Chapter 38
CATE
The art handlers came on a Thursday morning, two of them, in a truck with the client's shipper stenciled on the side.
"This the piece?" The older one had a clipboard and the soft hands of a man who'd moved a hundred million dollars of other people's history. "Sixteenth century, the sheet says."
"That's her."
"Condition report attached?"
"Forty pages and a drive." I handed him the folder. "Imaging, treatment record, findings. Tell whoever unpacks her the varnish is three weeks cured — no crate heat, no direct sun for the transit."
"You do all this yourself?" He was looking past me at the studio — the raking light, the bench, the wall of solvents. "Whole treatment?"
"Every layer."
"Huh." He initialed something. "She looks sad, your angel."
"She's been through it."
They crated her slow and reverent, gloved hands, not one wasted move, and the wingless angel looked out of the open face one last time — mouth open on its held note — and then the foam went in, and the lid went on.
I knew what was under the gold. A name nobody alive could read, on a painting nobody living understood, going out my door strapped in foam — to hang on a wall for people who would see a sad angel and a pretty halo and keep walking.
"Careful on the steps," I said. "The third one's loose."
That's the job. You find out what's under. You write it down. You let it go.
The check had cleared on Tuesday. Wednesday morning I went downtown with a cashier's check for the full arrears.
Three years I'd been chipping at that number.
Since before Nonna passed — payment plans, penalties compounding faster than I could earn, the quiet ledger she and I never told Joey about because he'd have had the FOR SALE sign up by Friday.
She died still carrying it. I'd carried it since, one commission at a time, and it had always been bigger than the year.
Now it wasn't.
The woman behind the glass looked at the amount, looked at the account, and typed for a while with two fingers.
"Paying it all?"
"All of it."
"You want a receipt?"
"I want two."
She stamped them without asking why — bang, bang — and slid them under the glass and looked at the next number, because to everyone else in that room it was a Wednesday.
Raq had come downtown with me — of course he'd come, he'd have walked me to the mailbox if I let him — and then stopped at the door of the office and stayed outside, on the sidewalk, without being asked.
Because he knew whose errand this was. Three years of a ledger with two names on it, and only one of us left to close it.
He was exactly where I'd left him when I came out, and he didn't ask. He looked at my face and had the whole answer.
"It is done?"
"It's done."
I stood there on the sidewalk with both receipts in my coat pocket, one hand pressed over them, and let out a breath I'd been holding since the funeral.
One's for you, Nonna.
The house was settled. The house was mine. And Joey could finally, finally shut up about selling it. Raq offered me his arm like it was 1948, and we walked to the train.
Sunday, Nina fed us — lasagna and braciole and the good tablecloth, her husband carving like a surgeon under supervision, Gina, and two of Nina's nephews from Bay Ridge orbiting the table because their mother had a shift.
And Raq sat in the chair that had stood empty through those two awful weeks in March. He filled it the way he fills doorways. He was wearing the gray sweater I'd bought him — buying the clothes goes both directions now — and Nina kept looking at him like the furniture had finally been delivered.
Nina had taken one look at him on her stoop and pointed at the chair like a judge issuing a sentence. "You. There. You eat everything I put down and you don't argue."
"I am amenable," he said.
I elbowed him. "Nobody says amenable. Say 'sure.'"
"Sure," he said, in exactly the same voice, and Nina looked at me over his head with her eyebrows at maximum altitude and put an extra braciole on his plate for reasons she'd have called instinct.
He ate everything she put down. He didn't argue. And Gina was in her seat — the seat next to his, the one she'd informed the entire second seating was permanent — before he'd finished sitting down in his.
She waited until the braciole. Then she took a folded piece of loose-leaf out of her pocket and smoothed it flat next to her plate, and I recognized it, and my throat did something complicated, because she'd been carrying that list since the bad Sundays.
Since the weeks he was gone and nobody would tell her anything.
"I have questions," Gina said. "I saved them."
"Ask," Raq said.
"Where were you?"
The table went quiet in that specific way. Nina's fork paused. And Raq set his own fork down and gave a twelve-year-old the full attention he gives structural loads.
"I made a mistake," he said. "A big one. I hurt people I love, and I came back, and I'm not going to do it again."
Gina held his eyes, checking the math the way her mother checks a dye job. Then she nodded, once, and consulted the list.
"Okay. Two. Did you ever play for the Knicks?"
"No."
"Could you?"
Raq considered this with the full gravity of a man deposed under oath. "It would not be fair," he said, and Gina wrote something next to the question — she scored it — and Nina pointed her serving fork down the table.
