Shepherd Avenue

Book 1: Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

Genres: Biographical; Family Life; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year “An excellent writer and a marvelous storyteller. . . . He creates a special world on Shepherd Avenue that I loved to enter and hated to leave.” –Ferrol Sams From acclaimed author Charlie Carillo comes a poignant, darkly funny, coming-of-age story set in the heart of Italian-American Brooklyn, New York, and the heat of one eventful 1960s summer . . . Ten-year-old Joey Ambrosio has barely begun to grieve his mother’s death when his father abruptly uproots him from his sedate suburban Long Island home, and deposits him at his estranged grandparents’ house in boisterous East New York. While his dad takes off on an indefinite road trip, Joey is left to navigate unfamiliar terrain. Besides his gruff Italian grandparents, there's his teenage Uncle Vic, a baseball star obsessed with the music of Frank Sinatra; a steady diet of soulful, hearty foods he’s never tasted, and a community teeming with life, from endless gossip and arguments to curse-laden stickball games under the elevated train. It’s a world where privacy doesn’t exist and there’s no time to feel sorry for yourself. Most of all, it’s where Joey learns not only how to fight, and how to heal, but how to love—and ultimately, how to forgive. Praise for Charlie Carillo and Raising Jake “The best kind of journey, one you don't want to end...funny, moving.” —Mike Lupica “In the tradition of Tom Perotta…truthful, and hilarious.” —Alison Grambs “A literary romp through the minefields of a totally normal, and totally abnormal, family… I actually laughed out loud and kept turning the pages to make absolutely sure that all worked out at the end.” –Cathy Lamb “Carillo has an easy way with breezy prose and likable characters.” –Publishers Weekly

Release date: April 4, 2017

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 278

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

I NEVER saw my father with a newspaper in his hands.

You hear about people in aboriginal tribes who live without ever seeing a written word or hearing the story of Jesus Christ’s life, but Salvatore Ambrosio traveled from Roslyn, Long Island, to midtown Manhattan each weekday to earn his living as an advertising copywriter. It was a long ride, more than an hour each way. I guess he looked out the window. It’s not likely that he talked to anyone.

When he got home from work his dress pants, jacket, and tie came off and were replaced by frayed work shirts and pants. He was never casually dressed, my father. His clothing was either impeccable or absolutely shabby.

My father’s aloofness toward the outside world didn’t do me much good when I’d ask him to help me with current-events homework. Without batting an eye he’d say, “Just tell your teacher that people are worse than ever, and do as many terrible things to each other as they can get away with.”

“Nice thing to say,” my mother would comment. Then she’d trim an article out of Newsday and read it aloud to make sure I understood it, while my father watched with amusement as the two of us “swallowed that bilge they print in the paper.”

My mother read the paper front to back. “Somebody in this house should know what’s going on,” she used to say. She knew in her heart that my father cared about people, but that he couldn’t hide his disappointment in most of them.

One thing that never disappointed my father was his garden. He loved to spend hours tending it slowly, treating our plot of land as if it were a giant jewel that needed daily polishing.

I got to know him best working beside him in silence. The big rectangles of lawns all around ours were tended by professional landscapers, men who jumped off trucks, unloaded machines, and, in furious clouds of noise and gasoline, cut lawns so fast it was like rape. My father used a four-bladed push mower. The neighbors mocked him behind his back, I’m sure.

I got an important glimpse into a secret chamber of my father’s heart when I was nine years old. It was an October afternoon. We had just raked the lawn and put down fertilizer. The job done, I lay on the browning grass and fell asleep. When I awoke he was standing by our hedge, leaning against his rake just hard enough to bend the tines. A honking flock of geese flew overhead. He let the rake drop and did a perfect slow motion pantomime of their wings, flapping his arms and walking in their direction on tiptoes, backlit by the dull orange sunset. It was a startling imitation. I was sort of surprised when he didn’t get airborne.

And I knew he wasn’t just a nut. Something was bugging him, urging him to tear away from the circumstances of his life — something he fought internally all the time. I didn’t know what it was, but I sensed that somehow I stood in his way more than my mother did. I pushed the lima beans around my plate and hardly touched the meat loaf that night.

It all came down when my mother became sick with cancer the following year. We used to visit her at the hospital early in the evenings. She would make us feel better, believe it or not.

