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sandwiches. Before he left, he asked Mike if they should have wine as well. “Rain check,” Mike said, because he had a sudden vision of an elegant evening sipping wine with this Italian gentleman and wanted to reserve that for the future. “I have to be back on the job after this.”
    “I will hold you to that,” Gio said.
    Mike hoped he would.
    “Tell me your sob story,” said Gio once he sat back down with their sandwiches.
    Mike had no idea what to say. “What do you mean?”
    Gio smiled and looked right at Mike. “If you have a teenage daughter but a young face, I imagine your age must be close to mine. Late thirties?”
    “I’m thirty-seven.”
    “Ah. As am I. In my experience, no one gets to be our age without a little tragedy and drama. So I’m asking, what’s yours? Also, sometimes you get this look on your face like you’re remembering something really sad.”
    “I do?” Mike couldn’t imagine how Gio had seen that in him. It was there, certainly, but Mike didn’t like to show that side of himself, especially not to strangers.
    “Here, I’ll tell you mine.” Gio smiled and folded his hands on the table. He leaned forward a little. “It went like this: I’d had a sore throat for a couple of days, but I kept singing anyway, because that was what you did. You drank tea with honey and the show went on. I was starring as Calaf in a production of Turandot in Beijing, and it was like every one of my dreams coming true.”
    Gio sat back a little and slid his arms off the table.
    “Nessun Dorma,” he said. “It is famous for a reason, you know. That aria, that was half the reason I began to sing opera at all. So there I was on stage, building up to the climax of the song. Calaf sings, Vincerò ! It means ‘I will win.’ He sings it three times, and the third is this tremendous note of triumph. Calaf is confident he will win this ridiculous contest with Princess Turandot. So there I am on stage, singing the lead up to that note: vincerò, vincerò .” He said the words like a chant.
    Mike’s heart ached at the realization that Gio rasped the words because he could no longer sing them.
    “In the middle of the third vincerò ,” Gio said, “my voice cracked and then died. ‘I will win,’ I was singing, but I lost.” He looked at the table. “There were polyps on my vocal chords I didn’t know about. What I thought was an oncoming cold turned out to be a bigger problem. It might have been fine, but my doctor called my profession ‘chronic overuse of the vocal folds,’ or something like that. They did surgery and discovered that, although the polyps were healing, they left behind scars. So now I can’t sing anymore.”
    Gio’s story was delivered with the casual affect of someone discussing a trip to the beach, but the watery look in his eyes conveyed a much greater pain. Mike’s sympathy was like a fist around his heart, and the emotion that caught in his throat might as well have been a softball because he couldn’t form words or make sounds. For his part, Gio looked at the table, stared at his sandwich, and shook his head like he didn’t want to speak anymore.
    Mike took a deep breath. “I know what that’s like,” he said. “To have the rug pulled out from under you. To have your whole life planned out for you until someone says you can’t have your plan anymore.”
    “Tell me,” Gio said, looking up with a softness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
    So Mike told his story. He explained about how he’d finished high school knowing he wasn’t college material. Not that he wasn’t smart—he knew he had some brains colliding around up there—but studying and tests were not where he would excel. He and Sandy had decided together to join the army. Shortly after they finished basic training, they were shipped off to Saudi Arabia. It was there they’d met another young private named Evan. Mike and Sandy and Evan became a trio almost immediately, the greatest of