Natalie A.:	Good evening. I'm Natalie Anderson. I direct the program in creative writing here at the college and I'm delighted to welcome you this evening to a reading by Christopher Castellani, an alumnus of the college who's returning this semester to lead our advanced fiction workshop. If any students with some experience in this genre would like to be considered for that course, I urge to introduce yourselves to Chris after the reading. This is a wonderful opportunity and we hope you will avail yourselves of the possibility. 
	I just finished Christopher Castallani's most recent novel, All This Talk of Love, and I can tell you that it had me from its very first sentence. Frankie Grasso and his mother, it says, watched the same soap, but they root for different women. There's so many enticing intonations here. For a start, the intimacy between mother and son deflected into pop culture. That deflection turns out to be emblematic of the many ways ferocious love gets managed by the characters in this novel, often through refusal. The disappointment when acknowledged, the letter unopened. It's not that Frankie and his mother, Maddalena, don't voice their love for each other, they close each nightly phone call with those words. It's not that this is a reticent family. The same complaints, the same worries, the same stories are repeated, ingrained, yet each family member has secrets ... Confessions that can't be spoken, sorrows that can't be born, self-knowledge that can't be faced, and deflection is their characteristic way of managing. 
	Then, to return to that first sentence, there's the slight transgressiveness of a young man watching soap operas during the day. It turns out that Frankie is working on his PhD in English, which perhaps accounts for his transgressiveness, or anyhow for his leisure time, [inaudible 00:02:31] for his procrastinations and the rationalizations with which he justifies them. 
	They root for different women. He likes the deranged ones, the pregnancy fakers, the poisoners, the tramps. They are necessary research for his chapter on the legacy of the gothic and the construction of female identity. His mother favors the patient, dutiful wives. They of the shellacked hair, and pantsuits, and unshakeable faith. I relish the distinctions drawn here between radical youth and conventional maturity, like it all the more because it turns out not to be so true. Maddalena has sacrificed her way into conventionality and hides behind it unquenchable sorrows. Frankie sleeps with a woman who wears combat boots, his professor ... Transgressive in almost every way. Yet, his dissatisfaction with derangement is palpable. We discover these complexities through the marvelous, illuminating shifts in point of view. Each major character, mother, father, son, daughter reveals sensitivities, obsessions, blindnesses. We understand more than they do, more than they reveal to each other. We understand when Maddalena refuses to visit Italy while her husband Antonio yearns for it, and surprisingly they're impaled by almost the same emotional reason. 
	Again and again in the novel, Castallani offers us analogous scenes, characters playing out similar scenarios while using similar articulations, making us freshly aware of the distinctions both subtle and major that underlie such seeming parallels. He anatomizes, too, the ways that tragedy percolates through different lives, souring, or paralyzing, or solidifying ... Even transformation. Two conclusions arise from these glimpsed interiorities. First, a quote: "You never know when everything will disappear. There is no permanence, no security, no absolute in this world." "Yet also, " another quotation, "the world will never end. The world will keep going with or without them." That continuity becomes, in the novel, its own consolation, it's own blessing. 
	Christopher Castallani, like Frankie Grasso, is the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Wilmington, Delaware. As I've mentioned, he's a Swarthmore alumnus and has earned a master in English Literature from Tufts University, and a master of fine arts and creative writing from Boston University. He lives, ordinarily, in Boston, where he's the artistic director of Grubb Street, one of the country's leading non-profit creative writing centers. He's the author of two previous critically acclaimed novels. I'll say that these novels together form a trilogy. A Kiss From Maddalena, that was published in 2003 and was the winner of The Massachusetts Book Award in 2004, and The Saint of Lost Things, published in 2005, a book since IndieBound Notable Book, but was long listed for the Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2006. In addition to his work with Grubb Street, Chris serves on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and as I mentioned before, will be teaching the advanced fiction workshop for us here at Swarthmore this semester. Please join me in welcoming Christopher Castallani.
Christopher C.:	They told me I have to wear this because the recording was for something ... It was going to be online, on the [inaudible 00:07:16] website. Right? OK. I'm going to have to turn it on, but it was the most important ... [inaudible 00:07:23] which I would have forgotten. 
	Can everyone hear me? Great. 