“You guys got it backwards,” she explained. “The visitors are supposed to cheer up the patient. See?” After about an hour she’d chase us out of there.

“Go feed the dog,” she’d say.

“We don’t have a dog, Mommy.”

“Go feed the cat.”

“We don’t have a cat,” I’d giggle.

“Go feed the ostrich.”

We’d leave in laughter, then eat our dinners in Northern Boulevard diners, watching cars whiz past as we forked down cheeseburgers, french fries, and cole slaw. My father knew the rudiments of cooking, but I don’t think he was able to bear the thought of a meal at our home without his wife.

She stayed at the hospital for all of April and half of May 1961. In the second week of May, he stopped taking me with him to visit. I was just ten years old but he left me alone in the house those nights and came home with take-out food in foil-lined bags.

It occurs to me that I never had a baby-sitter. Wherever my parents went — to restaurants, the movies — I came along, a son treated like a miniature adult.

Elizabeth McCullough Ambrosio died in the hospital on May 13. That night my father came home and filled a big aluminum pot with water, shook salt into it, and put the flame on full blast under it. He began opening a can of tomato paste.

“We’re having spaghetti,” he said as he cranked the can opener. I started to cry because I knew she was dead.

They buried my mother without a wake the day after she died. The only ones present at the cemetery were my father and me and a priest from a nearby Catholic church we’d never attended. My father was alternately sharp and polite with the priest, who didn’t dare to ask my father why he’d never seen us in church.

We lived an awkward month in the house before my father put it on the market. He hired a stranger to run a garage sale and sell every stick of furniture we had.

All my mother’s clothing and all his dress clothes went into a big Salvation Army hopper at a nearby shopping center. My father held me by the hips as I dropped three big bundles down the dark chute. For an instant I had a vision of him pushing me in after them.

Everything that could possibly tie him down was now gone. We lived those final June days in Roslyn like raccoons that break into summer homes through the eaves. With the rugs gone the aged oak floors groaned at every step, and even with the windows down little currents of air puffed in crazy directions.

The only thing we couldn’t get rid of was the four-bladed push mower, which my father left behind in the barren garage.

He didn’t let me in on his plan until our final night together in the house. We slept on a pair of cots dragged close together in the living room, a courtesy of the moving company that was to bring the new owner’s stuff in the morning.

I hadn’t asked a single question about where we were going during the scuttling of our possessions. I just sat up in my cot, waiting for him to start volunteering information.

He swallowed. He was hesitating, like a kid reluctant to tell a parent about a broken vase. “I quit my job,” he said through a dry throat.

“I figured that out,” I said, irritated. He hadn’t been to work for two weeks. “So where are we going tomorrow?”

He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t startled by his announcement. “I have to take off for a while.”

I felt my heart plummet. I was being disposed of, too — he’d only been saving me for last!

“What do you mean? Where am I gonna go?”

“You’re staying with my parents in Brooklyn.”

I was stunned. “I thought we hated them,” I said. “How can we stay there if we don’t even visit?”

“We don’t hate them!” my father boomed. “There have just been years and years of misunderstanding.”

I was disgusted. “Yeah, sure, Dad.”

He said weakly, “My parents are good people.”

“I don’t even know them!” I rolled over on the cot so I wouldn’t have to look at him. Not even sure I wanted to be with him anymore I said, “Why can’t I go with you?”

“Because you can’t, Joseph.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody can,” he said in a way that made it clear the matter was beyond his control, as if a demon inside him were calling the shots.

Puzzled, I rolled onto my back. Oddly, I felt my anger melting. I started thinking about how miserable this past month with my father had been. Maybe we both needed a break from each other. Somehow, I sensed that losing both parents might be easier than losing one.

“For how long?” I asked roughly.

The fact that I was talking inspired my father. “A few weeks, no more.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Where are you going?”

“Across the country in the car.”

We were silent. The wind picked up, making the ancient window panes jiggle and creak in their loose putty jackets.

I felt him grasp my elbow. “Joey, don’t hate me,” he begged in a voice I’d never heard him use. Desperate.

“I won’t,” I said. I didn’t take his hand but let him hold me for a few minutes before rolling onto my side and falling asleep.

Almost everything we loaded into our Comet station wagon the next morning belonged to me. My father packed one bulging canvas sack for himself, filled with shirts, pants, and underwear. That and his shaving kit were all he’d take across the United States.

