Chapter 20 #2
Marco. Standing four feet away, phone raised, the grin on his face so wide it threatened the structural integrity of his jaw. He’d captured it. The hug. Dante Caruso, ice-cold don of the South Side, embracing a woman in a community center lobby with both arms like a human being with feelings.
“That’s going on the fridge,” Marco announced.
“Delete it,” Dante said, releasing me. The severity back in place. The composure resealed.
“Already sent it to the family group chat.”
“Marco.”
“Gemma has it. Santo has it. Sal has it. I think Sal’s already made it his lock screen.”
Dante’s jaw compressed. The look he gave his younger brother contained a specific promise about future consequences.
Marco received this promise with the serene confidence of a man who had been threatened by his brother his entire life and had yet to experience a follow-through that outweighed the satisfaction of the provocation.
He was already moving through the room. That was Marco’s gift—the ability to be everywhere at once, to make every person he spoke to feel like the only person in the building.
Within five minutes he had introduced himself to three volunteers, complimented someone’s earrings, promised his personal number to at least two women who were old enough to be his mother and charmed enough to not care, and somehow acquired a cookie without anyone seeing him approach the table.
The neighborhood woman was giving a tour.
No one had asked her to give a tour. She had assumed the role with the same proprietary confidence she’d used to claim Midge—simply starting, gathering people in her wake, leading them through the hallways with the authority of someone who had been here every day during construction and knew where every outlet was because she’d argued about each one personally.
I watched her lead a group past the classrooms. Two rooms, bright windows, the walls painted in colors that a child psychologist had recommended and that the neighborhood woman had overridden twice because she “knew what kids liked better than any doctor who’d never shared a bedroom with four siblings.
” Small desks. Art supplies. A reading corner with a rug and pillows and a bookshelf already full.
Past the counseling suite. Two offices, quiet, the kind of quiet that was built into the architecture—soundproofed walls, soft lighting, doors that closed all the way.
The rooms where kids would sit across from someone trained to listen and say the things they’d been carrying and have those things received.
Then the gym.
Small. Just big enough. The floor was matted.
There were racks along one wall—boxing gloves in different sizes, hand wraps, the equipment you needed to hit something safely.
And in the corner, mounted to a reinforced bracket that the construction crew had installed after I’d drawn the specs on a napkin because napkins were apparently my family’s medium for important plans:
The heavy bag.
Eighty pounds. Red leather. The chain holding it to the ceiling was industrial grade. It hung perfectly still in the empty gym, waiting.
I’d insisted on the bag because I knew what it was to be a kid with nowhere to put the anger.
The anger that came from the system, from the homes, from the particular fury of being small and powerless in a world that didn’t care about you.
That anger needed somewhere to go that wasn’t your own body, wasn’t someone else’s face, wasn’t the wall of whatever room you’d been assigned to.
A bag could take it. A bag could take everything you had and hang there afterward, still and steady, ready for more.
Gemma found me by the gym door.
“This is for later,” she said. Quiet. The voice that was just for us—the little voice, the one that lived in sippy cups and coloring books and afternoons on Dante’s couch with Caravaggio arranged in compromising positions with my rabbit. She held out the gift bag.
I looked inside.
A stuffed fox. Soft. The amber fur impossibly plush, the kind of toy that cost real money and was worth it because it was the kind of soft that made you close your eyes when you held it.
And underneath, wrapped in the pink tissue paper: a sippy cup.
White, with small painted foxes around the rim, each one in a different position—sleeping, running, sitting with its tail curled around its feet.
A set. The fox and its cup. Chosen with the specific care of a woman who understood what these objects meant and what they held and how much weight a small thing could carry when it was given with love.
“Gemma,” I said.
“For your collection.” Her brown eyes held mine. The freckles. The smile that transformed her. “Every girl needs a proper collection.”
I held the fox against my chest. The softness of it against the place where Midge usually sat.
The building hummed around us. Full. Alive. The sound of people in a place that had been empty and wasn’t anymore—voices and footsteps and the particular noise of children discovering a space that had been built for them and beginning, already, to claim it.
