Chapter 1

The dough stuck to Dante’s fingers, so he added more flour, kneading and shaping the last bit into a boule before transferring it to the empty metal mixing bowl on the counter in front of him. He clapped flour from his hands and wiped his fingers on a clean towel. Pizza 3.14 was a family business, one Papi DeLuca started in 1963. The old man baked pizza pies in the brick oven in his backyard and used Nona DeLuca’s secret sauce recipe, fresh homemade mozzarella, and the vegetables that grew in terracotta pots on the screened in back porch at their old house.

Dante covered the boule of dough with a cloth napkin and smiled to himself. He’d been making dough for the pizzas almost every day since he was six-years-old. What had started as punishment for eating half of the Roma tomatoes from Nona’s little terracotta garden had turned Dante into the best pizza chef in the entire state. He and Pizza 3.14 had been featured on an early episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on Food Network and there was an entire wall devoted to celebrities that had eaten at the family-owned-and-operated-hole-in-the-wall Italian joint run by the DeLucas. Dante’s favorite photos were the one of Papi sharing a pie with Frank and Nancy Sinatra and the picture of Dante and Guy Fieri hand-tossing pizza crusts. Then there was the large trophy case that Uncle Vito had built beside the bar so the first thing customers would see when they came in was the awards the restaurant had won for the past fifty years, framed newspaper articles, and food critic reviews.

The restaurant was where Dante’s heart lived, literally and figuratively. After high school, Dante and his cousin Juno—short for Vito, Junior—had spent the summer and part of fall renovating the two floors above the restaurant and turning them into apartments. The two had grown up together, more like brothers than cousins, and definitely best friends. Dante still lived on the top floor of the building, but Juno got his girlfriend knocked-up, so he joined the navy and was stationed in Pensacola, Florida. Juno had never married the girlfriend, but he wanted to “make it on his own” like somehow working for the family wasn’t good enough. At least Juno still called on occasion. With no one to occupy the second floor of the building, Dante’s Pop used it as offices and storage.

“Morning, kiddo.” Dante’s Pop, Lorenzo, tapped on the Plexiglas shield that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Part of the restaurant’s appeal was that the pizza station and the brick oven were visible from anywhere in the place. Fresh made dough and hand-tossing was slowly becoming a lost craft thanks to the big box pizza chains.

“Hey, Pop,” said Dante. He reached up and tightened the knot of the red bandana he wore over his mop of black curls. The thing served a dual purpose, keeping his curly black hair out of the food and sweat out of his eyes. He hadn’t started warming the brick oven yet, but, when he did, the kitchen got hot fast. “What’s up?”

There was a running family joke that Dante was what Pop looked like thirty-some odd years ago and that looking like Pop was what Dante had to look forward to. Both of them dwarfed most everyone else, built like linebackers and standing a towering 6’4”—although gravity and a bad back and knees had shaved a couple of inches off of Pop. The old man’s hair started going salt and pepper in his early thirties and, at sixty, there wasn’t much of the pepper left. Dante found his first couple of gray hairs when he was nineteen and thanks to Revlon ColorStayno one was the wiser. The men shared the Mediterranean-blue eye color, long lashes, and the heavy eyebrows and Roman noses of Italians from whatever area great-grandma referred to as the old country. Having someone remark on how much Dante resembled his old man wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, given the number of DeLuca family photos that hung in frames around the restaurant. That was the vibe Papi and Nona wanted when they opened the place. Don’t need to be related to feel like part of the family.

“Need to make room in the safe. Can you run the deposit pouches to the bank? I’ve got a kid showing up to interview for Nicky’s spot.”

Dante’s cousin, Nicky, was leaving for school the next week, putting the staff down by one busser. “Joe doesn’t want the extra shifts?” Dante asked.

“Please,” Pop scoffed. “Joe’s a slacker. He takes more smoke breaks than a chimney. It’s early, bank shouldn’t take too long.” He glanced at his watch.

Dante sighed. “Fine.” He didn’t want to leave the dough to rise for too long, more than an hour and the yeast would start to give a slight sour taste to the cooked crusts, but Dante also didn’t want to incur the wrath of Pop’s Italian temper. He hung his apron on the peg by the kitchen door and took the deposit slips from his pop’s outstretched hand.