5. Vegarro “Vega” Moretti
VEGARRO “VEGA” MORETTI
According to my mother and aunt, in order for the family to stay connected, we had to sit around the same table, eat food prepared by our elders, and tolerate being embarrassed for at least two hours.
That Saturday afternoon, Aunt Denise hosted at the house she shared with Prodigy’s stepfather, Marcus.
By the time I arrived, the dining room table was covered with fried chicken, baked macaroni, greens, sweet potatoes, spaghetti, cornbread, and enough food to feed twice the number of people invited.
My mother, Renee, stood near the kitchen island arguing with Denise over whether the macaroni needed more cheese.
“It’s already cheese on top,” Denise argued.
“That doesn’t mean there’s enough inside.”
“You haven’t even tasted it.”
“I can tell by looking.”
“That is not how tasting works, Renee.”
Aunt Carla laughed from her seat at the island. She was Lux’s mother and my mother’s first cousin. Though she wasn’t Lowe’s mother, she treated him like a son. So, Prodigy had no blood connection to Lux and Lowe, but he had never treated them as anything except family, and vice versa.
“You two have been arguing about food since the nineties,” Carla laughed.
“Denise just gets off on disagreeing with me,” my mother replied.
Denise rolled her eyes. “I do not.”
“You still swear you can speak Italian more fluently than me.”
Denise turned toward her. “I can. You ordered laundry detergent at La Dolce Notte last week.”
My mother sucked her teeth while waving off her best friend of over thirty years.
Wise, Prodigy, Lux, Lowe, and I were already seated, listening to the women interrupt one another while my father and Marcus stood near the bar discussing basketball.
This was normal for us. My mother and Aunt Denise had been best friends before any of us existed.
They had gone to Italy together to teach English and met two Italian brothers who had no money, influence, or impressive last name.
My father and his brother had been regular middle-class men.
They worked, paid bills, and came from a family that expected them to live ordinary lives.
My father, Sal, had worked in logistics.
His brother, Renzo, had been an electrician.
They hadn’t expected to fall in love with two Black women from Chicago.
Living in Italy had not always been easy for my mother and Aunt Denise.
They dealt with staring, rude questions, strangers touching their hair, and people assuming they were temporary, paid entertainment instead of women their husbands planned to marry.
Some people treated my father and his brother like dating Black women was an act of rebellion.
Others acted as though my mother and Aunt Denise should have been grateful Italian men found them attractive.
Neither woman had ever been built to tolerate disrespect. So, they created a life there anyway.
The families returned to the States when Wise was five because my mother and Aunt Denise wanted their sons raised in Chicago, close to family and away from the prejudices Black people often faced in Italy. My father and his brother followed because that was where their wives wanted to live.
We had grown up middle-class. Sometimes, we were comfortable.
Others, we were barely keeping everything together.
Wise, Prodigy, and I got involved in the streets as teenagers because we saw other guys our age making fast money.
They had cars, clothes, jewelry, and cash, while we were asking our parents for a few dollars.
At that age, we didn’t see the risk, and the reward was parked directly in front of us on twenty-six-inch rims.
Eventually, our parents became more financially stable, but the Street Kings were already too deep in the game to stop.
Yet, no matter how big and bad we were in the streets, we never told our parents what we really did.
We couldn’t break their hearts like that, so we had them convinced we were successful entrepreneurs.
When Denise got with Marcus, her finances changed. Marcus was a successful businessman who owned several commercial properties and made sure she never struggled again.
Wise went to college to make our mother happy. That was where he met Bishop and Milan. He earned the degree, came home, and applied everything he’d learned to making the Street Kings more efficient businessmen.
I never bothered trying to please my mother with going to school. I couldn’t pull myself away from the streets.
“Why are you staring at the food?” my mother asked me. “Pick up a plate.”
“I was waiting for y’all to finish arguing.”
“We were not arguing,” Aunt Denise said.
“You told her she couldn’t cook,” Lowe pointed out.
My mother looked offended. “I did not say she couldn’t cook.”
“You said her macaroni looked dry,” Lux reminded her.
“That is constructive criticism.”
“It’s disrespectful,” Aunt Denise corrected.
Wise picked up the serving spoon. “Can we eat before this becomes violent?”
My mother pointed at him. “You’ve always been bossy.”
“He has,” I agreed.
“When he was ten, he made written schedules for the neighborhood basketball games,” she announced.
Wise paused serving himself. “Why are we talking about this?”
“He wrote down what time everybody was supposed to arrive, when warm-ups started, and how long each game would last.”
Prodigy looked across the table at him. “You had scheduled warm-ups?”
“He got mad when the players arrived late,” my mother continued. “One boy came fifteen minutes after the time Wise wrote down, and Wise told him he had forfeited his playing privileges.”
Lux laughed. “Playing privileges is wild.”
Wise glanced at our mother. “You enjoy humiliating me.”
“That explains why he acts seventy now,” Lowe said.
Wise slid the macaroni past Lowe without letting him take any.
“That’s childish,” Lowe responded with a laugh.
“No. According to my schedule, you missed your opportunity, motherfucka.”
Everybody laughed, including my father.
