today, as I was jerked out of a peaceful sleep by the sound of steady hammering at my front door here in Phoenix, I knew only one person could be responsible. My brother’s stubbornness was damned inconvenient when I was trying, for once, to take advantage of the opportunity to sleep in. I groaned and rolled out of bed because I knew that if I didn’t answer the door now, he’d just keep calling and coming back until something changed.
“Were you sleeping?” Gio seemed surprised when I flung open the door and glared at him.
“Yeah, I was sleeping,” I muttered. “People tend to do that early in the morning.”
He frowned. Everyone had always said we looked alike, but when Gio scowled, I felt like I was gazing into a damn mirror. “It’s not early, Dom. It’s eleven for god’s sake.”
“No way.”
Gio shoved his watch in my face before stepping over the threshold, even though I hadn’t invited him inside yet. Serves me right for buying a condo two doors down from his.
“Are you sick?” he asked with curiosity, knowing that these days I didn’t sleep in because there was so much work to do.
“No,” I grumbled.
“You don’t have company, do you?” he said, glancing around with disapproval at the usual disorder of my living room.
“Tons. A quartet of hookers I picked up on Van Buren.”
Gio smiled vaguely and took a seat on my leather couch.
“Guess you’re staying awhile,” I grumbled as I moved to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine.
“Tara took the baby to her mom’s house for brunch.”
“Isn’t spending time with your wife and daughter a better alternative to defiling my sleep?”
“Always, but her brother’s back in town, and things get uncomfortable when I have to sit across a table from him and defend you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Shit, that again? It was three years ago. I apologized to Ryan about sixty times, and anyway the girl never said a word about being engaged.”
“The sizable rock on her left hand might have given you a clue.”
“In my defense I wasn’t looking at her hand when she bent over the hood of my car and pushed her dress up.”
“Do you have any idea what a Neanderthal you sound like right now?”
“Give me a break,” I griped. “She couldn’t drop her panties fast enough. I didn’t know who she was, and in the long run, it seems like I did that guy a favor.”
“Well, Ryan’s managed to hold a grudge.”
“He should get over it.”
“Like you, Dom?” Gio teased, tossing a couch pillow at my head with a laugh. “After all, you don’t even have room in your head for things like the name of the guy who pantsed you in front of the girls’ varsity soccer team fifteen years ago.”
I stuck a mug under the coffee spigot and pressed a button. “I have no memory of the incident you refer to.”
Gio cracked up. “Right. That’s why you tracked him down four years later and beat him out of his crappy paycheck inside a pool hall before you beat him to a pulp out in the alley. Then you treated everyone in the place to a shot of tequila with your winnings.”
“Meh. I barely remember that.”
“The incident you toast a round of drinks to once a year?”
I handed my brother a full coffee mug and prepared one for myself. “Do I?” I said with false innocence.
Gio was watching me with a smile. He always had my number. “Come on, what was his name again? Carl Hand?”
“Chris Mann,” I said automatically.
Gio raised his coffee mug. “Well, here’s to Chris Mann.”
“To Chris Mann.” I drained my mug quickly, the haze of sleep dissipating thanks to the healing properties of caffeine.
My brother patted the space beside him. “Sit down. We’ve got a few things to sort out before tomorrow, and I want your attention while you’re in a cooperative mood.”
I sank into the leather with a groan, making a mental note to find some time to visit the gym today. “You shouldn’t bust my balls so much. I was at the new place until three a.m.”
“How’s it looking?”
“Good. The kitchen space is ready for the ovens, the countertops are being installed this week, and most of the electrical issues have been handled.”
Now that the talk had turned professional, I woke up. There was so much going on these days that sometimes it was tough to keep track of it all. If I stopped to think about everything my brother and I had accomplished together, an enormous sense of pride swelled in my chest. Years ago we’d fallen hard, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but we’d risen, and once again the Esposito name blazed proudly over a restaurant door.
Our grandfather, Leo, ran the original Esposito’s in Manhattan for decades before his health started failing. When he transferred management over to his son, Frank, and his grandson Steven, he thought he was leaving the family business in good hands. Gio and I were still boys, so Papa Leo figured that our uncle and cousin would run the place until we were old enough to share in the responsibilities. Our grandfather’s death had been devastating, but I was glad he’d never know how Frank and Steven mismanaged our inheritance and gambled away the family legacy. When it all came crashing down, I was bitter enough to take my own immature form of revenge.
In the end all that bad blood was enough to rupture the family forever. I’d just turned eighteen at the time, and Gio was sixteen, but our tiny, invincible grandmother realized there wasn’t much future left for us in New York. At that point all Donna Esposito had left were a few small investments and a vacation home in Phoenix she and Leo had bought years earlier, before two little boys were dropped on their doorstep. It seemed like the only logical thing for us to do was head west in search of a new beginning.
