The tomato came off the vine clean.
Vinnie weighed it in his palm. Heavy for its size. The skin was matte under the porch light, a deep summer red, and the smell of the broken stem was on his fingers — green, sharp, alive. He brought it inside the curve of his hand and stood at the edge of the strip of dirt that hadn't been a garden in thirty years until April.
Behind him a screen door tapped in its frame. A neighbor's air conditioner kicked on, then off. Somewhere down the block a dog was working up an argument with itself.
He'd come out here for a beer and stayed for the tomatoes.
The Heineken sweated on the railing of the back step where he'd set it. Half-finished, going warm. Vinnie picked up the bottle, took the last cold swallow, set it back down. Then he sat on the second step with the tomato in his hand and looked up at the section of sky the spruce hadn't taken.
Six months ago he'd woken up in a hospital bed in a body that didn't fit.
The hands had been wrong first. He remembered that. Bigger than his hands. Bigger knuckles. A wedding band that hadn't been there in twenty years and a tan line under it from a wife who'd died of ovarian cancer in 1988. He'd lain there looking at those hands for a long time before he understood that the head he was looking out of wasn't his either.
Now the hands were his. He'd stopped checking.
He bit into the tomato.
The skin gave with that particular small resistance — and then it was warm and salty-sweet and the seeds got on his thumb and ran down his wrist. He didn't have a napkin. He licked it off. It tasted the way these things had tasted the one summer in his other life when he had a roof garden and a girlfriend who cared about heirlooms. The girlfriend was gone twelve years before he was born into this body. The roof was on a building he would never own. The taste was the same.
It tasted like home, was the thing. It tasted like a house this man had owned and a wife this man had loved and a Sunday this man wasn't ever going to see again.
He chewed the rest. Ate the whole tomato standing in his father's yard.
Some inventory got done in the back of his head while he ate. Not as a list. Not as a checklist. Just as the ambient awareness of where a man stood at the end of the longest stretch of his life.
The man who killed Sal Marchetti was dead. That was one fact, and it sat where facts sit. Anthony Russo had carried a folder into Johnny Sack's office in late May, and three weeks later Aldo Mancuso had stopped breathing in a service alley behind a restaurant in Mulberry Street, and Vinnie's hands were clean and his name had never been on a single piece of paper that connected to it. The Morality Index in his head — the thing the System tracked because the System tracked everything — had moved one point. He'd watched it move and made his peace with the cost.
Marco Ferrante was on a porch in Sarasota.
Junior Soprano was on house arrest for a hit that hadn't quite landed because somebody had whispered the wrong word into Tony's ear at the right time.
Tony had said call me Tony.
Elena had reached across a table in Hoboken eleven days ago and put her thumb on his ring finger.
That was the ledger. He didn't need to write it down.
He finished the tomato. Wiped his hand on his pant leg. Pulled a weed at the base of the second Roma because the weed was there and not pulling it would have been a kind of disrespect.
The other ledger was harder.
His sleep was thinner than it used to be. Sometimes — most nights — he came up out of dreams that had Sal's funeral in them, or his own funeral in 2024 on the Turnpike, or both at once with the casket switching faces between blinks. The line between memories was supposed to be a wall and the wall was thinning. Last week he'd reached for a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment because his hand remembered being Sal's hand, and the cigarettes had been there because Sal had put them there, and he'd held the pack for thirty seconds before he remembered that he didn't smoke. He'd put it back. Hadn't told Tommy.
The System had a number for it. He didn't need to look.
He didn't look.
[Arc complete. Survival confirmed. Level 6 → 7. New function available: FBI Informant Detection.]
The message sat at the edge of his vision the way these messages always sat — present but not insistent. He acknowledged it. Filed it. The FBI piece would matter inside of a year — he already knew whose name it would put at the top of the list, and he already knew he wasn't going to do anything with it except stay away from the boat — but tonight it was just a notification and tonight he was just a man with tomato seeds drying on his wrist.
A car went by on the street out front, low and slow, somebody's kid showing off a stereo. The bass faded around the corner. The dog gave up arguing.
Next year was going to be ugly. He knew that. Knew the calendar of it the way a sailor knows the season. A man named Richie was going to come home from prison in five months and start asking after pieces of territory he hadn't held since the early nineties. A man named Pussy was going to keep wearing a wire to barbecues. A kid named Christopher was going to get shot in a parking lot outside a phone store. None of those things were happening to him. All of them were going to happen to people he had to live next to.
He'd survive them. He'd already started arranging the survival.
But that wasn't what tonight was for.
Tonight was for the tomato. Tonight was for the fact that there was a tomato. Tonight was for the small impossible thing that a man could come back from being dead in a different century and not just live, but plant something and watch it ripen and eat it on his own back step in August. He hadn't earned it. He didn't believe he'd earned it. But it was here and so was he.
Vinnie stood up. The back of his pants was wet from the step. He left the empty beer bottle on the railing for the morning. Walked past the Roma to the second plant — the beefsteak — and picked one more tomato, smaller, and put it in his shirt pocket for tomorrow's lunch.
He went inside. The kitchen light was still on. There was a yellow legal pad on the counter where he'd left it that morning, and a pen across it, and he stood for a minute looking at the pad before he picked up the pen.
He wrote two words. Newark RFP.
Then he wrote three more. Construction filing — accelerate.
He drew a line under both, capped the pen, and put it on top of the pad.
Then he turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.
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― DECREE ―
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