	Thank you so much for that amazing introduction. I have to say, that sitting there I thought well, just hearing that introduction was reason enough to come back to Swarthmore for the semester. On top of that, I get to ... I get to teach what I hope will be a great class with, I'm sure, wonderful students. I'm really honored to be back here and certainly honored to be reading for you tonight. Thank you all for taking time out of what is probably already a very busy semester, even though it's day 2. Having gone here, I understand how this works. I'm going to read ... I'm going to read from the beginning of the book, which Nat has already set up for me beautifully. Then I'm going to read from later in the book and I'm going to cover most of the four characters ... Three of the four characters in the book. We're going to hear from three of them. The only character you're not going to hear from is the daughter in the book. There's four characters. It's told from the father, the mother, who are both immigrants, and the adult children, or surviving children, are Frankie and Prima. 
	Since I'm teaching the creative writing workshop, I thought I would mention that the narrative strategy that I employed for this book was that I wanted to have each of the characters have their own sections, but those sections be separated by white space, not with their names, but white space so that we wouldn't have to introduce them. You'd just know who was speaking. Each would have ... So when you're in the son's head, you know you're in the son's head and you're only in the son's head and when you're in the daughter's head, you're only in her head. The only character who can break into another's character's section, is the mother character ... The Italian mother character. Any of you that have an Italian mother might sort of get why I did that. Also, she is the character who is carried through all three of the books and who has a particular relationship to knowledge and memory in this book. That was the rationale behind that. 
	I'm going to read from the beginning and then I'll skip ahead and I'll tell you when I'm doing that. You've already heard some of this. 
	This is the beginning so there's no need to set it up. 
	Frankie ... Oh sorry. I do have to say this first. The first line of this book I wrote when I was a student here at Swarthmore in 1993. 20 years later, here it is in this novel. If that's not inspiration enough, I don't know what is. I wrote that in the creative writing workshop that I took with a visiting professor in Swarthmore in 1993. Here it is again.
	Frankie Grasso and his mother watch the same soap, but they root for different women. He likes the deranged ones, the pregnancy fakers, the poisoners, the tramps. They're necessary research for his chapter on the legacy of the gothic and the construction of female identity. His mother favors the patient, dutiful wives, they of the shellacked hair and pantsuits and unshakeable faith and looks to them as examples of proper behavior in 1990s America. Frankie shouldn't be surprised. His mother's life has been a Jeremiah ad in two languages and two countries. And her 72 years have taught her to distrust romantic passion. 
	Precious minutes on the phone with Frankie she spends wishing doom on the amoral women of daytime, shocked that some network executive has allowed them to stray so far from decency in the middle of the afternoon. "In life," she says tonight, after Frankie praises the pregnancy faker for her resourcefulness in finding her long lost identical twin sister and persuading her to carry the baby she can't admit she lost, "You have the truth or you have nothing." And he what he wants to tell her is, by that formulation not a single member of the Grasso family, not to mention anyone he knows, has a blessed thing. 
	Instead, he says, "I'm exhausted. I've been working all night on this chapter. My phone bill's 10 pages long. Wait until she has that baby, then we'll see." 
	"I'll call you back right now," she says. "I have the money. Daddy put me on a plan .10 cents a minute. 'If you can call your cousin in [inaudible 00:12:02] twice a week,' I tell him, 'I can call Boston for a few dimes.'" 
	"I need sleep," Frankie says. Then, "Alright, call me back." He hangs up and takes a sip of whiskey. The light comes on in the window of his neighbor's house, an identical triple decker but better maintained. Recently in his german immersion course, Frankie invented the adjective [inaudible 00:12:25], or thrown together crowdedly, to describe his neighborhood. He loves his word, which looks and sounds like the claustrophobia it conveys, and connotes the grime and desperation of those thickly settled towns that surround and choke a city. 
	"This is your home now," his mother said the one time she visited him. She stood on his crumbling front stoop with her arms outstretched, facing the vista of chain link fences and vinyl siding. "It's ugly, but it's yours. You'll never want to leave."
	"It's only a six hour drive," he said. "I'll be back all the time." Instead, they settle for Frankie's nightly phone call at 11:01, no matter where he is in the world, one of their many promises to each other. 
	Frankie's friends call their parents once a month and fly home twice a year, less often if they can swing it. Like him, they toil in obscurity in the service of literary scholarship. They have advanced degrees and drug habits and a love affair with irony. Unlike him, the toil, or is it the obscurity, has soured them of distractions like family and authentic human connection. "You really talk to your mother every single night?" They ask him. "How? Why?" 
	"Because she's alive." He says. 
	"But what do you talk about? I haven't spoken an honest word to my mother since kindergarten."
	"Who said anything about honesty?" He says. 
	He lets the phone ring five or six times, imagine his mother on the other end staring into the receiver. When he finally picks up, she says, "What's wrong with you?" And though he thinks of three things off the bat, he treats the question as rhetorically and lets her talk. 
