“You don’t get to sit there acting like you knew him.”
“I did know him.”
“Then where were you?”
The words came out before I could stop them.
Years of exhaustion came with them.
“Where were you when he got sick? Where were you when I was choosing which bills could wait another month? Where were you when he started pretending he wasn’t hungry because he knew how much his prescriptions cost?”
Dante did not interrupt.
That made me angrier.
“You supposedly knew my father well enough to carry his photograph in your wallet, but I spent years watching him disappear in front of me.”
“I offered.”
I stopped.
Dante’s voice remained calm.
“More than once.”
“What?”
“The first time I learned he was ill, I offered to pay for everything.”
I searched his face for a lie.
“He refused.”
“Dad wouldn’t have been that stupid.”
Dante’s eyebrow lifted.
We both knew that was exactly the kind of stubborn thing my father might have done.
“He told me he had spent too many years keeping you away from men like me to let my money enter your house when he became sick.”
I looked back at the photograph.
“He knew what you were?”
“Yes.”
“And he stayed friends with you?”
Dante considered that.
“I’m not sure your father ever used the word friend.”
That sounded like Dad too.
“He tolerated me.
Corrected me.
Insulted my clothes.
Told me I spent too much on watches.”
Despite everything, I smiled.
Dante noticed.
“He also drank terrible coffee.”
“He made terrible coffee.”
“That too.”
For a few seconds, the impossible became strangely ordinary.
Two men drinking awful coffee.
My father criticizing expensive watches.
A younger Dante standing where I had never imagined him standing.
Then another thought struck me.
“You knew who I was tonight.”
Dante did not deny it.
“When I told you my name.”
“Before that.”
A chill ran through me.
“How?”
He tapped the photograph.
Dad was standing with one hand on Dante’s shoulder.
On the workbench behind them were several smaller photographs tucked along the frame of a dirty mirror.
One showed a little girl with tangled hair and missing front teeth.
Me.
“Your father talked about you constantly,” Dante said.
“I had seen photographs from the time you were a child.”
I remembered the moment at the table.
