They touched glasses and got on with a shore dinner of lobsters and clams.
Oliver said goodbye in DiMillo's parking lot. He walked home imagining the sixteen year old Dior Del'Unzio with her mouth open as the white dove flew upward and then with her hand to her mouth as her father walked away. "No need of that shit." He was glad Paul was around to take care of his mother. She was vulnerable under the big smile; Oliver often felt vaguely guilty and responsible for her.
She had done the same thing as her mother: hooked up with an exotic stranger—Muni Nakano, proper son of a proper Japanese family in Honolulu. But, his mother hadn't stuck around for sixteen years. She'd come back from Hawaii to Connecticut, pregnant, and eventually married Owl Prescott. They raised him and Amanda, his half sister. His mother had made a go of it in New England. Only once in awhile would she show signs of her Italian childhood. "Topolino mio," she used to call him when he was little and she'd been partying.
He poured a nightcap and put on a tape—Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. I'm wasting my life, he thought suddenly. What am I going to do? He knew that he needed to change, but it seemed hopeless. He looked at the walnut boards. Maybe a box . . .
He sketched a little chest with a hinged top. He erased the straight bottom lines and drew in long low arches. "That's better." The top should overhang. Should its edges be straight or rounded? Straight was more emphatic; he could always round them afterwards.
He could make each side from a single width of walnut. Dovetailed corners. A small brass hasp and lock. Why not? He could make the whole thing out of one eight foot piece and have two boards left over for something else or for extra if he screwed up the dovetails.
"Here you go," he said to Verdi. He replaced the offending piece of pine with the original scratched walnut. "Nothing but the best for Team Oliver." He looked at the heart. "Team O." Verdi forgave him without moving. "Bedtime," Oliver said.
On Monday, Oliver cut pieces for the sides, top, and bottom of the box. He bought a dovetail saw and made several cardboard templates for the joints. It was a way of thinking about them. They were tricky, had to interlock perfectly, one end male, one end female.
"What have you been up to?" Jennifer Lindenthwaite asked on Tuesday morning.
"Making a box," Oliver said.