	Maddalena Grasso switches the phone to her left ear and again takes up her husband's pants, which she's been hemming off and on for hours. She's been on the phone since eight o'clock: first with her daughter, then with her friend Arlene from the dance studio, then Sister Mary asking another favor for the church, then a wrong number with a friendly voice, and now, finally, always finally, her Frankie. 
	"Your sister was here this afternoon." She says. "You should have seen. She had my old sweat suit on, the pink one with the rhinestones on the cuffs your [inaudible 00:14:42] Ida gave me 30 years ago. She's like a hurricane, your sister. Never any time to sit and have a conversation. She had a bowl of soup and some pasta leftover standing in front of the sink the whole time like a peasant. I said, 'Sit down one second. It's not good always to rush.' But, she has no time. She's gonna call you this week, she said. She's gonna tell you she and Tom got that plot, the one with the water. They had the meeting with the builder and they got it."
	"The lot, you mean." says Frankie. "Not the plot."
	"Lot, plot, whatever. And you know the land next to it? You saw it last time. It doesn't have any water but it has those tall trees like you like. It's an acre, almost, for sale. And I was thinking, Daddy too, how beautiful it would be for you to live next door to your sister. And you won't have to throw away your money on rent anymore." 
	"Who's got that kind of cash?" Frankie says. If he doesn't shut her down now, she'll offer at least a down payment, a cut of the money she and his father have been saving in his name since the night of his conception, a night she's told him about in more detail than was necessary. 
	For a moment, Frankie allows himself to imagine the unimaginable: He and his girlfriend, Professor Birch, clearing the brush from the little strip of land, she in her tank top and hairy armpits and army issued boots, waving to his sister and brother in law from across a koi pond. Professor Birch is not the type for big Sunday dinner's cooked and served and cleared by women, for shared acreage, for lawn care. She's the type who phones her husband while Frankie's inside her to remind to him mail the insurance bill, who makes Frankie call her Professor even when she's naked and sullied and rummaging under his bed for her socks. She's exactly the type of woman his mother was afraid he'd meet in the big city. 
	With or without Professor Birch, Frankie has no plans to move back to the suburbs, a fact he can never admit to the woman at the end of the line. He has been called to a bigger and deeper life, far from the narrow bed in which he was planted. And yet, it is a stipulation of his unspoken contract with his parents that he treat this stint as a graduate student as temporary, a regrettable but necessary period of time away from home that will allow him to return in triumph as a doctor of philosophy and English literature, secure a highly paid professorship at the university, marry a sweet Italian girl, and start a family like his sister did and his older brother would have done, had he lived. 
	When Frankie is quiet for too long, Maddalena worries he's jealous of his sister and brother in law and all their money, he's fallen in love with Boston, and will never come home. He's too young and confused to think about plots. Let him be, she thinks, but how impossible that is. So she tells him her stories over and over again, in different words but with the same lesson at the end of them, stories about how it was for her to be brought to America from her village across the ocean like a piece of furniture, in love with one man, but married to another, a stranger, and just a teenager she was, without a word of the language, and none of it by choice, not at all like her Frankie, who left his mother in Wilmington four years ago, not for love, or money, or a better life, but for school, as easy as you'd leave a movie if it wasn't making you laugh. 
	"You know, Prima saved you a place at the table for the confirmation," she says. "She has to tell the catering how many people. Every person who doesn't show up, she still has to pay forty-five dollars."
	"I told her I wasn't coming."
	"You should come," she says, "To respect your sister. Not because you want to or don't want to."
	"To be honest," Frankie says, "I'm disappointed Patrick's getting confirmed at all. I had high hopes for him when he became a Buddhist and gave away his stereo."
	"Don't even mention that," his mother says. "He's normal again now and I've never seen your sister more happy." She takes a pin from between her lips. "You know, you can bring somebody if you want. I'll pay for the train for both of you. Prima put you down for two just in case."
	"I don't need train money."
	"Forty-five dollars a person," she repeats. "And that's without the open bar. Can you imagine? And if you don't belong to the country club you can pay a hundred dollars a person and still they don't let you have the party there." She lets that sink in for Frankie, though elegant things have never impressed him.
	Maddalena held all of her children's First Communions at the [inaudible 00:19:21], the Grasso family restaurant where there was home cooking and plastic red tablecloths and white crepe paper hanging from the walls. First, the party for Prima, the first child, her daughter, the angel, then for Tony, the first son born in the new country, then seven years after him, for Frankie, who saved her. Every night when the phone rings and he's there to say, "Hey Ma, what's up?" he saves her again. 