When we were on the road I said, “You have to sign my report card.” I dug it out of my pile of stuff. “We’re supposed to mail it back to school. Maybe you don’t have to if I’m not going back.”

“Give it to me,” he mumbled. At a red light near the Long Island Expressway he glanced at the card, hastily scrawled on it, and handed it back to me.

“Take care of it,” he said, knowing I had a stamped, addressed envelope the school had provided.

I looked at the card. Through the first three marking periods Mrs. Olsen, my fifth-grade teacher, had written tiny but stinging notes in the space provided for comments: “Joseph should participate in class more often … Joseph needs to be more outgoing … Joseph holds back during sports.”

And beneath each comment was my mother’s light-handed, almost fluffy signature, “Mrs. Salvatore Ambrosio.” She barely pressed a pen when she wrote.

I looked at the space for the last marking period.

“I suspect he can do better,” Mrs. Olsen had written of my straight-B performance.

“I suspect we all can,” my father wrote back before scrawling his fierce signature. It violated the boundaries of the dainty white box, and I could feel his lettering through the back side of the card, like Braille.

“There’s a mailbox,” I said just before we reached the entry ramp to the expressway. He braked the car. I got out and mailed the report card, sort of surprised that he’d waited instead of roaring away.

“Put your seat belt on,” he said, and that was the extent of our conversation for the rest of the trip to the East New York section of Brooklyn.

He slowed the car to a crawl when we made the turn down Shepherd Avenue. We drove beneath an elevated train track structure that left a ladder-shaped shadow in the late afternoon light. Rows of sooty red brick houses, fronted with droopy maple trees that seemed to have given up trying to grow taller.

My grandmother and Uncle Victor were waiting for us on the porch. I knew them only from photographs.

Clumsy introductions outside the car door: your grandmother, your uncle. No kisses. My father clasped his mother’s hand.

“Long time,” he said in a neutral voice. She nodded. Victor, after a moment’s hesitation, embraced my father.

“What are we, strangers here?”

Embarrassment melted Victor’s enthusiasm. He tore himself away to carry my stuff into the house. I stayed outside with my father, who kept his hand on the open car door, clinging to it as tightly as a rodeo rider grips a saddle horn.

My grandmother had planned to feed us, share one big meal together, but my father said he was already behind schedule. She urged him to stay long enough at least to see his father, who was late getting home. My father said he couldn’t.

“Not twenty minutes?” Constanzia Ambrosio asked. “What’s this schedule?”

“I’m very late,” my father said. “Believe me, Ma.”

How strange it was to hear him use that word, and how anxious he was to get moving, as if a bomb were about to explode inside him and he wanted to put distance between himself and his family to protect us from shrapnel. He stood like a chauffeur, handsome in denim jacket and jeans, misty-eyed, apologetic and arrogant at the same time. At last he hugged his mother, a collision of flesh like two human bumper cars.

“I’m sorry she died,” Constanzia blurted.

“Me, too,” my father said, his voice like a child’s. He let go of her and put his hands under my armpits. I braced myself, anticipating a lift.

But his hands went limp against my rib cage. “No,” he decided. “You’re too big for that now.” He crouched and hugged me, said “See you soon” in a broken voice, and split. I don’t know which of us felt more relieved.

*  *  *

Relieved, but not for long. The switch was concise, a changing of the guard.

“You’re gonna be livin’ here awhile, so forget about that Grandma and Grandpa business,” said Vic, my roommate, as he lugged double armfuls of my stuff to his room.

“We decided this morning,” he said, breathing hard. “No titles. Just Connie and Angie and Vic.”

Vic was eighteen years old, five foot ten, a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was thick as a cluster of wire brush filaments — when he ran his hands through it, it leapt back into place. His hairline ran straight across his forehead and down the sides of his head, with no scallops at the temples. His eyes were brown, like the eyes of everyone else in the house, including me. Only my father had picked up blue eyes, through some errant gene.

Every pair of Vic’s pants looked tight on him but he insisted they were comfortable and kept wearing them, despite my grandmother’s warning that “They’ll make you sterile.” His hard belly bulged slightly, like an overinflated tire. His rump bulged in the same way. From time to time he patted his buttocks, rat-a-tat-tat, as if they were bongos.