"Nobody talks basketball at my table. Marco, tell him about the volcano."
Marco told him about the volcano. At length. With the lid off the shoebox. And Raq turned the model a quarter-turn under the chandelier light and studied it the way he studies rooflines.
"Your magma chamber is above your vent."
"So?"
"So your mountain would detonate sideways and take out this village." A finger, very gently, on a cotton-ball sheep. "Which is what the real one did. Your teacher will not expect that. Show the sideways."
"Sideways," Marco breathed, like a man receiving scripture, and that school is never going to be the same.
"Cat." Nina, over the braciole, refilling my seltzer without asking. "He fixes volcanoes now. Anthony, tell him about the transmission."
"He doesn't want to hear about the transmission—"
"He does," Raq said. "I want to hear about the transmission."
And God help me, Anthony told it — the whole saga, the cousin, the junkyard in Canarsie, the part where the guy says that's not a Chevy part — and Raq listened the way he listens to the harbor, complete, unhurried, and at the punchline he nodded slowly, one professional to another, and said, "He was correct.
It was not a Chevy part," and Anthony pointed at him with the carving knife and told Nina they were keeping him.
Joey leaned over his coffee, quiet, under the noise, brother-channel.
"Nonna's taxes. You really cleared it? All of it?"
"All of it. Paid Wednesday. House is settled, Joe."
He looked at me a second, and his shoulders came down from wherever they'd been living since the funeral, and he nodded once.
"Good," he said.
And that was the entire war, over, in one syllable — because that's all it had ever been with Joey. Not the house. The worry, wearing the house like a coat.
Then he pushed back from the table and looked at Raq.
"C'mon. We got time before dark. Let's go shoot around."
Raq looked at him. He clearly had no idea what Joey was talking about.
"Shoot," Raq said, carefully, "around."
"Hoops. The park." Joey was already up, finding his jacket. "Basketball, dude. What planet did you come from?"
"This one," Raq said.
Dead level. Complete sincerity. And I choked on my seltzer, and Joey launched — the full Fontana laugh, head back, hand on the table — "This one, he says—" pointing at him, delighted, adopting him on the spot.
And Raq laughed too.
Dry, short, real — the rare one, the one I'd stopped being able to count because the count had been mine, all of them, every laugh since the stoop had happened in my kitchen or my bed or my wrecked yard.
This one belonged to Joey.
"Well?" Joey had the ball under his arm and the door half open. "You coming or what?"
"Sure," Raq said.
He stood, and shrugged — an actual shrug, where did he learn a shrug — and took the ball out of my brother's hands, turning it over once like an artifact, and followed him out the door into the last of the Sunday light.
Nina came and stood next to me at the front window with a dish towel over her shoulder, and we watched them go down the block — Joey talking with both hands, the ball under his arm, and next to him, shortening that enormous stride to match, the fallen Watcher of the ninth name, chief of ten, going to the park to learn basketball.
"Madonna," Nina said. "Look at that."
"I'm looking."
"He's gonna be terrible at it."
"He's not going to be terrible at it."
"Big guys are always terrible at it. Anthony's cousin, six-five, just about your guy's height, couldn't hit water off a boat."
"Nina. Trust me. He's not going to be terrible at it."
She narrowed her eyes at the window, at the two shapes turning the corner by the laundromat, filing that away with everything else she'd filed tonight.
"He ate the whole dinner with the baby fork," she said.
"You notice that? Little Marco's fork, from the drawer mix-up.
Man that size. Coulda asked for another one — I'd have gotten him another one.
" She flipped the towel off her shoulder and handed it to me, because in this family love is a dish rotation.
"He didn't want to make it a thing. He didn't want anybody to feel bad about a fork. "
"That's him."
"Yeah." She looked at me sideways, the look with forty years in it. "You did good, Cat. Whatever he is."
"Big old weirdo is what he is," I said, and she barked a laugh, and I laughed, and whatever had been sitting in that whatever got up and left the room, evicted, because Nina and I had decided it was funny instead.
The block was going gold at the edges, that last hour before the streetlights come on. Down at the park, my brother was teaching basketball to a fallen angel.
I dried the dish and put it away in Nina's cabinet.
Six blocks from here, the house was mine. Settled. Kept. And tonight a man who doesn't sleep would stand in its quiet, listening to two heartbeats.
The keeper keeps the house. The house keeps the family. Nonna taught me that with a rolling pin in her hand.
Turns out it works.