	Frankie rubs his eyes. Even if Professor Birch could ditch her husband, he knows exactly what they'd do at the silly fete: Shove free cocktails, gorge on the buffet, and spend the rest of the time on the lobby couch sneering at Prima and Tom's unexamined embrace of Catholicism. Worse, Prima's already called to inform him that the confirmation isn't all the Grasso's will be celebrating. She has some big announcement, one of her famous surprises, one she wants Frankie to hear in person because it will effect the entire family. She offered no more details, convinced he'd blab to their mother. 
	"Turns out, I have to present a paper that weekend." he says to Maddalena. "Not that anyone ever asks me about my schedule, it's kind of a big deal actually." 
	"Can't they just tell you now?"
	"The university's not very organized. Harvard. What do you expect?"
	"Harvard?"
	"Yes. Harvard. Does that make it alright? I can miss the formal induction of my innocent nephew into the racist, sexist, xenophobic institution known as the Roman Catholic Church, if I'm speaking at Harvard?" 
	"Do they pay you?"
	"Something like this you don't do for the money," he says. "You did it for the prestige." The truth of course is that there is no paper and no invitation from Harvard, which won't even let Frankie into its fortress of a library, let alone that quote, millennium approaches: anxiety and authorship in the fantasy [inaudible 00:21:17] conference. There's certainly no prestige. Despite employing some well connected and widely published professors, Dr. Birch among them, Frankie's graduate school is solidly second tier and Frankie himself is passionately meeting, but not far exceeding its modest expectations. Upon earning their PhDs, he and his classmates can expect not tenure tract positions at coastal universities, or the seven sisters, but if they're very lucky, [inaudible 00:21:45] jobs at mega state schools in Des Moines, or Tallahassee, or some other regional airport city. As far as Frankie knows, he's the only one sleeping with a professor, an advantage he counts as distinct in the job market. 
	"Your sister will be devastating," his mother says, "but school is more important."
	"I'm sorry," Frankie says, "I really am. This semester's strung me out. I'm not myself. Tell everybody I feel terrible." 
	"Do what you have to do." Maddalena says. "That's why you're up there. Work hard. Stay straight. Drink some whiskey, it helps you sleep." 
	"Excellent idea." He says. 
	"Goodnight." she says. "I love you."
	"Love you too, Ma. Goodnight."
	"Goodnight Frankie," she says. "I love you. I love you." It's important to her to say the words until she's sure he's hung up. 
	"Bye, Ma." Frankie says. "I love you. Bye." It's important to him to say the words until he's sure she's hung up. 
	And once again, she has spared him this time, as so many before. How easy life can be, Frankie thinks, when your mother knows so little of the world and you are not her favorite son. 
	I'm gonna skip ahead a bit ... Quite a bit ... And read from the father's perspective. In the meantime, what's happened is that big announcement that Frankie mentions is that his sister is ... Decided she wants to take the entire family back to their ancestral village in Italy and she's paying for the whole thing. That's the surprise ... That she's bought the tickets and wants them all to go. The parents have never been back. Maddalena refuses to go back for reasons she's explaining and won't explain at the same time. Antonio, the father, is desperate to go back because he longs for his village. The other thing you need to know ... Other things you need to know is that the Al Di La, as I mentioned, is the restaurant where ... That Antonio and his brother have built and it's about forty years old now, so it's an established restaurant and Antonio is wondering what's going to happen to it after he passes. You also know that they've had a son, Tony, who's passed away. Sorry. All we know until now is that he went missing at fifteen and was found in the river ... That he presumably jumped off the Delaware River bridge and no one knew why, and that Maddalena and Antonio had Frankie as a kind of replacement child. 
	Throughout, you also know that in these early chapters Antonio's noticing Maddalena's strange behavior, but he keeps it to himself. The behavior has gotten dramatically worse over the holiday season, things like she's putting food away in the wrong cabinets and saying she washed dishes that were still dirty. She's showing signs of something wrong with her mind ... Antonio's in his late seventies ... This guy [inaudible 00:24:49] is a family friend ... And I think that's all you need to know for this next part. 
	This is from later in the book. The chapter title was originally ... I liked it better so I'm going to say it ... My editor made me change it, but the chapter title originally was Someone Is Always Missing. 
