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across the narrow avenue, banners flapped with red lettering that wished long life to the Holy Mother. It was Assumption Day. He’d forgotten. The feast would start in a few hours, and how many of them would go crustless and crumbless at this feast because Rocco hadn’t opened the store?
    The bell in the belfry of the church began to toll.
    Somebody said, “She has that sunglasses that she rips them off her face, like now I’m supposed to be scared.”
    “Oh, oh, oh,” somebody said. “Here he is!” A woman with tightly bobbed red hair—her name was Testaquadra—pointed at Rocco like he was a criminal, and two by two the eyes began to seek him out and fix their gaze.
    It was eight o’clock in the morning.
    The woman Testaquadra approached him, kissed the sides of his face, muttered something he failed to hear amid the chatter of the others, and walked off down the hill.
    “The store is closed,” he softly told a buxom young lady with maybe sympathetic eyes, but she chose to look away from him, pretending it wasn’t her he meant to address. She was one of the many, faithful to the host that desired a leader who would speak to them collectively and explain why no bread today. He himself was not such a person; there are those whose greatness of spirit only the Lord sees; he could not speak in a loud voice to the all. He was a simple believer. He turned and went in under the tattered canvas awning of his store and sat on the steps.
    The others were still talking among themselves, watching him closely but averting their eyes whenever he looked back, and awaiting his address.
    Near him in the crowd stood a very young girl, towheaded, slit-eyed, with sharp teeth (her name was Chiara), and he beckoned her with his finger, and she approached him bravely.
    He made a sandwich of her little hand between his hands and said, “Rocco doesn’t work at the moment. He’s taking a holiday. A week, perhaps. Tell them. Afterward, things will rearrange themselves nicely.” He picked up his cup and saucer from the concrete step, and sipped, and flapped his hand toward the others that she might run off now and explain for him.
    Instead she sat on the step. She petted his biceps, scanning the crowd, vigorous, wrathful.
    When D’Agostino poked through the front of the crowd, Chiara leapt in front of him, folding her arms as if to forbid his approach, and clicked her heels.
    Sidestepping the girl and bending himself double, D’Agostino kissed the air on either side of Rocco’s ears. “You suffer, and so I bless you,” he said.
    “There’s something maybe you can explain to them for me, and then they’ll shove off,” Rocco said.
    “Yesterday evening I came and knocked, but there was no answer,” D’Agostino said. “So unlike you. But now it’s already understood.” He added, “Most likely you’ve already seen this,” and unfolded the newspaper he had stowed in his vest.
    In order to hold the paper and still leave one hand in the care of Chiara, who had resumed her seated position beside him, Rocco was obliged to balance his saucer in his lap.
    The main headline, with a gruesome photo, read QUADRUPLE AMPUTEE HEADED HOME, PLANS TO RELAX . D’Agostino stooped, seizing the paper, and flipped it upside down. Under the fold, next to an ad for a carpet-cleaning service, five inches of a single column began with the heading REMAINS OF ELEPHANT PARK NATIVE INCLUDED IN OPERATION BIG SWITCH .
    Chiara’s stockings were powder blue and stitched higgledy piggledy with little fishes. He wondered what he had done to deserve her at this time.
    Then, with alarming conviction, a reckless laugh sprung from Rocco’s stomach. He held the newspaper aloft. “You have misunderstood, Joseph. All of youse have misunderstood. This isn’t Mimmo. There was an error at the highest levels.”
    He laughed again, wickedly.
    “There has been a misidentification. ”
    D’Agostino, the side of his nose twitching as he spoke, asked him what did he