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Tom gets to the restaurant first and sits at the bar. It's a neutral place uptown where they've never been before, full of women in business separates and men who are drinking water with lemon, everybody smoking. Tom orders a bourbon and the bartender's look makes him feel guilty. Nobody drinks during the work day anymore, but Tom is sixty-four and he's allowed to be old fashioned. He throws his coat over the chair next to him and watches a TV that's mounted over the bar. John Lennon was murdered last week, and the news programs are still going wild over the story. Tom hates hearing about it; he's never been interested in popular music, but the story of Lennon being shot on the street outside of his apartment reminds him of his wife's death. She was thirty-one, shot by a random hood who swiped her purse when she was on her way home from visiting her mother in Queens. Tom never sent her out with a bodyguard, because in his world men didn't attack civilians, especially not women. When Teresa died, there was no rival family to rage against, no vengeful rally he could mount in order to feel like there was something he could do, a way to atone.
He finishes his drink and looks toward the door. Michael is walking toward him, snow melting on the shoulders of his black coat.
"Mr. Hagen," Michael says, grinning as Tom slides from his bar stool to hug him. Michael married his third wife back in May and he's been disturbingly cheerful ever since. She's twenty-nine years his junior; Michael is a big-shot CEO at an airline company and she was a struggling flight attendant when they met. Tom supposes she's nice enough, but his brothers' marriages still make him nervous. Between the three of them there have already been five complete disasters, and an ex-wife is always a potential informant. The police pressure has gotten almost unbearable in the past five years, and Tom keeps saying he'll retire, but there's so much legal work to be done.
"Have you waited long? What are you drinking?" Michael has a habit of stringing questions together without waiting for answers. Tom just smiles and watches him order a diet Pepsi from the bartender. "Gotta be careful, you know?" Michael says, grinning and patting his stomach.
"Yeah, sure," Tom says. "You've got a young wife to impress. I'm too old to give up my bad habits."
"Oh, Tom, you've never had a bad habit in your life."
Tom taps the cigarettes in his trouser pocket. "I don't know about that," he says. "The doctor wants me to quit these."
"It's true," Michael says. "They'll kill you." He smirks and pulls his own pack from his coat pocket, lights one and hooks his finger into a glass ashtray on the bar, dragging it toward him.
"How're the kids?" Tom asks. Michael has six children now, two from his marriage to Kay and three from the ten year stint with Rita, plus a step-son with Tracy, the new wife.
"They're great, just great," Michael says. "Anthony and Shirley are coming for Christmas. Mary will be up in Seattle with what's-his-face."
Tom laughs to himself. Michael's only daughter has been married for seven years and has two kids by her husband, but Michael will hardly offer his son-in-law the time of day. Sonny is the same way with his daughters' husbands, and Tom thinks it has something to do with the hell they all went through during Connie's marriage to Carlo. There's a certain lingering suspicion about outsiders who marry in.
Fredo and Sonny come through the door already arguing. Sonny is gesturing wildly, Fredo shrugging and holding up his hands. When Fredo sees Michael and Tom at the bar he breaks into a grateful grin and hurries forward to hug both of them.
"Here he is, fresh from the airport," Sonny says, slapping Fredo's back. "Where I told him to wait at the goddamn luggage claim -- listen, you're lucky we weren't another hour late. This clown was sitting at the gate in perfect comfort the whole time I was waiting at the fucking luggage circus. I'm thinking he missed the damn flight, worried, and he's sitting there watching TV and doing a crossword."
"I forgot, okay!" Fredo says, ducking Sonny's fake punch. "You know I got a bad memory."
"Yeah, I know, that's why I told you to write it on your hand."
"I washed up on the airplane! Thanks for the seats, Mikey, they were great."
"As if you don't fly first class anyway," Sonny mutters. Fredo is working out in Vegas at one of the hotels they own on the strip. It's an easy job and it suits him, though they've had problems with his drinking and an illegitimate kid and two arrests for disorderly conduct at his own goddamn club. Tom loves Fredo, but he still associates the sight of his face with hours of legal paperwork.
"What the hell are we doing at the bar, are they trying to make us wait for a table?" Sonny asks.
"No," Tom says, picking up his coat. "We were just waiting for you two. I've made a reservation."
"Of course you have," Sonny says, pinching Tom's cheek. Tom goes hot around his collar, wishing Sonny wouldn't do things like that in front of their brothers, though he always has and it doesn't mean anything to the casual observer. The truth about his relationship with Sonny is the most closely guarded secret of his life, and he's always had a lot of things to hide, usually on behalf of other people. This segreto is his, and he's obsessively careful with it, though Sonny undoes his precautions by smacking his ass too frequently in public.