	The house is ... This is Christmas Eve. The house is finally quiet. Antonio in his chair, in this room with wrapped presents and empty, tossed-aside envelopes, watches midnight mass at the Vatican on TV. The sound's on mute because the picture is all that matters. Get the camera off the pope, he thinks, show the people, show the piazza, and if you can, swing the lens over the mountains forty miles to Santa Cecilia, buried in snow. Show me my old house, the chestnut trees, the frozen spring. But the picture doesn't change. The pope mumbles on. From the window he can see St. Mary's, the church that holds his family, most of his family, not Tony, not Mario. Someone is always missing. 
	The parking lot is parked with the cars of hypocrites. He's not one of them. When he needs God, he turns over in his bed and puts his arm around his wife and says [inaudible 00:26:07]. He doesn't need any red sweater or polo [inaudible 00:26:10] or gift certificate for a haircut at some overpriced salon. He feels every dollar his wife and kids waste on him, on [inaudible 00:26:18], on anything, as an insult. You want to show me you love me, save your money. Show some respect. Finish your school. Take me to Santa Cecelia, where I belong. I can count on one hand the years we have left together. 
	He's there now in his village, a boy again in his heavy coat. The grown ups surround him with candles in their cupped hands, the church cold as a crypt. There is the ceramic baby Jesus at the alter to kiss and adore, or maybe it's plastic. Did they have plastic back then? When did plastic start? The years are a jumble. Antonio was a boy of 7 and Maddalena was a baby. The day her parents announced her, they propped her on the counter of the grocery and customers came to welcome her to the world. Antonio looked up at her wiggling toes, at her [inaudible 00:27:08] sisters pinching her cheeks. The [inaudible 00:27:11] lived down the street from his family. They owned that big store and the Grasso's owned a tiny [inaudible 00:27:16] of land, a three room house, and a few chickens. The baby Maddalena was pure white, no dirt under her fingernails, no marks on her skin. She glowed in the sunlight of the grocery window. He may have invented all of this, the light, the baby on the counter, but it's as real as the fire beside him on this Christmas Eve, seventy-two years later. He reaches up to tickle Maddalena's toes. His father is not there to slap his hand away. His father has been gone forty years. 
	How strange to be at the end of life, so soon. Seventy-two years from one midnight to another. From the boy at the counter looking up at the old man in the chair ... Sorry. From the boy at the counter looking up to the old man in the chair looking back. So what if he feels sorry for himself? He's not allowed? He's never been a brave person. He's not one of the immigrants to write a book about, the ones who came to America with empty pockets. He had a mother and father to lead him by the hand on and off the ship, find him his first job, give him a house with a finished basement and a yard with a [inaudible 00:28:20]. He had friends, cars, girls, a brother to put up half the money for a restaurant, a faithful wife, an ordinary life split into two worlds. Soon, when he's gone, a few of those people over St. Mary's would cry, but only for a little while. Their lives are full enough without him. The customers would still come to the Al Di La for their calamari and stuffed shells, they'll sit waiting for their tables under the framed black and white photo of Antonio and Mario with their arms around each other, and if they notice the photo at all they'll say maybe ... 
	Strange to be a sad old man in an easy chair, the years settling on him like dust, and yet, not strange at all. He and his batch of friends at the lodge talk of nothing but the years. Moments ago they say I was a man of twenty-five leaning over the railing of a ship, watching Italy sink into the ocean. Their kids, like Antonio's, appeared one day like magic then disappeared. Why did nobody warn them of the grief of fatherhood? Not that your kids grow up and leave you in every possible way, that they're strangers from the start. They don't stand still long enough. They let you get only so close and you work too many hours, and they tell their friends their secrets, and they love you, but with their souls only, the way they love their country, or God. Their hearts belong to other people. He's the only person alive who knew the secret of Tony's heart. He keeps it closer than any he's ever known. It's like a heavy stone in his pocket, one he takes out on nights like this, when nostalgia's got him by the balls, when he's got too much time to turn the stone over and over and rub it with his thumb as if it's beautiful and precious, when in truth it was the one bit of ugliness in his son, and it was the ugliness that killed him. 
	When you can shut the rest off, this is how Antonio chooses to remember his oldest son, a boy who loved his father and the place his father built. From the age Tony could walk and talk, the only thing he liked more than walking and talking at his father's side was walking and talking at father's side at the Al Di La. No one has loved the restaurant so strong since then. After school, Tony would come straight to the Al Di La and sit for hours in a booth doing his homework. When that was done, he'd fold napkins, arrange the forks and knives on the tablecloths, cut the slices of cheesecake and store them in the refrigerator, he drew new logos and signs for the restaurant on the backs of the place mats and showed them to his father joking that when he grew up and took over, he'd make the place more modern. He had a talent for design from making the perfect crease in the napkins or spacing the knives and forks exactly the right distance apart. 