During those rough times Gio and I made endless plans about opening up our own restaurant someday. Over the next six years, we finished school, worked like crazy, and, with a small deposit of cash, an ambitious business plan, and a sympathetic loan officer, managed to make the new Esposito’s a reality. It occupied a corner of a brick strip mall in Tempe, a college town that housed the huge state university. It bore little resemblance to the elegant Manhattan original, but to us it was the center of the universe. I always knew I’d do whatever it took to see that everything we’d lost was reclaimed, at least in a sense. I owed it to my grandfather, and the long line of Espositos that had come before me, to keep clawing away until that happened.
The food—wood-fired pizza with an incomparable crust and a family-recipe sauce—was its own best advertisement, and there was nothing unusual about a line of customers going out the door on Friday and Saturday nights. We Esposito boys knew what people wanted when it came to food, having worked the counter at the Manhattan place from the moment we hit our teens. The recipes were carefully guarded among the family, but Gio and I had known them by heart since we helped our grandma, Donna, in the kitchen as kids. Two years after opening our own place, we leased the store beside it, knocked down a wall, and doubled the size of the restaurant. Now, less than four years after Gio and I opened the doors to our own pizzeria, we had a staff of twelve, and we were getting ready to open up a second, larger version in downtown Phoenix.
I wouldn’t hit my thirtieth birthday for two more summers, yet together my brother and I had redeemed our family name and made our own dreams come true. It was a history worth celebrating.
These past few weeks Gio had been focusing on running the original store and dealing with administrative details for the second one while I threw myself into the messier tasks involved in getting Espo 2—as we’d been referring to it—renovated in time for the grand opening, little more than a month away. I loved it, though. I loved dealing with the contractors and the grittiness and watching the transformation of the old, abandoned bar in Phoenix’s downtown Heritage Square neighborhood. This new restaurant would bring us full circle. I couldn
’t wait to see my grandmother’s face when we showed her that we’d done it—we’d recreated the legendary Esposito’s in a new city.
Gio listened to everything I said about timelines and contractors, nodding with satisfaction when I estimated how much we still needed to complete before we opened our doors.
“That’s good news,” he said. “We’re way ahead of schedule.”
“Don’t get cocky,” I warned. “Remember, we inserted some wiggle room on purpose because something is bound to go sideways in the weeks leading up to the opening.”
“We have four weeks,” Gio argued. My brother was sharp—tough for any contractor or line chef who tried to get around him.
I shrugged. “Four weeks is nothing. It will pass so fast it’ll feel like whiplash.”
He shoved me. He was the only man on earth who could get away with that. “Come on, Dom. It’s time to get a little excited.”
“No, it’s not. It’s time to take exhaustive inventory of everything that could possibly go wrong.”
He raised an eyebrow. “One of these days someone’s going to come along and shatter that damn pessimism of yours.”
“Bullshit. Being cynical keeps me honest.”
“You are that,” he said seriously, setting down his coffee mug. “The best man I’ve ever known.”
I felt a tiny twinge over those words. I thought about Grandpa Leo dying alone by a dumpster because I hadn’t shown up for work that night. I still had nightmares about that, and in my darkest moments, I wondered if he cursed me as he gasped his last breath. And there were other things too. Things I was terribly ashamed of and had never admitted to Gio. But I couldn’t change any of that today.
“You feeling hormonal this morning?” I asked my brother in a joking tone. “You seem awful melancholy all of a sudden.”
“Not melancholy. I just appreciate you, that’s all.” He ran his finger over the top of his coffee mug. “Keep meaning to ask you something.”
“As long as it’s not about Chris Mann.”
“No.” Gio cleared his throat. “Tara and I saw a lawyer last week.”
“What the hell for?”
“We hadn’t updated our wills since Leah was born, and we needed to appoint a guardian, just in case.” Gio paused. “We want you, Dom. We want you to take care of our daughter if it comes to that. I mean, Tara’s parents are great, but they live in a retirement community, and they’re always traveling. You’re the only logical option.”
The cherubic face of my six-month-old niece flashed through my mind, and my heart contracted. I’d hang the moon for that baby girl. And for her father too. As Giovanni’s words sunk in, the weight of all that love and trust got me feeling kind of choked up. Out of all the people Gio and Tara could choose from to entrust their precious daughter to, they’d picked me. That wasn’t the kind of faith that came along every day.
“I’m honored,” I said quietly. Then I nudged my brother’s knee. “I don’t give you permission to go anywhere, though.”
He flashed me a smile. “I don’t intend to.”
I stood up and grabbed both coffee mugs to refill them.
“Shit’s about to get real, you know,” I said from the kitchen.
Gio turned and peered at me curiously. “Shit hasn’t been real up until now?”
“It was real enough with one store. Two stores mean double the work, double the worries, more than double the staff.”
“You think we’re biting off more than we can chew?”
“Hell no. I can’t wait.”
Gio laughed. “That reminds me of two things. I got a call on Friday from this reporter at the Sun Republic. They’re looking to do a big write-up to coincide with the opening of Espo 2.”
