Read Online Art on Fire by Hilary Sloin - Free Book Online

employed all through his adolescence until the business could no longer hold its own against Pepe’s and Sally’s, and had finally surrendered. Alfonse had gone to work for Luciani’s landscapers, and had soon moved out of the old neighborhood into downtown New Haven.
    No one at Pepe’s remembered Alfonse, and though he claimed to remember the pizza maker, he did not try to say hello. They chose a table up front by the window and ordered a small pepperoni and a pitcher of ginger ale. Alfonse told Francesca he was sorry “about all that had happened with your little friend—”
    â€œLisa,” interrupted Francesca, almost violently.
    â€œLisa. I’m sorry, baby.” He hesitated before bringing up the topic in which he was most interested—his own intruded-upon love, a young, perfect (more perfect with each passing year) love, scribed on a face that remained fresh as white sheets on the line in the backyard of his mind. Still, almost thirty years later. He shook his head. “Your sadness reminds me of a girl I loved.”
    â€œWhat girl?” asked Francesca.
    â€œA girl I knew before your Mama, long, long ago, way back inmedieval times,” he joked in that adult way, simultaneously relishing and resenting his ripened age. Outside, a man was walking two strange dogs with rat ears and skinny, nervous bodies. One sprayed against a lamppost, the other, at the same moment, began compulsively rolling on the ground. Alfonse stared with a blank expression; Francesca considered laughing, but decided against it.
    â€œYou know, baby, each thing that doesn’t work out means something else will.”
    â€œI don’t care about anything else,” said Francesca.
    The pizza arrived, and Alfonse began pulling the slices apart, loosening them, making the cheese bleed onto the metal plate. Francesca quickly pulled a slice away and dropped it onto her plate, blowing on it. Her stomach was empty; she hadn’t eaten anything since the rugelach at her grandmother’s that morning.
    â€œYou know,” Alfonse said with his mouth full, then stopped to chew, having secured his position as speaker. He swallowed. “You can talk to me about anything.” Francesca thought he sounded like a faker, like he was recycling lines he’d seen in a movie scene between a father and daughter. “Anything at all. That’s why I’m your Papa. To help you.”
    â€œOkay.”
    They ate for several moments. Alfonse took a sobering sip of ginger ale, swallowed. He looked up toward the kitchen, where one could watch the pizza maker throw the ball of dough into the air, catch it on his hardened fist so that it immediately spread out and dripped down the length of his wrist. In quick, fleeting thoughts, he remembered the old restaurant, all his dead relatives.
    â€œGrandma says you were very upset.”
    â€œNot really.”
    Alfonse was an ambiguous father, a quixotic, kind presence who lurked about in the children’s lives, surprising them with stuffed animals and tickling. But it was clear Francesca needed someone here, and Vivian had been too repulsed by the day’s events to lend a hand. So the task had fallen upon Alfonse, and he was flailing about in the dark, trying to prove to himself that his parental love was unbiased and blind and that it mattered not to him that Francesca appeared to be taking her tomboy-ness to a pathological level.
    â€œIs your friend in some kind of trouble?” He stopped eating and folded his hands under his chin, resting his elbows on the table. An isosceles triangle, thought Francesca.
    â€œNo.” She threw her crust back onto the pizza plate.
    â€œWell, then why did you tell Grandma it was an emergency? Why did you have her bring you to such a bad neighborhood?”
    â€œIt’s not a bad neighborhood.” To Francesca, it was a perfect neighborhood. Its residents, and all the Chinese people of the world,