	By the time he was fourteen, in 1970, he was doing the work of a bus boy and making better tips than some of the waiters, because who couldn't fall in love with him? He was already tall, already handsome, the shadow of his first beard growing, his legs strong, his face lit up for the old ladies. There was a waiter that summer, Dante, the son of Marconi the electrician. Antonio hired him as a favor to his father, even though he had no experience. Dante was nothing special, worse, he had a tattoo on his left leg, and big horse teeth, and a ponytail. He was on his way to becoming a [inaudible 00:31:45], another one of those children who wasted their parents sacrifices, but he had charm. The customers asked for him by name and Tony followed him around like a puppy dog. 
	It was after Dante came in June of 70' that Tony changed. Dante brought him albums and taught him to do mean but perfect imitations of the managers, Gilberto and Lucio. Lucio had a high girly voice, Gilberto a stutter, and both imitations made everybody laugh. Dante pushed Tony to play pranks on the dishwashers and cooks and his sister, to hide the aprons, or their salt until they got so mad they started fighting with each other. He made it Tony's job to cover his tables while he snuck off for cigarettes with his long haired friends who hung around outside the restaurant near the bus stop waiting for the end of his shift. Dante's act bothered Antonio from the beginning, but he put up with it because of his friendship with Marconi and the free electric work and because Tony liked having him at the Al Di La. When the two had different schedules, Tony sulked and yawned and sat in the corner writing in a book of guest checks he carried around in his apron so he would feel like a real waiter. 
	One day Antonio heard Lucio asking one of the other boys, "What's the prince always scribbling?" He was the worst gossip of all, Lucio. Still is. 
	"Who knows?" said the bus boy. "He's a smart kid. He's probably doing his homework." 
	"In the summer? In a check book?" said Lucio. "It's not normal, all that writing. It's too many words."
	Antonio ignored this at first. He couldn't blame Lucio for not liking Tony or Dante because of all the teasing they did about his high voice and he watched his son more closely. Tony took that book of checks everywhere. Whenever he got a free second, he'd write in it with concentration. At the end of every day, he'd tear out a handful of pages, stuff them in his pocket, and throw the rest of the book in the trash. One day the widow Ida called to say she needed help in her kitchen, could Antonio send over somebody tall and strong? He sent Tony, who left his apron behind on a hook in the kitchen, and in it's front pocket the book of checks. 
	Ida did not live far. Antonio had only a few minutes. From the window of the Al Di La, he watched Tony cross Union Street, jog over to Ave, and turn the corner toward Edcio's house. He had long legs and thicked out curls and a smart head on his shoulders. He was so young and innocent and decent, with a long life ahead full of every possible good thing. This is the other way Antonio chooses to remember him, his son who turned the corner that day and came back someone else. 
	Antonio flipped through the lime green pages; First the specials, the list of orders, the running tally of tips. The middle was blank. When he got to the back pages, Tony's handwriting small and scratched filled the lines. He'd crammed words into every inch like he was a prisoner and that these, the last scraps of paper he'd get. They were letters; some to himself, some to Dante Marconi. Dante's name was on every page, but his letters, they made no sense. No boy in his right mind sent letters like this. 
	"Do something Tony Grasso," they said, "before it's too late. Find a priest. Go to the bridge. Your mother will be better off. It's too late already. Too late." 
	What was he talking about? Too late for what? What was Dante doing to him? 
	"You have flour all over your legs today. You are the beginning the end. Take me for a ride with Bruce and Mikey and the guy with the broken arm. Take me anywhere. Why aren't you talking to me today?" Then, some kind of poem about a field in the spring and a dream about the ocean. "In my dream, a wave knocked you down and when you came up for air, you had a hole in your back like a whale." At the top of the dream page, that name again: Dante. 
	Antonio didn't understand. The black and blue ink marks blurred into a live mess of nonsense. [inaudible 00:35:46], his teachers back in Santa Cecelia used to call sloppy handwriting. [inaudible 00:35:51], she taught him, was a sign of disrespect. When Tony & Prima did their homework, Antonio sometimes stood guard over them as they wrote, watching like a hawk for [inaudible 00:36:01]. He couldn't necessary help them get the right answers, but he could insist that their handwriting showed respect. Straight rows of neat letters, clear numbers, not this disgraceful mess of Tony's. You don't write so sloppy and small, Antonio knew, unless you are ashamed. He tore out the last three pages and hung the apron back on the hook. He went to the dessert fridge where Dante was scooping out portions of tiramisu onto a plate. "Go home." Antonio said, grabbing the plate. "You don't work here anymore." Fuck Marconi and his free repairs. Who cared that Dante chased after him asking why, saying, "Please, please Senor Grasso, what did I do?" Antonio didn't say another word. All that sissy begging made him want to punch him in the face. 
