The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry

these last few months. It was on account of the case that he’d left his apartment in San Bruno this morning and drove down to the Serafina Café. The café was a place from his past, down in the old neighborhood, and he would not have gone there, he told himself, if not for the case.
    *   *   *
    These days, down at Serafina’s, the television played continuously above the bar. It was an older television, a cathode-ray tube with a convex surface. It had been hooked up to cable somehow, but the color was off, and the picture had a glassy, funhouse look.
    Stella, the owner, had put it up there a few years back.
    Her husband would never have agreed, Sorrentino knew. People didn’t come to watch television, he would say, they came to talk, to eat—but things were different now. Stella’s husband was dead, and it wasn’t the old days anymore. The Serafina’s clientele had always been from the neighborhood, and they were getting old, their numbers dwindling, here on the border of Chinatown and Little Italy. Those who came now were mostly from streets close by—old Italians who lived in the Florence Hotel or the apartments above Columbus. There were some who still came down from Telegraph, but it was not an easy walk down the hill. If you had the money for a taxi, then you would not eat at Serafina’s anymore.
    Stella’s husband may not have approved of the TV, but things had changed. Stella had to compete with the bar around the corner and also with the flophouse lobbies.
    It wasn’t the old days, no.
    It wasn’t like when Rossi was mayor, and people lined up in the streets smoking cigars. Not like when they had fresh tomatoes delivered every day, and you could smell the produce in the trucks as they went by the orchards of San Jose, the cherries and the prune plums, and also the broccoli from San Bruno.
    But people did not grow broccoli in San Bruno anymore. As far as Sorrentino could tell, there was no such thing as prune plums.
    *   *   *
    When Sorrentino walked in, the regulars did not pay him much mind. Or it did not seem so to him. A couple of old men sat at a table by the wall, and they glanced up at him the way they might glance at anyone. Maybe they paid him some mind, maybe they didn’t. There was an old bastard who kept his eyes on him, and an old woman who whispered to herself, and some shadows at a table in the back, but Sorrentino didn’t recognize anyone, at least not from what he’d seen so far, and he assumed it was similar the other way around. When he sat down, Stella peered across the counter at him.
    â€œGuy,” she said.
    He started to smile but knew better. There was nothing like joy in her face.
    â€œSpaghetti.”
    She nodded and walked away. Ten years since his last visit, and that’s all it came down to. He was sixty-one now, and Stella was seventy. They had grown up in the neighborhood, and he remembered when she’d been a blousy young woman standing around with her thick brown hair at her father’s produce stand. Sorrentino had known her husband. He’d gone to her wedding and to her husband’s funeral. She’d been there, too, when Sorrentino had put his own son in the ground—and this was what it came down to: Stella walking back to the kitchen wearing a dress like his grandmother used to wear. Then returning with a plateful of noodles and sauce.
    â€œWine?”
    â€œNo. I don’t drink anymore.”
    â€œSome people can’t take it, I guess.”
    â€œNo. Some of us can’t.”
    Sorrentino had left the SFPD not long after his divorce. His wife had said the divorce was on account of his drinking, but the truth was that after their son had died, he didn’t have much stomach for his wife anymore. Nor she for him.
    The boy had been killed when his truck toppled over on some road in Kuwait, some weeks after the fighting had ended, in the aftermath