Aunt Denise pointed her fork at Prodigy. “Don’t laugh too hard. You were running a gambling operation out of my basement at twelve.”
Marcus agreed with a laugh. “Sure was.”
Prodigy grinned. “It was not a gambling operation.”
“You charged those boys five dollars to enter a video-game tournament, took bets on every round, and kept half the money,” Marcus explained.
Prodigy shrugged. “That was an administrative fee.”
“He had a sign-up sheet, brackets, and somebody working the door,” Aunt Denise continued. “I only found out because one little boy’s mother called me demanding her son’s money back.”
Carla looked toward her sons with a teasing smirk. “Those two have been terrorists since they learned how to walk. When they were five, they figured out how to unlock the back door and disappeared for almost three hours.”
Lowe laughed. “We just went to the park.”
“You crossed two busy streets to get there!”
“We looked both ways,” Lux said, shrugging.
“You were five!”
Prodigy shook his head, chuckling. “Who came up with the plan?”
Carla pointed at Lux. “He did. Lux packed snacks, bottled water, and a change of clothes in two backpacks.”
Wise looked at Lowe. “What did you contribute?”
“I carried the money.”
“What money?” I asked.
“The money they stole from my purse,” Carla answered.
“We borrowed it,” Lux corrected.
“You bought ice cream for every child at the park.”
Lowe smiled. “We were learning how to run shit.”
Carla stared at both of them. “I spent three hours believing they had been kidnapped while they were at the park buying friends. I thought Debra was going to kill me for losing her son.”
“You found us, though,” Lowe said.
Carla reached for her wine. “And people wonder why I drink.”
As we all laughed, I looked towards my aunt and noticed she was pouting.
“You good?” I asked her.
Her frown deepened. “This conversation makes me think about Mercy, makes me wonder what kind of child she would have been.”
The table quieted as we all mourned Prodigy’s little sister.
Denise and Renzo had gotten pregnant with their baby girl a year after Prodigy was born.
We never got to meet her, though. Aunt Denise was eight months pregnant when she got into a car accident and Mercy was killed.
Denise woke up from surgery without a baby.
It was devastating for her and my uncle because Mercy was supposed to complete their family.
All Denise and Renzo wanted was two kids; a girl and a boy.
Marcus rubbed Denise’s shoulder soothingly. She blew a heavy breath, shook her head like she was shaking off the heavy thoughts and forced a smile. “Anyway, let’s change the subject.”
Marcus looked toward Prodigy. “How is the search going?”
Prodigy lowered his fork. “Slow.”
Aunt Denise sighed. “Because there is nothing to find.”
Prodigy looked at her, warning, “Ma.”
“I know you don’t like hearing it, but your father left because he didn’t want the responsibility of being a husband and father anymore. Finding him will not change that.”
My father set down his glass. “He didn’t leave willingly.”
Aunt Denise turned toward him. “Salvatore, we have had this conversation.”
“And you keep saying the same thing like repeating it makes it true.”
“He’s disappeared for eighteen years. What else would you call that? He never contacted his son.”
“My brother loved that boy.”
Denise slightly rolled her eyes. “Then where is he?”
My father’s expression always held so much grief whenever his brother came up in conversation. They were as close as I am to Wise and Prodigy and were also best friends like my mother and Aunt Denise.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But Renzo wouldn’t walk away from his child without a reason.”
Prodigy watched him closely, as if hearing those words again gave him the power to keep searching for Renzo.
Aunt Denise shook her head as if she felt sorry for Sal. “You remember the brother you wanted him to be.”
“No. I remember the man he was.”
Marcus placed a hand over Aunt Denise’s, but she continued looking at my father. “He left me to raise Prodigy alone.”
“And I am telling you, he would never do that. Something happened. Did you ever consider that his disappearance could have been connected to Vittorio Carbone?”
Before he disappeared, Renzo had worked as an electrician at a commercial property owned by Vittorio Carbone.
Renzo so happened to be inside the building when two men came to kill Vittorio.
Renzo could’ve hidden and let it happen.
Instead, he pulled the fire alarm, got Vittorio out through a service corridor, and took a bullet protecting him before security arrived.
“How could that be if he saved Vittorio’s life?” Denise asked.
“The men trying to kill him could have came after my father.”
“Why? He was just an electrician and they knew that. Besides, there would have been evidence of that somewhere.”
“You cannot know that,” Prodigy argued.
“Neither can you.”
The room stayed quiet for several seconds.
I respected my father for many reasons, but his loyalty had always been near the top of the list. Eighteen years had passed.
Renzo hadn’t called, written, or appeared at a funeral.
Most people had accepted the easiest explanation.
But my father refused to. He believed, despite their brotherly bond, that his brother loved Prodigy too much to disappear by choice, and he stood on that belief even when it made things uncomfortable.
Prodigy cleared his throat. “I found another possible address.”
Aunt Denise closed her eyes briefly. “Where?”
“I’m not comfortable saying, especially since I don’t know why he left.”
My father nodded. “Tell me when you’re going.”
“I can handle it.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t. I said tell me. You’ll need support.”
Prodigy stared at him before nodding once.
Aunt Denise looked as though she wanted to argue, but Marcus squeezed her hand, and she complied with a weak smile.