"I'm checking." He tapped the page. "I make promises, I keep them. I said I'd read it, I'll read it. Every word. Even the head."
"How many promises have you made?"
"To the book? Just the one."
"In general."
He thought about it with what looked like real honesty, which surprised her. "Too many," he said. "That's my problem. Ask anybody. I say I'll do a thing, and then I have to do it, and I've said I'll do about four hundred things. I'm thirty-six years old and I'm still paying off things I said when I was nineteen."
"Such as?"
"I told my Aunt Cecca I'd come to Sunday dinner every week until one of us died. That was 1971. Neither of us has died. She makes osso buco on the first Sunday of every month, and I'll tell you something, it's not getting better." He held out his hand across the table. "Remy Agostini."
She looked at the hand. "You promised not to bother me."
"This is the opposite of bothering. This is manners. My aunt would rise up from the Excelsior and strike me down if I sat across from a woman for ten minutes and didn't give her my name."
She shook it, briefly. It was a hard, dry hand, calloused across the palm in a pattern she did not recognize, a long ridge at the base of the fingers as if he spent his days hauling on something.
"Mina," she said.
He waited. "Just Mina? Like Cher?"