The table Tom reserved is by the windows and looks out on Madison Avenue. Guys are putting up a sign for a new vitamin shop across the street, and Tom watches them work while Sonny complains about the stuffy-looking businessmen and women at the tables around them.
"What is this place?" Sonny asks. "The WASP cafe? You're kidding me with this."
"I thought it would make sense to go someplace low key," Tom says. He doesn't say it out loud, but Michael is not always fond of going out to their usual neighborhood places with the whole gang. He's tried to distance himself from the family in his professional life, though Tom and Sonny both believe that his affiliation with the Corleones makes his corporate enemies fear him in a way that serves his interests well. "None of these bozos know who we are," Tom says.
Sonny shrugs like that's his main problem with them. The family has lost a lot of prestige since the bust up at the Apalachin Meeting. Sonny himself barely got out of doing time for drug trafficking. Tom knows Sonny misses the glory days, but some of the ways the business has changed are for the better. There hasn't been an all-out war in New York since the forties, only small-time revenge killings and a few bloody messages sent over botched deals here and there. Drugs are the main action now, and Tom sometimes thinks that disenchantment with the changes in the business was part of what killed Vito. The doctors said it was his heart, but that could mean a lot of things.
"So, listen," Sonny says. He starts almost every conversation this way, and it's such a comfort to Tom, the things about him that don't change. "I'm driving back from the airport with Fredo and I see this old hotel off of 95th. You know what I'm talking about, Tommy? It used to be the, uh, Plaza Suites or something. So I'm thinking of looking into who owns it, you know? Petey's been telling me real estate's the thing to buy right now."
"Listen to you, a legitimate businessman," Michael says, grinning at him.
"Hey, watch your mouth," Sonny says. "All's I'm saying is it looked like the kind of dump we could pick up cheap."
"It's not a bad idea," Tom says. "Depending on what they want for the place." The family is doing okay, but they're not rolling in money like they were in the early sixties. Pete Clemenza Jr. is their accountant, and he's a little more gung-ho about investment opportunities than Tom would like him to be.
"They're tearing down the hotel next to mine on the strip," Fredo says. "Maybe we could pick that up, too."
"I'm not talking about Vegas real estate," Sonny says, making a face. "That town is going to shit. No offense, Freddie, but it is. People are afraid to walk the streets at night. Gambling's a tourist racket now, and Petey says we're losing on everything out there."
"Hey, let's order, alright?" Michael says, motioning to the waiter. Tom is grateful for the change of subject, and he and Michael share a look across the table. There was a near fallout between Sonny and Fredo after Vito died, because Sonny wouldn't give Fredo any real responsibility or even let him make decisions about the Vegas side of the business. Tom and Michael managed to patch things up between them, but it's still tenuous. Sonny has always had a hard time understanding that what Fredo wants from him is not just love but respect. Still, Tom can't blame him for not trusting Fredo with anything too important; it's on his counsel that Sonny has avoided it.
They talk about the stock market and pass around pictures of the grandchildren while they wait for their meal to arrive. Sonny orders a bottle of wine and then another one; he calls the meal a special occasion, and it is. It's the first time they've all been together since last Christmas. Even with Mike here in town, they're all too busy to spend much time together, except of course for Tom and Sonny, who haven't parted in twenty years. Tom has become such a silly old fool that he gets uncomfortable when Sonny runs errands without him, and he'll send bodyguards racing after him if he tries to go out alone. Even Sonny's trip to the airport to get Fredo was a source of worry, but Tom had a meeting in town that he couldn't miss. Tom still can't shake the feeling that they got off too easy, that the danger that was so close for so long is still stalking them, even with business cooling off and the children and grandchildren installed in the normal lives Vito wanted for them. Santino Jr. is the only one of the kids who's done time; he's worked for the family in the past but is mostly just a bum, albeit a good-hearted one like Fredo. Tom's boys both went to college. Frank is an architect, married with kids up in Albany. Andrew went a little God-crazy after his mother died and became a priest.
"Try this," Sonny says, slicing off part of his swordfish and dumping it onto Tom's plate. "It ain't bad." He takes some of Tom's french fries and stuffs them into his mouth, pointing his fork at Michael. "I read you're having some union problems," he says, still chewing.
