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no way of knowing how much would happen to her little family by the time she saw her husband again on Halloween night.
    Nor did she know that by that time, everything that made him recognizable to her, everything that made him Roger Alan St John, would already be gone.

6
     
    The Villa Corelli Nursing Home was a four-story, stoic brick bear on East 152nd Street near St Clair. It had seen better days when it was known as the Erie Arms hotel, back in the thirties and forties, but for the most part, its sixty rooms were clean and safe and well run. The home was all male, all Italian. Nicky’s grandfather Louis Stella, now ninety-one, lived in a room on the fourth floor. As Nicky passed through the small lobby and signed in, he was immediately accosted by the standard nursing-home scents. Disinfectant, long-boiled meats, flatulence. Geezer smells.
    When he turned the corner in to his grandfather’s room, Nicky had a bag of candy in his hand, a plastic sandwich bag containing a few green jellied spearmint leaves, his grandfather’s favorite. The bag was a lot smaller than the bags they sold at the stores because Nicky made it himself, putting four or five of the spearmint leaves in a Glad bag, then stapling the paper label to the top. He had used the same label for two years, managing to sneak it out of the room every time he visited Villa Corelli. Left to his own devices, Louie Stella would eat five pounds of the shockingly sweet green candies if they were left in front of him, as he once had.
    ‘Hi, Grampa,’ Nicky said. He leaned over and kissed the old man on his stubbled cheek, and immediately winced. Someone had given his grandfather a bottle of cologne, and it appeared that he was wearing the whole thing.
    His grandfather looked up, squinted. ‘Vincent?’
    ‘No, Grampa. It’s Nicky.’ Nothing. Not a glimmer of recognition in the old man’s eyes. Nicky spoke a little louder. ‘Nicky, Grampa. Vincent’s son. Nicky.’
    ‘Vinny?’
    ‘Nicky.’
    Louis Stella gave his grandson the once-over. Slowly. Like he was sizing him up for a spanking. ‘Vincent?’
    Nicky looked to the other side of the room. ‘Hank . . . you want to give this a shot?’
    Hank Piunno was his grandfather’s roommate of ten months, an emaciated, birdlike man in his eighties, a classic anal retentive who always had the items on his night-stand arranged with Euclidean precision. ‘It’s Nicky, Louis,’ Hank said. ‘Your grandson. Nicky. Not Vincent. Nicky.’
    Louie Stella smiled, oblivious. He looked at Nicky. ‘Howsa you family?’
    ‘I don’t have a family, Grampa,’ Nicky said. As always, the stating of that fact chipped away another tiny piece of his heart. Meg. God, how he still missed her. He started talking before his emotions could seize his words. ‘You’re my family.’
    Louie Stella appeared not to have heard. But Nicky knew that he just as likely might have been back in Italy somewhere, adrift in time, a cocky, muscular kid walking his donkey through the crags and cairns of Bari. He looked up. ‘You catch the bad guys?’
    Nicky rolled his eyes. ‘That’s Vincent, Grampa. That’s my father. Your son. He’s the cop.’
    Nicky stood up, took out his iPod, put the headphones over Louie’s head. Like all the rituals in his life, Louie expected this, looked forward to this. Every visit, Nicky would play something from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana for his grandfather. Like all Italian men, Louie Stella misted up and began to drift with the opening strains of the intermezzo.
    Nicky studied the old man for a few moments, seeing his father sitting there in a few years, himself. Three generations of emotionally brittle men. Louie Stella had been a bullworker his whole life, a man who offered the world the intellect of his hands, the strong, unyielding muscles of his back. But now his hands were gnarled into something hardly recognizable as human. It was difficult for Nicky to believe that they were the same hands