*
The lobby was empty.
The reception had pulled everyone to the back room like gravity—the promise of cake and coffee and the particular magnetism of a buffet table, which was a force no community event had ever successfully resisted.
I could hear them through the wall. Voices.
Laughter. The clink of something being set down on a folding table.
The muffled sound of Marco telling a story that was probably eighty percent embellished and a hundred percent effective.
Life happening in the other room, loud and warm and real.
In here, just me and the photograph.
I stood in front of it. Close enough that my breath fogged the glass.
I looked up at her. My sister.
“Hey,” I said.
Quiet. The word barely a sound. The way you talk to the dead when you’re not sure they can hear you but you need to say it anyway, need to send the words out into the air on the slim chance that air carries things to wherever the dead are.
“So. This is it. The center.” I looked around the empty lobby. The fresh paint. The clean floors. The intake desk with its neat stack of forms and its jar of pens. “It’s nice. You’d like it. You’d probably reorganize everything within a week and tell me I did the layout wrong, but you’d like it.”
The silence held. Warm. Not empty—full. The particular fullness of a room that had been named for someone and carried their presence in the naming.
“There are classrooms. Two of them. Small desks, because the kids are going to be small. Art supplies. A reading corner with—you’d love the reading corner.
There’s a rug. Pillows. The bookshelf is already full because it turns out when you tell people you’re building a center for kids, everybody has books they want to donate. Everybody.”
I paused. Touched the edge of the frame. The wood was smooth under my finger.
“There’s a heavy bag. In the gym. I made them put it in. Because—you know. Some kids need to hit something. I needed to hit something for about fifteen years and didn’t have anywhere to do it.”
My voice caught. I let it. There was no one here to perform steadiness for. Just Maria and the glass and the empty lobby.
“Kids are going to come here,” I said. “Kids like me. Like what I was. Scared and angry and carrying things that were too heavy and too sharp and nobody taught them how to set down. They’re going to walk through that door and someone’s going to be there.
That’s—that’s the whole thing. Someone being there.
That’s what I didn’t have and it’s what they’re going to get and it’s named for you because you would have been the one standing at the door. ”
I breathed in.
“I met someone.”
The words felt different said out loud. Different from thinking them, different from living them. Said to Maria, in this room, the words had a weight and a shape that made them real in a new way.
“His name is Santo. He’s—“ I stopped. Tried again. “He’s big. Like, physically big. Covered in tattoos. His nose has been broken twice. He looks like someone you’d cross the street to avoid, which honestly is fair because he is someone most people should cross the street to avoid.”
I smiled. Small. The kind of smile that happened in the face before the brain authorized it.
“But he reads to me. At night. He does voices, Maria—he does really silly voices and they’re terrible and he commits to them completely and I fall asleep listening to him butcher French pronunciation and it’s the best sound I’ve ever heard.”
The photograph. Maria’s grin. The missing tooth.
“He brushes my hair. He makes sure I eat. He runs the bath to the exact temperature where my shoulders drop and he knows what that temperature is because he pays attention. He pays attention to everything. He’s the most attentive person I’ve ever met and he’d rather die than admit it.”
I pressed my hand against the glass.
“You’d like him,” I said. “I think you’d have opinions about the tattoos.
You’d tell him the Madonna on his shoulder looks like she‘s judging everyone and he’d say that’s the point and you’d roll your eyes so hard they’d leave your head.
You’d give him a hard time. You’d make him earn it.
And he would earn it, Maria. He’d earn it every day because that‘s what he does.”
The glass under my hand.
“I’m glad I found you,” I said. “I’m sorry we can’t be together. But you’ll always be with me.”
Maria Flores. Sixteen years old. My sister. Here on this wall, in this building, part of my life.
I lifted my hand from the glass. My palm left a print—the faint smudge of warmth on the cool surface, the ghost of contact. It would fade. That was okay. I’d be back tomorrow.
I turned. Walked toward the sound of voices.
*
The bedroom was ours now.