And so it went. John Hill drank too much and fell asleep in his car. The waitresses smiled. The food was fine. People paid for it. After closing, instead of rushing home, the staff stayed and Ghazi passed out platters of enchiladas, stuffed peppers, and hickory catfish. When Mourad came to pick them up, he parked the car and joined them. Ghazi served them beer and tequila. “You waited on these shitheads, now I wait on you,” he said. They turned the radio dial away from the Latino station and stopped it at Classic Rock.

Ghazi took a waitress in his arms and held her while the music pounded and the rest of them ate. He had one hand around her waist and the other in her long hair. Aziz, too tired to eat or drink, watched them. Ghazi was a wide man. He was not a particularly good dancer. Nothing about him was good-looking. Yet what Aziz saw of him was not what he sensed in him. His jet hair was cut close, and his short beard, instead of softening him like beards did most men, blackened his face. His eyes were tar dark. He had fair skin; the charcoal of hair and brows and eyes and beard were bolder because of that pale setting. He would have looked frightening, Aziz thought, except for something in his unhurried gait, the slow way he used his hands, and, the strangest thing of all, the mournful downcast of his eyes, which were also unaccountably merry.

They worked. There seemed to be nothing but that. They knew there was, but it was not for them. Heather was a secretary at a law firm. Rafik said he was at the Brighton Moving and Storage Company. Aziz assumed he was over at Kamal’s, on a cell phone to Munich, haggling over stolen suits, plotting shipments of nothing good, stalling someone with variations on words like margins, deadlines, and overnight express. Lahouari worked at the Old New England Body Shop. One of his brothers, Hamid, delivered pizza in Cambridge. The other, Ali, fried doughnuts. The Three sent money home. Mourad sent money home. Aziz sent money home. Ghazi, now chef at Del Fuegos, sent money home; his father sent it back. The Brooks Street kitchen leaked. Repairs were infrequent; they didn’t last. The ceiling was many browns.