Vic’s room was sparsely furnished: a horsehair mattress on a platform bed, an army fold-out cot (for me), a crucifix on the wall, a photo of the Journal-American’s 1960 all-star baseball team (“I’m third from the left; that guy’s hat hides my face”), a Frank Sinatra record jacket tacked to the wall, and a Victrola.

“Put that down,” he said. I’d picked up his athletic cup and put it against my nose, thinking that was where it was worn. He took it from me and gestured with it.

“Listen. If we’re gonna get along we can’t be messing around with each other’s stuff, okay?”

I nodded. “What is that thing?”

He blushed. “You wear it here,” he said, holding it in front of his pants. “In case you get hit with a baseball. You like Sinatra?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don’t listen to music much.”

Shaking his head, Vic put on a record. “If you hang around here, you gotta like Sinatra.” Music filled the room. Vic lay on his back, his stiff mattress crunching as he rolled with the music.

“Look,” he announced when the first song ended, “I think you and me can get along real good. See, I’m a ballplayer, I need lots of sleep. Most nights I’ll probably go to bed earlier than you.”

“What position do you play?” I asked politely.

Vic’s eyebrows arched. “You know baseball?”

“A little.”

“I’m the shortstop. I play in between the second baseman and the third baseman.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, don’t go thinkin’ I can’t hit, just because I’m an infielder. I hit better than all the outfielders on the team. If you can call ’em outfielders. Now listen to this part, how he does this,” Vic said, leaping off the bed and cranking up the volume on the Victrola.

Down the street the elevated train rode past, partially drowning out the music. Vic muttered “Damn” and lifted the needle off the disc to play the same part again, scratching the record.

“Here it is,” he said solemnly.

I forget the song but at a certain point my uncle was jumping up and down on the bed, singing along. When the song ended he stepped to the floor, pink-faced.

“Like, I get carried away,” he said.

Connie appeared at the doorway. “I heard you jump, all the way downstairs! You’re gonna come right through the floor.”

“Sorry, Ma.”

“Come on,” Connie said. “We’ll eat.”

When she left, Vic grinned at me. He clasped the back of my neck and led me into the hallway, giving me a slight Indian burn.

On the way in I’d noticed a beautiful dining room where I figured dinner would be served, but Vic surprised me by leading the way to a dark, rickety staircase. Our footsteps echoed as we walked down to the cellar. There were no banisters. I put my palms against the walls for balance, feeling the scrape of rough stucco.

The basement floor was red and yellow tiles. There were windows along one wall, facing the driveway — you got a view of any approaching visitor’s ankles. A long table with built-in benches stood under fluorescent lights. My grandfather’s oak chair stood at the end of the table.

This was the hub of the home. During Depression years the main floor of the Ambrosio house had been rented out to boarders, so the family had gotten into the habit of using the basement. It was roomy, and always cool in the summertime.

Upstairs, the dining room might as well have been a museum — the mahogany table with its fitted glass top, a buffet table on wheels, heavy long-armed chairs. On the backs of those chairs there were doilies that stayed white year-round, and if you opened a cabinet door in the dining room there was a clicking sound, as if the long-untouched varnished surfaces had welded together. Trapped inside the cabinets were gold-rimmed teacups and saucers with paper tags still glued to their undersides.

But that room couldn’t hold a candle to the character of the basement.

For one thing, the floor wasn’t level, which Vic demonstrated by placing a baseball on it. The ball was still for an instant, then rolled to the opposite wall.

“Enough with that trick, already,” Connie said.

The ceiling was a network of pipes and cables, painted white. There were upright poles at strategic locations, supporting the house above us.

A bowl of spaghetti sat in the middle of the table, steam rising off it and disappearing into the fluorescents. Connie worked it with a pair of forks.

A cameo portrait of her would have displayed a slender woman. Most of her two hundred and twenty pounds hung way below her breastbone. She was fifty-five years old but her hair was black, save for a pair of white-gray stripes at either side of her part, like catfish whiskers.

Those fleshy arms rose again and again over the spaghetti, curtains of fat dangling and dancing from her upper arms. I was reminded of the flying squirrel pictures I’d seen in my science book.

Her guard was all the way up that night. “You hungry?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You didn’t eat so good when you and your father lived alone.” A statement.

“Sometimes we ate out,” I said.

“Mmmm.” She was confirming her own thoughts. She put a bowl of spaghetti before me. “You remember the last time you ate here?”

