RICHIE DROPPED HIS son off at about 4:30. He said he was heading back to pick up Kathryn at the Four Seasons. I did not tell him about my lunch with his father. Perhaps he already knew. If he did, he didn’t mention it. But he already had enough on his plate today.
Richard hadn’t even taken off his coat yet, but Rosie was already sitting on his chest and lapping his face. I saw Richie smiling at the sight of them. I put my arms around him, and kissed him harder than I’d planned.
“It’s all going to work out,” he said when we both pulled back.
“Pretty to think so,” I said.
When he was gone, I asked Richard how he was doing, having to say goodbye to his mom.
“I’m okay,” he said. “My dad says I have to keep being brave.”
I smiled at him.
“Guess what?” I said. “He’s always telling me the same thing.”
“But it’s hard sometimes,” the little boy said.
“Is it ever,” I said, then asked if he wanted to change the subject.
“Yes, please,” he said.
“You like pizza?” I said.
“We didn’t have pizza in London that much,” he said. “Mom said it wasn’t good for me.”
Another reason to hate her.
“Well,” I said, “how would you like to go have the best pizza?”
“Can Rosie come with us?”
“No,” I said. “But we’ll bring some pizza back for her.”
“Is pizza good for dogs?” he said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Then the two of us got into my car and drove to Santarpio’s.
THE WARREN TAVERN was an older Boston landmark. Santarpio’s had better pizza.
It was on Chelsea Street in East Boston, close enough to the airport that you could shuttle there from Logan. It had become even more of a local legend in my lifetime because the father of Mike Eruzione, the captain of the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey team, had bartended there for years. I wasn’t much for hockey. That was Richie’s favorite sport, even more than baseball. But everybody in Boston knew the name Eruzione, because he’d been the one to score the winning goal against the Soviets in what even I knew was the greatest game ever played.
My own father had been taking me to Santarpio’s since I was Richard’s age. The place had been around since 1903, and the owner, Frank Santarpio, used to joke that they had to finally build an airport nearby so that people could fly to Boston if they wanted one of his pies.
I parked on Bremen Street. When we were inside we went to our left and into the back room, and scored a table under a picture of Mike Eruzione.
“Who’s that?” Richard said.
“A famous hockey player whose dad used to work here,” I said.
“My dad likes hockey,” he said. “He told me he’s going to take me to a Bruins game.”
“The two of you are going to do a lot of things together,” I said.
“With you, too?” he said.
“You bet,” I said.
We ordered an Italian cheese, large. When Richard asked why I had ordered such a big pizza I told him I wasn’t just bringing some home for Rosie, but maybe even for my friend Spike.
“Is Spike a dog?” he asked.
I told him no, but that Spike was even more loyal than one.
The little boy didn’t talk more about his mother leaving, nor did I. We just ate pizza. I happily watched him eat. I asked him if he was excited about his new school. He said he was excited and scared at the same time.
“New things,” I told him, “can be both.”
“That’s what my dad says,” Richard said. “You sound like him sometimes.”
“You’re very smart,” I said.
“Thank you, Sunny ma’am,” he said, and smiled at me as he did. It was, I had decided, a pretty spectacular smile.
When we finished eating and the leftovers had been packed into a small pizza box, I told Richard we should get going, so as to be back at my house when his father got back from the airport. So we came down the ramp out front, went straight to the corner, and walked the fifty yards to Bremen. Then I unlocked the car, secured Richard into the booster seat that Richie had remembered to leave on my doorstep. The pizza box was next to Richard in the backseat. He said he would guard it for Spike and Rosie.
I was about to get behind the wheel when I felt the gun pressed into the small of my back, knowing exactly what it was even with my peacoat on. I had no chance to clear my own gun out of my purse, not that I would even have considered it with a little boy in the backseat.
“Remember me?” he said. “The Harvard man?”
He leaned in close to my ear now.
“Who snuck up on who this time, little girl?” he said.