CHAPTER THREE
ADELINA
I buy the inhaler at ten past nine in the morning with a dead man's hundred.
I spend it.
Sixty-one dollars. Two of them, because if you buy two they knock four off, and the pharmacist has known Matteo since he was three and does that for us.
I put the change in the coffee tin.
I walk him to school. He talks the entire nine blocks about a boy called Dashawn who has a theory about the moon, and at the gate he turns around and holds his hand up flat, which is what we do instead of a kiss now, because he is nine and there are people watching.
I hold mine up flat.
And then I go home, and my father's Buick is on the wrong side of the street, and the front door is open.
There are four suitcases in the hall.
Three of them are ours. The fourth one I have never seen before in my life, and it is the good kind, hard-sided, and it is standing by itself at the bottom of the stairs like it has been hired.
"Pa."
Nothing.
"Pa."
He comes out of the kitchen with a bottle of Amaro Montenegro in one hand and his good coat on over a T-shirt, which is the exact combination that has meant trouble in this house since I was six years old.
My father is a handsome man. People say it about him at funerals. He is fifty-two and he has all his hair and he can walk into a room where everybody is furious with him and have three of them laughing inside two minutes, and when I was small I thought that was a kind of strength.
"Sweetheart," he says.
There is nobody else here.
He only calls me that in front of people, and there is nobody else here, which means there is somebody else here.
"Who's in the house," I say.
"Nobody's in the house."
"Whose bag is that."
"Adelina."
"Whose bag."
"It's Paola's." He sets the bottle down on the radiator cover, which will mark it, and I watch myself not say anything about the radiator cover. "We're going to Staten Island. Couple of weeks. You, me, the kid. Paola's got the basement done now, it's nice down there, there's a bathroom."
"Matteo has school."
"There's schools on Staten Island."
"He has school here. He has a doctor here. He has a card at the clinic on 13th that took me eight months to get and it does not transfer, I've asked."
"Two weeks."
"Two weeks is four hundred dollars of my shifts, and I've got Sunday brunch picked up, and I've got the light bill on the twenty-fourth."
He turns around and looks at me.
And there is a second, right there, when I think he is going to tell me. He has a face for it. I have seen my father tell the truth maybe fourteen times in my life and every one of them started with that face, and it lasts about as long as it takes to blink, and then he decides.
He always decides.
"The bill's handled," he says.
"The bill is not handled."
"I handled it."
"Pa, I paid the bill." My voice goes up. I hate when it goes up. "I paid it on the fifth out of my own money. I have the receipt in the tin. You can go and look at the receipt in the tin."
"Then it's handled," he says, and picks the bottle back up. "So what are we arguing about."
I go upstairs and stand in my room for a minute with my hands over my face.
Then I do the thing I do, which is that I start putting things right. Matteo's bed. The laundry basket. The window in the bathroom that swells in the rain and has to be hit in one particular place with the flat of your hand.
There is a boiler cupboard on the landing.
It is the only place in this house that has ever been mine, because it is the only place my father will not go, because the pilot light went out in 2013 and gave him a fright and he has not opened that door since.
I keep the good towels in there. I keep the Christmas stuff and the box with the documents and the folder with Matteo's inhaler prescriptions and the letters from the clinic.
Today the door is not shut properly.
The latch on that door is a sticky latch and you have to lift the handle while you push, and I have done it four thousand times, and it is sitting a quarter of an inch proud.
I open it.
The towels are on the floor.
Not fallen. Moved. Taken down in a stack and put on the floor of the cupboard in the corner to make room on the shelf, and on the shelf where my towels were there is a bread bag.
A Sunbeam bread bag, the big white ones, twisted at the neck and wound with an elastic band, and it is full of paper.
I take it into the bathroom and lock the door and sit on the edge of the tub.
Manifests.
I do not know the word for them when I am sitting on the tub.
I learn the word later, from a man in a black coat, in a room with plastic on the furniture.
What I know on the edge of the tub is that they are freight dockets, the pink carbon kind, three to a page, and they have a truck number and a weight and a route and two signatures.
There are hundreds of them.
I go through them in order because there is no other way I know how to do anything. December 2020 at the bottom. Fifteen days ago at the top.
Every single one has been altered.
You can see it. You do not need to be anybody to see it.