	Antonio left out the back door and walked down Union. If he could stop time and think, think hard, Tony's words would make sense. He shoved the pages deeper into his pocket. He wandered the streets, passed the old men in their folding chairs, made a left and then another left, forgot where he'd turned. At the next intersection he got so confused, [inaudible 00:37:08]he knew better than his backyard, that he couldn't remember how to get back. He stood for a long time, paralyzed, dizzy. Cars rushed passed. The traffic lights blinked. Then, someone called his name. Julio Fabres stood on the other side of the street ... 7th street, so he'd gone in a big circle ... And waved. 
	"Antonio Grasso!" he yelled again. He was standing in front of his house. "You here for a visit?" He walked toward him, arms out. "Come on in," he said. "Come in." he said. Julio let him into his little empty row house. He talked on and on; Politics, the weather, neighborhood gossip. Antonio was still paralyzed. Every month, Julio said, more Italians moved out of the city. He was sad to see them go, to see a neighborhood of strangers. Tears were forming in Antonio's eyes and Julio stopped. "What is it? [inaudible 00:37:59]?" 
	He took out the pages, now crumpled and smudged, from his pocket. "I'm sorry," he said, "I don't know what to do." He laid them on the table between the glasses of wine Julio had poured. "Tell me what they mean." They called Julio Fabres the professor of little Italy. He had some college. He understood poems and dreams. Antonio hadn't ended up on 7th street by accident. The professor would find a normal reason for Tony's letters, tell Antonio not to worry, they were harmless, the boy was so young, we all get crazy ideas when we're young. 
	Julio put on his glasses. He read all three pages twice, then he took a sip of wine, folded the pages in half, and slid them back over to Antonio. He looked him in the eyes. "I'm sorry, compa," he said. "This is bad. Very bad, maybe, but it doesn't have to be." 
	"Tell me."
	His son had an unhealthy crush Julio explained, an infatuation. What made it bad news, of course, was that the infatuation, the romantic idea he should have for a girl, was for the Marconi boy. This idea got him twisted in the wrong direction. You see men like this on the news, he said. You read about them in literature; The Greeks, even some Romans, but you never think they can be someone you know, someone of your own blood. The good news, according to Julio, was that first, Tony was young and there was still time for him to grow out of it, and second that the Marconi boy didn't share his feelings. Nothing had happened between them. Julio pointed to the bottom of the first page ... You don't know I'm alive. You don't see me. You will never drive me to New York, Dante, Dante, Dante, Dante ... "That tells me there's nothing happening from the other side," said Julio. 
	"He's only fourteen," Antonio said. "What kind of feelings can he have yet?"
	Julio smiled. "What kind of feelings did you have when you were fourteen? And he's almost fifteen in two months."
	Antonio stood and walked to the other end of the kitchen. "This Dante, he's got a ponytail. He looks like a girl."
	"That's a good sign," Julio said. "Then, you know some of the greatest artists in history ... " But he didn't finish the thought. 
	"It can't be." Antonio said. "You can't tell anything based on that mess." He waved his arm towards the checks, still folded on the table. "You can be wrong. It could be just a joke he's playing." He took the pages and tore them into a million pieces. "That part you read, it doesn't even make sense. 'You'll drive me to New York.' That could mean anything."
	"Like what?"
	"Like he wants to go to New York," Antonio said. "See the Statue of Liberty. It can't be what you're saying. You can't tell me there's no chance you're wrong just because you read books."
	"I never said there was no chance. I hope I am wrong," said Julio Fabres. "That boy is like my son too. You think we want this for him?" He folded his hands. It's more common than you think, especially these days. It's a scary time, all those crazies in California. Just keep an eye on him. It can go away I think. It's not impossible. It can be what they call a phase."
	"I know what a phase means," Antonio said. "I don't have as much school as you, but I know the basic words and I have common sense and common sense tells me this can't be." 