"They're not problems," Michael says. He keeps his eyes on the steak he's cutting into, his sawing growing a bit more forceful. "They're issues."
"What's the fucking difference?" Sonny looks to Tom as if he'll know; Tom shrugs. "All's I'm saying is --"
"All's you're saying, right," Michael mutters. "I know what you're saying because I've heard it, and no, thank you, I'm not interested."
"Ungrateful," Sonny says. "Always ungrateful."
"C'mon, Sonny," Fredo says, because somehow he's the peace keeper between the two of them. "Say, how's Con doing, anyway? I haven't heard from her in a few weeks."
"A few weeks?" Sonny scoffs. "You think she talks to me that often?"
Connie still blames Sonny for the death of her first husband, and not unjustly. She doesn't know that Carlo died not just because Sonny hated him, but because he was mining for family secrets and selling them to a rival family. Sonny has forbidden Tom, the only living person who knows the truth, from ever telling her, so she goes on hating Sonny, or projecting the whole mess of her first marriage onto him, anyway, even now that's she's happily married to some slob from Connecticut who treats her like a queen.
"She'll be there for Christmas," Tom says. With Ma and Theresa gone, the embarrassing task of arranging family parties has fallen to him, and he's heard all of the RSVPs personally. Connie will be up in two days, and she'll insist on doing all the cooking, trying to replicate the things they ate at Christmastime as kids.
"Let me tell you one thing about unions," Sonny says, and Michael drops his fork to his plate in exasperation.
"Sonny," Tom warns.
"What? What, Tom? I'm trying to help."
"You should listen to your consigliere," Michael says.
Tom takes a drink of his wine to hide the heavy swallow that built in his throat before Michael said consigliere. If ever anyone could figure out what's been going on between him and Sonny since the forties, it would be Michael, and for a moment Tom was terrified that he would say wife, but he's being crazy. Michael would never embarrass them like that.
"I saw in the paper that they're already starting to rebuild the MGM Grand," Tom says, directing this mostly to Fredo, since the property is right across the street from the hotel he oversees in Vegas. Less than a month ago, eighty-five people died after a fire broke out in one of the Grand's restaurants. The fact that it could have happened in one of their hotels made Tom's heart pound, and later he had to laugh at himself. As if they weren't responsible for the deaths of more than eighty-five people already. But these people were innocents, families on vacation, and Tom has been working to make sure that the sprinkler exemption that allowed the MGM fire to spread isn't in use in any of their hotels.
"That's awful disrespectful," Sonny says. "Those people are barely in the ground."
"That's business," Michael says, and everybody at the table understands what he really means: You don't know what real business is like.
"That's the bottom fucking line, is what that is," Sonny says, leaning toward Michael until his chest is pressed to the table. "That's not the business I'm in."
"Well, of course, selling coke to another generation of Americans is all about respect," Michael says, careful to keep his voice low. Sonny starts to get up, as if they're going to take this outside, but Tom anticipates this and reaches for Sonny's leg under the tablecloth. He squeezes Sonny's thigh until his muscles go slack again, and Sonny falls back into his seat, muttering under his breath.
"Mike," Tom says. "Sonny, let's just have a nice meal." He knows he sounds like their mother, and he sighs. He feels as tired as she began to look toward the end of her life.
"Yeah, c'mon, fellas," Fredo says, twirling his wine glass nervously. "It's Christmas."
They all turn to their plates, no one willing or able to come up with another subject of conversation. Coke is an especially sensitive one, not only because of the fortune and trouble it's brought to the family, but because Fredo and Sonny both came to know the drug on a more personal level for awhile. Tom takes the awkward moment of silence to again thank God that that's over with. It's not in Sonny's nature to destroy himself so consciously, but he came awfully close.
"Hey, listen," Fredo says, timid, like he's not sure if he's allowed to speak yet. "I thought maybe after lunch we could go by Mom and Pop's graves and, you know, put some flowers down. I ain't been in New York for so long, and, I don't know, I'd like to."
"I've got a meeting at two," Michael says. "With the Northwestern people, we're trying to acquire the company. It's kind of a sensitive time. You go for me, okay, Freddie?" Michael squeezes Fredo's shoulder, and Fredo pushes his lips together, nods.
"Me and Tom ain't too busy," Sonny says. "We'll come with you, won't we, Tommy?"
"Sure," Tom says, nodding. He feels badly for Michael; he knows that his inability to go with them isn't the intentional slight Sonny will make it out to be.
"Pop would be real proud of you, Mikey," Fredo says, understanding this, too. "Buying companies and all. That's great."