I shrugged. “Great.”
“They also want to touch on a little bit of the backstory. You know, the rebirth of a great New York restaurant family.”
“Sounds like a good story to me.”
Gio gave me a funny look. “You know Frank died five years back, but they might decide to track down Steve.”
I almost growled at the mention of my corrupt uncle and cousin. Together they’d destroyed what had taken eighty years and four generations of Espositos to build. They’d also broken my grandmother’s heart. “Well, if some reporter can flush him out of whatever hole he’s crawled into, then so be it.”
“Remember Dave Shapiro?” Gio said, eyeing me carefully.
I nodded, recalling a skinny kid with glasses who used to pal around with Gio in the old neighborhood.
“Well, a while back he told me he heard Steve moved to Syracuse with Beth and the kids. Don’t know if he’s still there.”
“If he is, then I hope he likes snow,” I said, keeping my tone level. Hearing all these toxic names spoken aloud rattled me. I didn’t want Giovanni to catch on to that, though. It had been a long time since we’d discussed the shit that had gone down in our last days in New York. There was no reason to bring any of it up now.
Gio knew when to drop the subject. He asked if I wanted to go visit Donna later this afternoon with him, Tara, and the baby. When we first had to move our grandmother to a full-time care facility, we’d felt guilty. But eighty-two-year-old Donna Esposito was the belle of the ball there. The only thing she loved more than her card games, sing-alongs, and movie times were visits from us.
“Yeah, I’ll come,” I said, figuring I could push the gym visit back a few hours. This was technically my first full day off in a month and would probably be my last one for quite some time, so I needed to grab the opportunity to visit my grandmother when I could.
“Good.” Gio rose from the couch and stretched. “In that case I’m glad we had the chance to hash out all this now so we don’t end up torturing Tara with it.”
“Hey, wait. You said there were two things you needed to talk about. One was the Sun Republic story. What was the other one?”
“Oh yeah. Melanie’s starting tomorrow.”
“Who?”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve told you six times that I hired a replacement for Jennifer.”
“Ah yeah, Jennifer. So professional of her to throw a temper tantrum and quit with no notice just when we needed her most.”
Gio was frowning again. “I know she was pissed about having to take on more responsibility with the new store opening, but we gave her a hefty raise. She never gave me a real reason.”
I grew uneasy over the thought of our former bookkeeper and assistant manager. Jennifer had been a decent employee, but from the beginning, she’d made it clear she had feelings for me beyond the normal employee-employer relationship. That wasn’t a line I planned to cross again, and in this particular case, I wasn’t attracted to her. Seducing your staff was never a good idea. I’d learned that the hard way.
It had happened once, back when we opened the first place. I went out a few times with the hostess, and we had a little too much fun. It didn’t turn into anything special, but there was a lot of gossip among the staff. When the girl quit a few weeks later, a rumor started circulating that she left because of me. It wasn’t true. She’d just started her law school internship. But it was a disruptive thing to deal with in the middle of our first restaurant opening. After that, Gio and I had agreed we, or rather I, would never allow it to become an issue again. A boss needed to uphold higher standards. I owed Gio that much. My bad choices had already cost our family enough trouble.
Yet I had to admit that where Jennifer was concerned, I’d probably been guilty of being more flirtatious than I should have been. We laughed together a little too often, and she started thinking there was something between us. I realized there were some intentions behind the way she’d stand too close to me and constantly smile in my direction. Eventually she stopped dropping hints and just got angry. I wasn’t even slightly surprised the day she slammed a clipboard on the counter and stormed out for good, because she thought I was being a little too friendly with a pair of college girls who’d come into
the restaurant.
Gio must have figured out the reason, although he avoided saying so. He kept hoping I’d meet some great girl and settle down like he had. But why do that? I went out and had fun when I felt like it. There just wasn’t a lot of room in my heart or my schedule for anything else. Most of my energy went into the restaurant, and everything else was reserved for my family. So far I hadn’t met anyone worth the effort to change.
“If I had to guess, I’d say Jennifer just thought it was time for her to move on,” I said diplomatically. “The timing sucks, though.”
Gio nodded. “Might not be the worst thing, since we really need someone with better administrative skills. We were lucky to find Melanie on such short notice. She can handle payroll, accounts payable, tax filings, compliance, organization, and basic staff management for both restaurants. In the morning I’ll be having her fill out some paperwork and outlining her job tasks, but I’ll send her your way in the afternoon.”
“What for? Espo 2 isn’t really ready for staff.”
He looked at me like I possessed the thickest head on earth. “So you can meet her, Dom, and so she can see where she’ll be spending most of her time. We already talked about this. The office at Espo 1 is a closet, and we’ll have that huge space in the back of Espo 2. You two are going to have to share it. That shouldn’t be a problem, right?”
“Nope,” I said. “Not a problem at all. So what’s Melanie’s background?” No point in pushing the office arrangements—I had too much to do with the renovations. “She has restaurant management experience, right?”