“Can I Sit With You?” The Mafia Boss Asked The Homeless Woman — Unaware She Was His Past Eye Donor

Chapter 7

At nine o’clock on Thursday night, the diner door opened, and Ruth Hollis looked up and nearly dropped the coffee pot. He had come alone. No car parked across the entrance, no man with salt-and-pepper hair standing by the door with both hands clasped over his stomach. No one at all. Just a man in a wet coat. And this time the diner didn’t freeze. It merely lowered its voice, which Mrs. Hollis thought was even stranger.

Julian didn’t walk straight to the last table. He went to the counter, studied the board on the wall as though he were truly reading it, then said he would have two bowls. Mrs. Hollis opened her mouth to ask a question, then didn’t. She ladled out two bowls, set them on a tray, and realized her hands were trembling slightly, which annoyed her, because she was sixty-three years old and wasn’t in the habit of trembling.

Julian paid. He left the change on the counter without a word. He picked up the tray and carried it across the room, slowly, and everyone pretended not to watch. Nora heard him from four tables away. She heard the rhythm of his steps, stored since Tuesday night in that fixed place where nothing was allowed to move, so she didn’t need to think. She knew at once. Before he could set down the tray, she said he hadn’t brought the other man with him.

Julian paused for half a beat. Then he said no. He placed one bowl in front of her. Nora didn’t reach for it. She kept both hands resting on the table and pushed the bowl back toward him, not hard, only enough to slide it beyond her reach, and said she didn’t accept food from people whose names she didn’t know.

Mrs. Hollis, standing in the middle of the aisle with the coffee pot in her hand, froze. Someone in the diner coughed once, then went silent.

Julian looked at the bowl of soup she had pushed back toward him. For the past ten years, grown men had waited three weeks merely for the chance to sit at the same table with him. And this woman had just returned a four-dollar bowl of soup. He sat down. He said, “Julian.”

Nora tilted her head. She asked if it was only Julian. He said for today that was all. She considered that longer than he expected. Then she reached out, found the rim of the bowl, and pulled it back toward herself. But she didn’t eat. She picked up the spoon and did something Julian hadn’t prepared for. She scooped, divided, and poured half of her soup into the other bowl, working very slowly and precisely, her left index finger resting lightly on the rim so she could tell how high the liquid had risen without spilling a single drop. Then she pushed that bowl toward him. She said they would share. She said strangers came to be less strange when they shared a meal.

Julian looked down at the bowl. He was the man who had paid for both bowls on that table. He could buy the entire diner, the whole building, the entire neighborhood before sunrise. And the woman sitting across from him had just given him half of what he’d given her, as though it were the only reasonable thing in the world. He didn’t understand why his throat felt the way it did. He picked up the spoon.

Before taking a single bite, Nora bent down and poured a little soup into the bottle cap beneath the table. Ghost ate first. Ghost always ate first. Julian watched the movement and thought of a handwritten ledger in ballpoint ink, of three initials in the final column dated three years ago, and he didn’t ask. He had intended to ask all afternoon. He had prepared three different ways to do it. But he sat there and watched her feed the dog first, and he didn’t ask.

They ate in silence. Near the end, Nora said he was eating more slowly than he had the night before. Julian said he hadn’t eaten the night before. She said she knew. That was why she’d mentioned it. She offered no further explanation, and he asked no further questions, and outside, Providence rain fell across Ashcroft Street and ran toward the harbor, where things that belonged to him were being unloaded in the darkness, and for roughly twenty minutes on that Thursday night, Julian Voss forgot them completely.