33. Giovanni
— ? —
Giovanni
I did daycare drop-off in a truck my son had named Bo.
No one knew why. There was no Bo. There had never been a Bo.
Nico had looked at the truck one morning with the terrible unshakable certainty of a toddler, pointed, said “Bo,” and that had been the end of the discussion, because in this family the name was law.
I had argued jurisdiction with federal prosecutors.
I had negotiated across tables where the wrong word cost lives.
I hadn’t lasted four seconds against a one-year-old and a two-syllable verdict.
So: Bo. I drove Bo to a small brick daycare every morning at eight, in a coat that cost more than the daycare’s monthly rent, and I buckled a car seat, and I handed my son to a nineteen-year-old named Brittany who called me “Nico’s dad” and had no idea and no interest in who else I might be.
It was the best part of my day. I had run an empire. This was better, and it wasn’t close.
I fixed up old buildings now. The honest kind of work, the kind that left a place better than you found it, run out of a small office on the second floor of the short building across the square from the Marlowe, the very building I’d bought a lifetime ago just to be near her, and which she still referred to, with great satisfaction, as “barely qualifying as looming.”
There was a drawing taped to the wall behind my desk. Nico had made it. It was, generously, a truck: four circles, a rectangle, a shape at the front that might have been a face or might have been weather. Beneath it, in Brittany’s helpful print: dada + bo.
It was taped over the threat assessments.
That was the part the drawing didn’t erase, and I didn’t pretend it did.
My name still opened certain doors and barred certain others.
There were men in this world who would still very much like to know where my children slept, and a man who forgot that got the people he loved hurt, my father had taught me that much correctly, even if he’d taught me almost nothing else right.
So I still ended every week the way he’d ended his: reviewing the perimeter myself, personally, reading reports I paid well for, walking the sightlines, keeping the quiet unbroken.
Peace wasn’t a gift anyone handed you. It was a thing you maintained, weekly, forever, with your own two hands, like a house.
But the perimeter had changed shape.
The detail at the daycare gate had been there so long, and behaved so well, that the teachers brought the men coffee.
Marco had a favorite mug at that daycare, a chipped one with a cartoon frog, and got visibly wounded if someone else used it.
There was a spare car seat in the back of an armored SUV.
My consigliere, who had watched me end men with a sentence, once spent forty minutes on the phone with me at two in the morning helping determine whether a rash constituted a medical emergency.
(It did not. It was applesauce. We were both awake for another hour anyway.) Dante had stopped commenting on any of it.
I thought he’d given up. I thought, God help him, he was happy.
I’d never have said either thing to his face and he’d have denied both to mine.
I took work calls with a toddler on my shoulders, one hand steadying a small ankle, and nobody on the other end of the line knew there was a child up there quietly rearranging my hair into war.
I still saw Dr. Okafor every other week, and she had, by that point, heard a genuinely unreasonable amount about tap dancing, and had once observed, dryly, over the terrible throw pillows, that a man who learned to shuffle-ball-change in secret for the woman he loved was not, clinically speaking, “emotionally unavailable” anymore, and could we perhaps discuss something else.
And I spent a portion of most afternoons standing at a job-site window watching my wife run a scaffolding crew with a pencil behind her ear and plaster dust in her hair, being, again, Dr. Okafor’s word, clinically feral about it.
This was my life now. I had built a criminal dynasty and walked away from the throne of it, and this was what I’d traded it for: a truck named Bo, a frog mug, applesauce at 2 a.m., and a woman on a scaffold who argued with me about cornices and won.
I wouldn’t have given back one hour of it.
***
Kylie told me she was pregnant in the only language she trusted all the way to the bottom.
I’d been drafting an expansion for the cottage, a proper second story, more room, a real studio for her with north light, the kind of thing I’d been sketching on and off for months without telling her because I wanted it finished before I offered it.
I’d left the blueprints on my desk overnight, weighted under the frog mug.
When I sat down the next morning, they’d been edited.
Her handwriting. In my margins. Red ink, the color of emergency, the color she’d fired back at me in the white space of a Jane Jacobs first edition six years and a lifetime ago, when we were still two strangers arguing our way toward each other and didn’t know it yet.
She’d crossed out my layout for the back bedroom. Beside it, in an architect’s clean block capitals, precise as a foundation line, she’d written:
NURSERY, PHASE 2. EST. COMPLETION: SPRING.
I read it once. My eyes wouldn’t hold it.
I read it again. Then twice more, four times total, sitting alone in my office with a blueprint and my entire chest quietly reorganizing itself around a new load-bearing wall, before I stood up so fast my chair went over backward and I didn’t stop to pick it up.
She was on the site. Of course she was on the site. Up a scaffold, pencil behind her ear, mid-argument with Marcus about the pitch of a restored cornice, entirely unbothered by the fact that she was thirty feet up and carrying, I now knew, and she now knew I knew, our second child.
I crossed the whole job site without slowing down. I didn’t care that the crew was watching. I reached up, put my hands on my wife’s waist, and lifted her clean off the scaffold and set her on solid ground where I could see the whole of her at once.
“Giovanni-”
“You’re pregnant.” I wasn’t asking. The margins had already told me.
“I was going to tell you tonight. In a normal way. Like a normal person, with a dinner and a-”
“You told me in the margins.”
“It’s where we tell the truth,” she said, chin up, and I kissed her in front of the entire crew, in the middle of the site, in broad Georgia daylight, and then, because I had never once in my life known how to hold a good thing quietly, I turned to the entire crew, my wife already hissing my name and reaching to clap a hand over my mouth, and I told all of them, at volume, that there was going to be another one.
They cheered. Marcus started a slow clap.
Somebody up on the third level whooped and dropped a wrench, which nearly undid the whole celebration in a workplace-safety sense.
Kylie put her face in her hands. And Marcus, grinning, informed me that the stoppage had cost roughly an hour of billable crew time and he’d be adding it to the invoice.
I paid it. Gladly. In full. Then I bought the crew lunch, and the daycare a new set of building blocks, and, in a fit of feeling that Dr. Okafor and I would examine in depth the following Thursday, a small lemon tree for the courtyard, because you plant something when a person is coming.
Peppina taught me that, in a village on a hillside, without ever saying it in words.
***
That night, Nico fell asleep between us, the way he still did whenever he could engineer it, one fist locked in the collar of my shirt and one small foot planted in his mother’s ribs like a flag on conquered ground.
Kylie watched him breathe in the dark. Then she watched me watch him.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
I thought about the man I’d been, the empty one, the one who moved through every room counting exits and called the counting love. About the drawing taped over the threat reports, and the frog mug, and the block letters that said spring. About a table, and how it was about to be one chair short.
“Sunday,” I said. “We’re going to need a bigger pot.”
She laughed, quietly, so as not to wake him, and reached across our sleeping son to find my hand, and held it, and neither of us let go.