14 “Doppio” by Annie Borelli

Evening is the only refuge from the summer heat. Finally, the sun sinks behind the low skyline of Palermo. The streets are misted with twilight, the restaurants and cafés dense with bodies, all sheltering from the last sweltering hours of the afternoon.

He is waiting for her at Caffé alla Rosa, tucked into the back corner table, his delicate fingers wrapped around a frothy cappuccino. He doesn’t see her yet. She is silhouetted in the doorway; the summer day has ravaged her, her neck still slick with sweat, her hair tied in a desperate knot atop her head. She is carrying the order from the Don in her hollow chest. You are to marry him.

Everything is too hot in Sicily.

She wants to buy time. Can she approach the counter and order a drink beneath his notice? Her eyes down, she ducks behind the backs of chairs, bobbing heads, jostling elbows. She slides through ambient conversations, slanted shadows, the writhing scent of coffee in the air, tangy and head-clearing. He doesn’t see her. He is enraptured in the safety of his cappuccino. He doesn’t know that he’s sinking into a final moment of peace, that he is going to drown.

She stands at the counter and waits to order a doppio. When the coffee arrives, she will be out of time. There is only this moment—this waiting for the double shot, the jolt of courage she prays it will give her. She signs the cross, and no one sees.

What’s the problem? the Don had asked. Don’t you love him?

            Yes. She does. That is precisely why she does not want to marry him.

Then why do you frown at me?

            Because he is not ready. To marry him would be to betray him.

She said: He will be trapped.  

            It is not optional.

            The doppio arrives, and she finishes it in one swallow. It sears all the way to her stomach, charting a fiery course, and she bids it onward into her limbs, the tips of her fingers, her legs, her head, her mind. Make me brave.

She turns towards the back corner table and catches sight of him again. He is reading the back page of the day’s paper, his gaze idling over the words, his face placid. His oil-black hair captures the gold light of the café; his swan neck is arched forward as he reads.

She sighs. No, it is not that she doesn’t love him.

She leaves the empty doppio glass on the bar and approaches the table where he sits. His head lifts as she slides through the café, as though he knows her footsteps apart from the rest.

“You’re late,” he says. The tilt of his voice is gentle. He smiles, and her heart sickens. “Sit.”

The coffee is beginning to do its work in her veins. She is off-balance as she takes a seat on the edge of the chair across from him.

She searches his eyes. They are the clear-water eyes of someone without expectations: wide, wet, warmed by the cappuccino on the table in front of him. She does not want to see the weight of what she has to say suck the yellow café light out of his eyes. She does not want to see the knowledge take root in his chest the way it has in hers. She could greet him instead. She could delay this reckoning for another day.

But the words are inevitable. It is better for them to spill onto the table now. “Will you marry me?”