The next night, despite the weather (mid-January, bleak as the bottom of a shoe, sleet turning to snow and back again), Fitz took the family out for dinner. Or for pizza, actually. This was in fulfillment of a pledge he’d made to his son at the beginning of the fall term—if Corey managed to get a B average or higher on his report card he could pick any restaurant he wanted, as long as it was a burger or pizza place and within a ten-mile radius. The payoff had been more than a month in coming now and Corey, who’d done better than just manage in his new school and wound up with A’s across the board tailed by a flurry of complimentary comments from his teachers on his work habits and attitude, had been nagging him about it since New Year’s. Or not nagging—it wasn’t in his nature to nag—but offering up subtle and not-so-subtle reminders like, They let us out on the playground after lunch today and all we could smell was pizza—from Scavone’s, I think it was, which is only two blocks over?—because they were like cleaning the ovens or something, I think. And you know what I dreamed about last night? No, what? Pizza.

So though he really didn’t have the money or the time and the car gave him the same aggravation as usual (addicted now, it seemed, to ether, which cost a dollar twenty-five a can), they all drove across town to Corey’s favorite place—Carbone’s—which, Corey claimed, had the best crust in Boston, though to Fitz, who’d grown up on New York pizza, it all tasted like cardboard with tomato paste and shredded cheese dribbled over it.

The place was overheated and overlit, which normally would have annoyed him but felt somehow comforting on a night like this when you had to stomp the slush off your boots in the anteroom and beat your hands together just to get a little circulation going. And the smell—the scorched-oven aroma of bubbling pizza and hot calzone—brought him right back to life after a long grim day of sitting in class and the library and fielding questions from his too-clever-by-half undergrads in Psych 101. He put a handful of change on the table so Corey could wheel off to play one of the pinball machines lined up against the back wall, then went to the counter and ordered a pitcher of beer with two glasses, a Coke for Corey and a large mushroom pie with anchovies on one-third of it for Joanie, who had a taste for the super-salted, dried-out little strips of baitfish that neither he nor Corey managed to share.