	There are always signs. They tell you; the newspaper and TV shows, all they talk about is signs. You're supposed to look for them and then know what they mean when you find them. But Antonio's never trusted himself to read signs. He's a man, a father, easily blinded by love, by the faith that if you want something badly enough for you or your children, and work hard to get it, it will come to you. After that day in Julio's kitchen he was as blinded as ever by love for Tony, more blind, if you can be such a thing, and wanted more fiercely than he'd wanted in his life for Julio to be wrong, for his son to turn out normal, healthy, untouched. 
	So he watched him. He stole more checks, read more pages of the same [inaudible 00:41:50] about Dante, always and only Dante long after Antonio had chased him from the Al Di La. He went through every scrap of paper in his room, looked in the back of his dresser drawers, under his bed, in the corners of his closets. He smelled his clothes, checked behind the mirrors. He listened in on his phone calls. He followed him home from school, kept two blocks behind him in his car. He waited in the parking lot while Tony sat with his friends in a booth at the charcoal pit, looking happy enough. Right up to the day. 
	When he went missing, they searched his room, pulled out his desk drawer, and turned it upside down. Index cards, notebooks, and a stack of rubber banded guest checks fell to the floor. Quickly, Antonio slipped the guest checks into his pocket. He kept them with him, reading them over and over for a clue to where his son might have run off. Two days later they dragged his body from the river. 
	Tony left his family with ugly words. Antonio burned them in a garbage can in the backyard. At the funeral, he avoided Julio Fabres' eyes and never spoke to the man again. When Julio visited the house at holidays, Antonio walked passed him without a nod, talked over him when he tried to tell a story. After a while, Julio understood the sign: Stop coming to the Grasso's altogether. And not long after that, he was dead too and there wasn't a person left who knew Tony's heart the way his father did. 
	Lately, that miserable time comes back to Antonio like a movie in his head he can't turn off. The words on the guest checks won't stay down. They shout at him from the dirt behind the garbage cans. The flour on Dante's legs, the body falling from the bridge, Tony asking him with his crumpled up, destroyed face when he got back from helping his zia Ida why he'd sent his best friend away. And there are times like now when Antonio feels, can even admit it, relieved, almost grateful, that Tony died when he did. As he's learned more of the ways of the world, seen it change and rot before his eyes, he's come to convince himself his son would never have survived it. Forty year old men dying from pneumonia, teachers at the dance studio prancing around in their tight pants unashamed, protests in San Francisco and DC, parades in New York celebrating. Would that have been Tony's life? A Grasso's life? He'd have been forty-three this year. What does forty-three look like for that kind of man? Would he be wasting away too? A talking skeleton like Rock Hudson, who'd once been handsome and rich and top of the world? 
	As impossible as it's been for Antonio to imagine Tony's adult life, it's worse to feel this relief, this sickening gratitude. So he pushes it away. It's one o'clock in the morning. From the window he sees the cars leaving in the church parking lot. He goes downstairs, turns on the spotlight, and walks to the end of the driveway without his coat. Before long, his family rounds the corner, then they say their goodbyes and see you tomorrows and Prima and Tom and the boys get in their cars ... Too many cars for one family ... A waste of gas and mileage and extravagance. 
	Before Frankie can disappear into his room, Antonio asks him, "So how was church?" 
	"How do you think?" Frankie says, smiling. "Smoke, mirrors, hypocrites." 
	They share this, at least. Neither of them believes in God or trusts the Catholic church to do anything for you except take your money. 
	"Thank you for going." Antonio says. "It means a lot to your mother."
	Frankie shrugs. "It's good people watching." 
	They can talk like this only when Maddalena's not in the room. Just as Antonio is about to ask Frankie more questions, isn't' he glad he got it out of the way tonight instead of having to get up early tomorrow morning, are are of his friends in Boston religious, what does he think keeps people coming back year after year for the same nonsense ... Maddalena comes towards them. Frankie winks and they kiss each other goodnight. 
	The dining room table is cleared. The dishes are clean and the hallway swept. Only the den remains a mess. The presents, the wrapping paper crumpled into balls, the pine needles. Antonio and Maddalena will take care of this tomorrow together before they drive with Frankie out to Greenville. Now, it's time to rest. Maddalena closes all the lights. She lies on the couch in front of the tree using her old flowered house dress for a blanket. Antonio goes back to his chair, then changes his mind and sits beside her, her feet and ankles in his lap. They don't talk. They're both so tired. 
	"Another year," she says. The TV stays on mute. The tree glows. They fall asleep this way, eventually, and when they wake it's morning and the tree lights are still on and Tony's still gone. And they're still older than they've ever been and it's like any other day, except when Antonio says, "I'll make the coffee," Maddalena asks, "But who are you?" 
	Thank you.