"Yeah, I don't know," Michael says. He sits back in his chair and stares at his plate.
"Hey," Sonny snaps, and he stares across the table at Michael until he looks up. "Don't give me that shit. He was proud of you, and I know he told you so. So don't forget it. Okay? Okay?"
"Pop wasn't too happy with me when I got divorced," Michael says. He pulls his cigarettes out and taps one into his hand, but he doesn't light it, just twirls it between his fingers.
"He wasn't happy when I got divorced, when you did, when Freddie did," Sonny says, gesturing around the table like the ghosts of their marriages are standing behind them. "Shit happens. Ma and Pop had a perfect marriage, and they knew that, rest in peace. They wanted that for us, sure, but they didn't hold it against us when we screwed it up, believe me."
"It was different with me and Kay," Michael says. "I could have made things work if I wanted to. Pop knew that."
"And I couldn't have made things work with Sandra?"
"No, Sonny, you couldn't," Michael says, and they're all quiet for a few tense seconds before Sonny starts laughing. Tom and Fredo join him, and Michael breaks into a grin.
"Yeah, that's true," Sonny admits.
There is dessert and coffee, talk about the Giants and betting on the Super Bowl. Tom has never bet on a sporting event in his life, though he was raised on gambling money, and this was true even before the Corleones took him in. When Tom was a kid, his biological father was always out pissing the money his mother made away, unknowingly paying into the industry that would fund his son's college education.
Michael and Sonny fight over the bill for a good ten minutes, and Tom talks to Fredo about the settlement the families of the people who died in the Grand are likely to get.
"It'll be in the hundreds of millions," Tom says. "The owners will have to sell, and for cheap, too."
"But we don't want that place, right?" Fredo says, looking nervous. "It's haunted, right? Bad luck."
"I read about an inn up in Ithaca that had its business triple when they started telling people there was a ghost on the third floor," Tom says. "Apparently a woman killed herself there back in the forties."
"Jesus, Tommy, where do you read this garbage?" Sonny asks after he's slipped the waitress his credit card in secret, Michael's still sitting on the table amid the crumbs.
"Well, you couldn't get me there," Fredo says, shuddering. "And I don't even believe in ghosts, not really."
They say goodbye to Michael while they wait for the valet to bring the cars around. Tom took a cab from his meeting, so he climbs into the passenger seat beside Sonny, Fredo in back with his luggage. They stop at a market in the Bronx to buy flowers, and Tom thinks about ghosts on the way to the graveyard. He's holding the flowers in his lap, one of the lilies bumping his nose. He would have liked to have gone to a nicer shop and put together a more tasteful arrangement, but Sonny and Fredo would have picked on him. Vito was the one who taught him how to garden; he let Tom help with the tomatoes and charged him with picking grasshoppers off the basil when he was twelve. Theresa kept an elaborate garden at their house while she was alive, and Tom would keep her company while she worked in it, going over his papers in a lawn chair while the boys drove toy trucks across the grass. When Theresa died, he didn't know how to take care of most of the things she'd planted, but the idea that they would all die along with her terrified him. He didn't think he could survive the sight of her flowerbeds going wild and then brown and dry, so he had Carmella explain everything, the names of flowers and what they needed to survive. She kept insisting that she would send a gardener over, but for some reason Tom wanted to take care of Theresa's flowers himself, perhaps because he'd felt guilt to rival his grief when she died. He'd been in love with Sonny since he was fourteen, and while he'd always told himself that it didn't matter, that he could still be a good husband, there was a resignation in his wife that broke his heart more after she was gone than it had when he'd had to face it every day. They were good friends, but they didn't often share a bed, especially after the boys were born, and whenever Theresa complained about his devotion to his work, they both knew that his devotion was more to Sonny than the job, and that this was what truly bothered her.
Tom stops off to put flowers on his wife's grave while Sonny and Fredo move ahead to their parents' headstones. His eyes still cloud over every time he visits her here. He wishes now that he'd somehow found the courage to be honest with her. She might have gone on to find the real love of her life if she heard the truth from him out loud, but Tom doubts she ever would have left the boys or split up the family. There was no real solution, but he doesn't regret his marriage. He thinks of what she was like when they met; he was in law school and she worked the counter at the library. One of the other desk workers relentlessly tried to flirt with Tom – a busty girl with red hair, he forgets her name – and he and Theresa would smile at each other secretly when she wasn't looking, as if her efforts were their private joke.
