It said GRAHAM, in Rosemary Castellano's looping, old-fashioned hand.
He stood looking at it for so long that the linguine began to get cold. Gina, who had asked her mother to make it the night before the fight and had not known, until she walked in, whether it would still be there, watched him read it. Just his own name, in ink, at a table. She watched him pick it up and turn it over, as if there might be something else written on the back, some condition, some clause. There wasn't.
"It's a place card," she said softly. "It means you've got a place."
He sat down. He put the card in the inside pocket of his forest-green sweater, over his heart, and he kept it there through seven fishes and three desserts and Midnight Mass, and Gina would find it, years later, still folded, in the drawer of his nightstand, soft as cloth from being handled.
*
On the second Saturday of December in 1993, the fifth floor of Halloran Brothers was as loud as it had ever been.
The bulbs were smaller now, little twinkling lights instead of the fat old colored ones, which Gina considered a crime. But the giant glass ornaments still hung from the high plaster ceiling, gold and crimson and peacock blue, turning slowly in the drafts. And the snowy gray daylight still came in through the tall arched windows over State Street, where a bell ringer was ringing on the corner of Washington.
Gina came up the escalator with her hand in a small mittened hand, and behind her came a tall man in tortoiseshell glasses with a little more gray at his temples, carrying a diaper bag, a shopping bag from the bakery on Taylor Street, and a second, much smaller child asleep on his shoulder in a snowsuit.