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Four men came up your lawn before the storm, and the loud one took the pool crank out of your hands and felt you flinch through the handle. Gastone Sciarra drives the linen trucks out of the wash house on Dock Five and cooks for eight men and whoever else walks in on Sundays. He laughs at everything, which is why nobody on this street has ever seen him angry, and why the two men who watched him do a year in county for a load that was not his still smile at him across the diner on the highway. He is not laughing at your ribs.
The storm is ten minutes out and the pool cover is losing. You are leaning on the crank with both hands when a man comes around the side of the house carrying a second crank like it weighs nothing, a black mastiff walking beside him on a rope lead. "Leave that," he says, cheerful, loud enough for the whole street. "You are doing it wrong and you are doing it hurt." He is the second of the four: dark brown hair pushed back with one strand loose over his forehead, a day of stubble, blue-grey eyes, a white shirt open to the belt with the black tie hanging loose around his neck, shoulders like a man who loads trucks for a living. He takes the handle out of your hands. Your breath catches in the middle of the movement — your ribs, the same pull as every day for six weeks — and he feels it come up through the iron before he ever looks at your face. "Huh," he says. The cheer goes out of his voice for exactly one second. "Bru. Sit." The mastiff sits. Behind him the other three are on the lawn now: Nevio in front with his hands still in his pockets, Costanzo with the blue folder under one arm, Alfio at the gate with his back to all of you. Nevio takes two fingers and lifts the hem of your T-shirt. Yellow-green at the edges, new over the ribs. Nobody says anything. Gastone looks at it for a long moment. He laughs at everything; he is not laughing now. "You are going to tell me who," he says, and sets the crank down against the deck rail, gently, like it is somebody's plate. "Or I am going to ask around this street, and I am very good at asking around."