Somebody has written a weight in the box and then somebody has written a different weight over the top of it in a different pen, and the second number is always smaller, and the second handwriting is my father's.
I would know my father's handwriting in the dark.
It is beautiful. It is the most beautiful thing about him.
He writes like a man from 1955 and he taught me to do my sevens with the line through.
Six years.
Six years of a bread bag on a shelf behind my towels, four feet from where my brother brushes his teeth.
I sit on the edge of the tub in my coat and I count them, because I cannot stop myself, and I get to two hundred and sixty and my hands get bad and I have to put them down on my knees for a minute.
And the thing in my chest is not shock.
That is what I have to say about myself, and I have turned it over a lot since. It is not shock. Some part of me has been standing in a hallway for six years waiting for somebody to hand me this bag.
The feeling is closer to arithmetic finally working out.
The sixty out of the drawer. The rent that was paid and then was not paid. The year he had the Lincoln and the year after when he had nothing. The way men on 18th Avenue say Cosimo with a little rise at the end of it, like a question they have decided not to finish.
I put them back in the bag in order.
I wind the elastic band back the way it was, twice, the same direction.
I put the bag on the shelf and I put my towels back on top of it, and then I stand in the middle of the landing with my hands empty and no idea at all what I have just decided.
I get Matteo at three.
He comes out of the gate at a run with his coat open and his bag on one shoulder, and he does not say hello, he says, "Dashawn's wrong about the moon," and keeps walking, and I have to jog four steps to catch him up.
"Is he."
"He says it's getting closer. It's getting further away. It's getting further away by four centimetres a year, which is the width of my hand, and in fifty million years there won't be any more eclipses and everyone will be sad."
"That's a long time to be sad about."
"It's not sad now," Matteo says. "It's sad later. That's worse, because nobody's doing anything about it."
I get his inhaler out of my bag at the corner of Sixteenth and hand it to him with the plastic still on it, and he stops walking.
He looks at it. He looks at me.
"There's two," he says.
"There's two."
"Addie."
"What."
"There's never two."
And I stand on the corner of Sixteenth Avenue with my nine year old brother holding a plastic box in both hands like it is an animal, and I understand something about my own house that I have managed not to understand for a very long time, which is that if two of a thing is enough to stop him in the street, then he has been counting as well.
He has been counting this whole time.
He puts one in each pocket of his coat, one on the left and one on the right, and he balances the weight, and then he takes my hand, which he has not done in public since April.
"Don't tell anyone," he says.
"Tell them what."
"About the two."
He is on the couch when I come down.
The television is on with the sound off. He has the bottle between his knees and he is not drunk yet, he is at the stage before, where he is warm and generous and would give you his coat.
I sit on the arm of the chair.
"There's a sit-down tonight," I say. "Eight o'clock. Zio's back room."
My father does not move.
The light from the television goes across his face, blue, then blue, then white.
"Who told you that," he says.
"The man who booked it."
"Adelina."
"He came into the restaurant last night and he sat in my section and he asked me how old Matteo was," I say, and my voice is very steady, and I am proud of it in a way I am going to be ashamed of later. "So don't. Please. I'm asking you not to do the thing where you decide what I can hear."
He puts the bottle on the floor.
He leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, and for a long moment he looks like a man in a church.
"Four million," he says.
"What?"
"You want to know. So you know. Four million and change.
" He says it to the carpet. "Over six years.
And I didn't take it, sweetheart, I want you to understand that, I moved it, I moved it for somebody, and I got a piece, and the piece was nothing, the piece was a Lincoln and a couple of vacations, and now the whole four million has got my handwriting on it. "
"Who did you move it for."
He shakes his head.
"Pa. Who."
"That's not a question you get to ask."
And I am going to hear that sentence again, in a different room, out of a different mouth, and I am going to hate it more the second time.
"So what happens tonight," I say.
"Nothing happens tonight. Tonight I go in there and I make him an offer and he takes it, because he's a businessman, they're all businessmen now, it's not 1970."
"What offer."
"I've got things I can give him."
"What things." I stand up. "Pa. What have you got. The house is the bank's. The car's worth nine hundred dollars. What exactly are you planning to put on my uncle's table."
And my father looks up at me.
For one second, one whole second, he looks straight up at me, and his eyes go across my face the way you check a price.
Then he picks the bottle back up off the floor.
"It's handled," he says. "They'll take something else."