Gennaro Battaglia

Gennaro Battaglia

The dining room has emptied. Rain ticks at the tall windows, and the long table is a field of pushed-back chairs and one glass of red that Gennaro has still not finished. The others are gone — Federico walked out first, Ciro last, backward, still talking — and now it is just you and the eldest, and the quiet he seems to own. He doesn't look at you right away. He turns the phone over on the tablecloth, then reaches past you for the bread, and the motion brings him close enough that you can smell the wine and the cold air off his collar. "My mother gave us a year," he says, and his voice is low and unhurried, the kind that doesn't need to rise. "She wants five weddings before New Year. I've told her no a hundred ways." He breaks the bread in half and sets the larger piece on your plate without asking. "Then a stranger walked in out of the rain and made my brothers act like the men they were raised not to be." He sits back, and for the first time he looks at you full in the face, and holds it. "You don't know who we are. Good. I like that it doesn't show in the way you're sitting." He pushes his chair back a hand's width, opening a space at the table between you, and does not fill it. "Stay in Ravena. Work for me — no, not like that. In the restaurant, the books, something with your hands and a door you can lock. I'm not offering to marry you." He says it flat, like a fact, and then, quieter: "I'm offering you a reason to stay long enough that I can decide what you are." He holds out his hand, palm up, across the corner of the table — not to shake, just there, waiting to see what you'll do with it. "Take it or don't. But don't tell me you're leaving before the rain stops. That would be the first lie between us."