I hesitated. “I never ate here before.”

“Ah! You don’t remember!”

Vic bared his teeth tightly. “God, Ma, he was a baby. Why do you bring that up?”

Connie ignored Vic as she loaded his dish. “That was some fight,” she said. “I still get knots right here when I think about it.” She made a tight fist and held it near her stomach.

“Forget the knots, let’s eat,” Vic said, winking and squeezing my knee.

Eating noises. Connie pointed at my side dish. “He don’t like it.”

I was poking my fork into something I later came to love: bread, raisins, capers, and cheese, mixed together and baked into half a red pepper. It reminded me of a little coffin and was too sharp a taste for my first day.

“You don’t like it, don’t eat it,” Connie said, as if she didn’t mind.

“This food’s gotta grow on you,” Vic said. “Eat a mouthful tonight, next time eat two. Before you know it you’ll love it.”

I held my breath and swallowed a mouthful without chewing. It went down like a giant slippery aspirin.

“I promise it won’t taste so bad next time,” Vic said. Already I was chasing it with a forkful of spaghetti.

“You talk like my food’s poison,” Connie said.

“Ah, quit acting hurt, Ma.”

Connie pointed at him with a fork. “You. Don’t eat so fast.”

She had a point. Vic ate with the speed of an animal fleeing predators. He held his fork in his right hand and a piece of Italian bread in his left, which he used to shove food onto the fork. When the bread got mushy with sauce he took a bite off it, then resumed work with the dry bread.

“You’ll bite a finger off,” she warned him. “Gonna get fat.”

“Ah, I burn it off fast,” Vic said, a crumb flying from his mouth. He elbowed me, and I found myself smiling and nearly echoing, “Yeah, he burns it up fast,” but I stopped myself. Why make an enemy of Connie when I barely knew Vic?

The rest of the meal was quiet, save for low, muffled belches out of Vic. Connie picked up a bit of food that had flown from Vic’s mouth and crushed it in a paper napkin.

“Now don’t go thinkin’ your father don’t love you,” she said.

A direct hit; my eyes welled with tears. Vic stopped chewing and shot a searing look at her. Then he softened and looked my way, prodding me with an elbow.

“What team do you like, the Yankees or the Dodgers?”

I’d never even heard of the Dodgers. “Yankees.”

“Me, too. My father likes the Dodgers, he’s ready to kill O’Malley for sendin’ ’em out west. Listen, if I make the majors, I’m gonna play for the Yanks.”

“Big shot,” Connie said, getting up to clear the table. The meal had lasted barely ten minutes.

Vic ignored her. “Only thing is, they got so many good players that hardly anybody gets to play every day, except for guys like Mantle and Maris.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “See, I don’t wanna warm some bench when I get there.”

It never occurred to my uncle that he might not make the Major Leagues, but only that he might get cheated out of valuable playing time once he arrived.

He folded his big hands behind his head. “The big dough’s in New York. You set yourself up nice, and then you can get into, like, broadcastin’. That’s how come I’m takin’ a speech class in school. They remember who you are when you play in New York.”

“They forget,” Connie said above the thumping of hot water into the sink. “You’d be surprised how fast people forget.”

Again he ignored her. His eyes narrowed suddenly. “Who hit more homers last year, Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle?”

“Mickey Mantle,” I guessed.

“Wrong!” Vic roared joyfully. “They both hit forty! See? Here’s a guy hittin’ homers all over the place and nobody knows about it, ’cause he doesn’t play in New York. Poor guy’s stuck in Milwaukee.”

“Shut up already,” Connie said. “Every night we hear this.”

She finished washing the dishes. We climbed the stairs to the front parlor and watched TV for a while. Not once had my grandfather’s absence been mentioned.

*  *  *

They set my cot up next to the bedroom window, which was open all the way. Warm air puffed through the screen, but you’d be exaggerating if you called it a breeze.

The sheets were stiff, having been hung to dry in the dead air of the basement because it had rained earlier in the week. Getting into bed was like climbing into an envelope.

It wasn’t dark and it wasn’t quiet. Light filtered in from the street lamp. Two or three radios played somewhere. There were bouts of distant laughter and the screech of brakes on Atlantic Avenue.

“Vic?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there a party going on somewhere?”

“Whatsamatter, can’t you sleep?”