Sonny comes to stand beside Tom and clamps his hand on his shoulder. Tom hopes it isn't disrespectful, standing over Theresa's grave with Sonny, but Sonny loved her, too, and he likes to think, hopes desperately, that her spirit understands in death what he couldn't explain in life. He's never talked about it out loud with anyone, not even Sonny. It's something that happened when he and Sonny met, an unbreakable spell they've never questioned and never had any hope of dissolving, however much they sometimes wanted to. Sonny took one look at Tom, picked him up by the arm and brought him home. Tom followed without hesitation and stayed when Sonny asked him to, carved a place at his side and set about the business of belonging only there, never anywhere else.
"Freddie needs a minute," Sonny says. He squeezes Tom's shoulder, and Tom thinks, of course, of the day, the week, the year after Theresa died. No one but Sonny could console him, and for at least a couple of weeks he couldn't even stand the sight of anyone else's face. Part of him wanted to avoid Sonny out of respect for Theresa, but he couldn't. Sonny was the one who understood not to say anything, Sonny who never shut up. He sat quiet with Tom for hours and made him drink water. He took the boys out to the movies or the park when Tom wasn't fit to be in public. He let Sandra divorce him so he wouldn't have to leave.
"Tommy, Tommy," Sonny says. He sighs, lifts up his hand and lets it fall back onto Tom's shoulder. "What are you gonna do, huh?" It's what he always says when he can't figure out how to express something. Tom just shakes his head. He never tries to answer.
It's four o'clock by the time they get home, and Fredo had fallen asleep in the back, leaning onto his carry-on bag. The day is gray with fat snow clouds that haven't burst open yet, and Tom has had far too much wine to get any work done, so he goes up to his bedroom while Sonny helps Fredo with his bags. They both moved into the main house after Vito and Carmella died, the houses he and Sonny used to live in with their families now occupied by close business associates. Santino Jr. lives in the apartment Fredo used to stay in, so they've set Fredo up in the guest room. Tom takes his cholesterol pill with a glass of tap water and pushes through the messy assortment of junk on the dresser until he locates his glasses. Sonny's sloppiness has rubbed off on him over the years, but only when it comes to housekeeping. He sneaks a horticultural magazine from the drawer of his bed stand and settles in to read it. The subscription was a gift from Frank's wife, who also has an interest in the subject. Sonny gives him hell already for the time he spends puttering around the estate's gardens, so he tries to be discreet about his leisure reading habits. Sonny did tell him once that he reminds him of Vito when he's out there, an old man with his tomatoes, and Tom didn't say so, but it meant a lot to him.
He puts the magazine away when he hears Sonny coming up the stairs, and grabs the remote control from Sonny's side of the bed. He flicks the little television set on their dresser to the five o'clock news and pretends to be watching the weather report with interest when Sonny comes in.
"Big storm coming," Tom says, nodding to the television. Sonny shuts the door behind him and sits on the end of the bed to take off his shoes.
"Better call Connie," he says. "When's she flying in?"
"I think she was gonna drive."
"Drive? What is she, crazy?"
"You want me to answer that? I'll call her tonight."
Sonny sighs and unbuttons his shirt, taking it off as he walks across the room. Tom still watches him undress with interest, as if he hasn't seen the same thing every day since he was in his thirties. It's some kind of still-delayed reaction; he got so used to the idea that he'd have to live without Sonny that he can't retrain that part of his mind, even though he's got him now. Sonny undoes his belt and gets into bed with a groan, folds his hands behind his head.
"I told Fredo we'd have dinner kinda late," he says, staring at the TV. The newscaster is back to the John Lennon story.
"Fine," Tom says. He turns the TV off. "That wine knocked me out. I might sleep for an hour or so."