“Too much noise,” I complained. “Is it always so bright in here?”

“Are you crazy?” He hated being awakened. “Here, sleep on this side,” he said, rising.

“It’ll be the same over there,” I whined.

“The same,” he mimicked. “Roll over and close your eyes.”

“I already did.”

“Well, just shut up.”

I heard his irregular breathing across the room and imagined him hating my guts. Now and then he sucked in his breath and socked the pillow with his fist.

I had to break the silence. “My father cried when he left.”

“I saw him cry once before,” Vic said, startling me with his friendliness. He sat up, propping his head up with his hand.

“The time Dixie died, a long time ago. You never knew Dixie. Swell pooch. Well, anyway, he made him a coffin out of an old desk drawer and stuck him in a pillow case. Buried him right out in the backyard.”

Vic flipped onto his belly. “Didn’t make any noise when he cried, though. Cried and cried until his eyes got red, but … funny.” He looked at me. “Didn’t he cry when? …”

“When my mother died,” I said, completing his sentence.

“No. Not around me, anyway.”

Vic let it sink in. “Weird guy.” He reached around under his mattress. “Want a Milky Way?”

“We just brushed our teeth.”

“Ah, it’s all right, you just rub the chocolate off with your tongue. Here.”

He tossed one at me. It landed in the sheets, near my knees.

“Dixie,” Vic said through a mouthful of candy. “Once in a while my mother still chucks a bone out in the yard for her, where your father buried her. You can’t touch the bone, either. It has to sit on the grave till it rots.”

His voice grew serious. “So if you see a bone in the yard, don’t touch it, ’cause it’s for Dixie.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Especially if my mother’s lookin’.”

“I won’t. What would I want with a dumb bone, anyhow?”

He flipped onto his back. “I’ll tell you this — your father’s all right. He was good to me when I was a shrimp.”

I let his remark go without comment.

“But he was always a little crazy,” Vic continued. “Remember when he got married, and everybody told him … jeez, do you believe this? I’m expectin’ you to remember your father’s wedding!”

“What did everybody tell him?”

Vic sighed. “All right. When he got married nobody was marryin’ Irish girls. That’s the truth. I mean it’s no big deal now, but to my mother …”

“What?” I said. “Say it.”

Vic licked his lips. “My mother thought she wasn’t good enough for Sal,” he said. “She apologized a million times since then,” he added quickly.

The news hit my heart like dull daggers.

“God, I shouldn’t have told you that,” Vic said, pummeling his bedding. “Why the hell couldn’t you fall asleep?”

Vic rolled away from me. I saw the black back of his head, suspected he was nowhere near sleep. I was right. When he rolled to face me again his eyes were wide open.

“Nobody could ever tell your father what to do,” he said with fierce pride. “If he had his hand on a hot stove and you told him to take it off he wouldn’t. A rock head. Now it’s the same thing. He wants to drive away, he drives away. Understand this? Joseph?”

“Joey,” I corrected. “No, I don’t.”

“Want another Milky Way?”

“Yeah.”

This one landed on my navel. “They got married real young, they had you right away…. He’s makin’ up for lost time, I figure. Few weeks and he’ll be back, guaranteed.”

The bedroom door opened. Connie’s form filled the doorway.

“Talk soft.”

“Sorry,” Vic said, wincing.

She looked at me. “He keeping you awake?”

“No,” I said, “I’m keeping him awake.”

“Lie down and shut up,” she instructed, pulling the door closed. It was shut nearly all the way when it opened again, suddenly.

“You ain’t foolin’ me,” she said to both of us. “I find the candy wrappers in the morning.”

The door closed for good. Vic’s breathing became rhythmic with sleep. I ran my tongue over my teeth to get rid of the last traces of chocolate and caramel.

The night that had given Connie “knots” was still a mystery, but that was all right. I could wait. I certainly wasn’t going anywhere.

“Nowhere to go.”

I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Vic rolled over.

“What’d you say?”

“Nothing.”

He pushed a thick knuckle against one eye. “Aw, c’mon, kid, get used to this place and sleep, already.”

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN I awoke the next morning I was alone. “Dad?” I said, then I remembered.

Sheets, blanket, and pillow lay in a thick tangle at the head of Vic’s bed, and clothes were scattered on the floor. It didn’t seem late. I finally found a clock under one of Vic’s undershirts. . .