"Yeah," Sonny says. "C'mere." He draws Tom to him and reaches down to pull a blanket up over him. Tom settles into the familiar crook of Sonny's bony shoulder and shuts his eyes. He's still kind of stunned that he can do this, and he runs over the slow progress of his relationship with Sonny like he's going over an old photo album in his mind, making sure all the pieces are still there. When they were fifteen Sonny snuck a bottle of rum Carmella had used to make a cake upstairs and split the remains of it with Tom, who didn't want to get in trouble but also didn't want Sonny to think he was a wimp. Before they both got incredibly sick, they rolled on the floor with laughter at nothing in particular, and when Sonny leaned over Tom with the biggest, dumbest grin he'd ever seen on anybody, he actually thought, for half a second, that Sonny could be in love with him, too. Then there was a long stretch of nothing, until the eve of Sonny's wedding, when he drove Tom up to Syracuse like they were going all the way to the border to run away together, but when they got there he filled up the car and drove back. When Tom asked him what the hell he was doing Sonny said he'd just wanted to go for a drive. At Tom's wedding Sonny got terrifically drunk with Fredo and broke out the window of some poor guest's car, but by then Tom didn't have any hope that this behavior had anything to do with him. Sonny met Lucy through Connie shortly after that, and for some reason Tom was disgusted when he found out Sonny was cheating with her. It wasn't like he'd been faithful to Sandra up to that point, and it wasn't as if Tom's guiltiest and most enduring secret wish wasn't that Sonny would cheat on his wife with him, but something about the timing of the Lucy situation just ate at him. They got into a fight over it after Connie's wedding, just before Tom flew to L.A. to see about getting Johnny into that war picture.
"The Don's not happy about it," Tom snapped irritably as he was packing. Sonny was standing behind him, still in his tuxedo, his tie loose and his shirt unbuttoned. Tom doesn't even remember why Sonny had followed him home; they were always together, even then.
"Pop's not happy about it, is that right?" Sonny said. Tom could tell from the tone of his voice that he was about to say something horrible, but he never could have predicted what came next. "Is that it, Tommy? Or is it that you just don't want me screwing anybody but you?"
"What the hell's the matter with you?" Tom bellowed, so loud that he was ashamed of himself. His cheeks burned and his eyes watered, and Sonny just stared at him, as if that wasn't the reaction he'd expected at all. Tom picked up his suitcase and left without looking back.
Things were different when he got home. He and Sonny weren't alone together if they could help it, and it wasn't hard, with Tom busy overseeing the financial repercussions of the deal with Sollozzo and Sonny still spending all his free time with Lucy. Then Theresa was killed, and Sonny returned to Tom's side like he'd never left. Tom was a mess, and then when he wasn't, Sonny was still there. They went on a business trip to Turkey together, and Sonny was just bored enough by the negotiations and the country itself that he decided to try kissing Tom in the room they were given at Sollozzo's villa. Tom told Sonny he was crazy, kissed him back and helped him tear his clothes off, told him again that he was crazy, let him do whatever he wanted and stopped talking altogether, except to say his name the way he'd heard Lucy moan it through the door at the house, the way he'd always wanted to, Sonny, oh, God, Sonny. It was the most dangerous thing they ever did, and Tom felt it through every inch of his body as Sonny taught him how good it felt to be reckless.
"You asleep?" Sonny asks while Tom lies there remembering. Tom cracks his eyes open and sees the snow starting outside. Sonny always leaves the curtains wide open and never worries about who might see inside, as if they're invisible when they're together.
"I was just thinking," Tom says. "What if Pop never took that deal with Sollozzo? He thought about turning it down, remember? What if we never went to Turkey? You know?"
"Oh, c'mon," Sonny says. He spreads his hand over the back of Tom's head, where the last remains of his hair are still hanging on. "What if this, what if that. A million different things could have happened."
"Sure, but –"
"I would have found some other way," Sonny says, and he must know what Tom is really asking. He slides his arm down and closes his hand over Tom's shoulder. "I'd been working on it awhile."
Tom grins against Sonny's undershirt. He needs to get up and call Connie, maybe take an aspirin, make sure the documents he signed at that meeting actually got filed with the court. He shuts his eyes again, slides his arm across Sonny's chest.
"Goddamn did I eat like a pig today," Sonny says, mournfully and in the direction of his stomach.
"So what?" Tom bites back a comment about how this is no different from any other day.
"Yeah, you're right." Sonny fumbles around for the remote until Tom hands it to him. "You mind if I watch Match Game?" he asks.
"Go ahead," Tom says, though he hates that show. He does like to hear Sonny shout out guesses.
He's so tired that he falls asleep despite the shouting, and he dreams that they're young again, unmarried and getting ready to go into the dining room to join the whole family for dinner, Vito, Carmella, Clemenza and the others they've lost waiting for them. Tom pulls Sonny into a room between the kitchen and dining room that he's never been in before. It's dark and filled with antiques, dusty old vases and skinny bookshelves.
"Hey," Tom whispers. "You don't have to wait so long."
Sonny grins and kisses him, presses him back against the smooth side of a massive grandfather clock. He rests his elbows on Tom's shoulders and pushes his hands up into his hair, and they don't worry about the people waiting or the dinner on the table, because they've got all the time in the world.