“How Can I Get Muscles Like Yours?” — The Mafia Boss Froze When the Maid’s Little Girl Walked Into His Private Gym

The blue coat arrived on the first day of March.

It was made of heavy Melton wool, the color of the deep lake where the freighters turn around. It had silver buttons shaped like little anchors, and the lining was red silk that felt like water when you put your arms through the sleeves.

My toe was healed.

It was a little crooked—it curved slightly toward the second toe, like it was trying to tell a secret—but it didn't hurt when I ran.

The garden was melting. The black earth was coming up through the snow, smelling of rotten grass and the worms that were waking up beneath the boxwood.

We were in the kitchen.

My mother was making *chilaquiles*—the real kind, with the tortillas she had dried on the radiator overnight and the green sauce that made Dominic’s ears turn pink when he ate it.

He ate it anyway.

He sat at the end of the long pine table in his shirtsleeves, his glasses on—little gold-rimmed reading glasses that made him look like a schoolmaster from a country that had lost a war—reading the *Chicago Tribune*.

"The alderman resigned," he said to the butter dish.

"Which one?" Alina asked without turning from the stove.

"The one with the teeth," Dominic said. "He’s going to Arizona to raise horses."

"Good," she said. "He had bad eyes."

"He had seven million dollars of my money," Dominic said, turning the page with a dry *crackle*. "Now he has five hundred acres of dirt and three mares that are blind in one eye. We call that a compromise."

I came into the kitchen wearing the blue coat.

It was long; it came down to the tops of my strawberry socks. I had Benny tucked under my arm like a newspaper.

"Look," I said.

Dominic lowered his paper. He looked over the gold rims of his glasses.

He took his time. He looked at the anchors on the buttons. He looked at the sleeves, which had been turned up two inches because my mother was still convinced I was going to grow six inches by Easter.

"The buttons are straight," he observed.

"They're anchors," I said. "Like the ships."

"Like the salt boats," he said.

"I have pockets," I told him, shoving both hands into the wool. "Look. Big ones."

I pulled my hands out.

In my left hand was a spool of blue thread.

In my right hand was a small, round stone I had found by the fountain—smooth and white, the size of a pigeon’s egg.

"What is the stone for?" Dominic asked.

"For Buster," I said. "If he comes back from Evanston."

Dominic took off his glasses. He folded the gold temples with a small, precise *click* and set them on the edge of the newspaper.

He reached out his hand.

"Come here," he said.

I walked over to the end of the table. My shoes made a solid, heavy sound on the oak boards—not the soft, frightened sound my purple socks used to make, but the sound of someone who had five rooms and three gardens and a black Imperial with six-inch armor in the garage that belonged entirely to her.

Dominic didn't pick me up. He reached out and straightened the anchor button at my throat.

His fingers were warm. They didn't smell like boxing tape anymore; they smelled of lavender water and the orange marmalade he had put on his toast.

"Buster isn't coming back," Dominic said.

"How do you know?"

"I bought Evanston," he said.

My mother stopped stirring the green sauce. She turned her head, her wooden spoon dripping three drops of oil onto the clean floor, her dark eyes wide.

"You did what?" she asked.

Dominic didn't look at her. He kept his gray eyes on my face, his thumb gently smoothing the blue wool over my collarbone.

"The whole town?" I asked, my eyes wide.

"The street," he said. "The street with the lawns. The dog is ninety years old, Lucy. He lives on canned beef and he sleeps on a porch with a heating pad. He doesn't want your rabbit. He doesn't even want his own teeth."

"Can I see him?"

"No," Dominic said.

"Why not?"

"Because," Dominic Moretti said, his voice dropping into that low, heavy rumble that had once made four hundred men in tuxedos stop breathing in the ballroom, "you are the boss’s girl. And the boss’s girl doesn't go to Evanston to look at dogs that have given up."

He leaned back in his chair.

He looked at my mother.

She was looking at him—not with the lard-face, not with the apron over her eyes, but with that slow, quiet look she had when she was deciding whether the bread needed five more minutes in the brick oven.

"Delgado," he said.

"Yes, Mr. Moretti?"

"Set another plate."

"For who?"

"For the girl," he said, tapping the pine wood next to his elbow. "She’s four. She can't eat off a crate forever. It’s bad for her posture."

My mother looked at the table. She looked at the blue wool coat with the anchor buttons.

Then she took a white plate—the English one, with the little blue birds on the rim that had survived the tea party—and set it down three inches from Dominic’s forearm.

"Sit down, Lucy," she said.

I climbed up onto the chair. It was high, but I used the rung—the one that Dominic had fixed with two steel pins and a dab of carpenter’s glue the week before.

I sat there.

My feet didn't touch the floor. They swung back and forth, the purple socks flashing beneath the hem of the long blue coat.

Dominic picked up his fork.

He looked at the chilaquiles. He looked at the red sauce that was already simmering in the little iron pot.

Then he reached out with his left hand—the one with the broken knuckles that didn't bend right in the morning—and he took Benny by his one blue-stitched ear.

He set the rabbit between the salt cellar and the butter dish, facing the garden where the grass was turning green under the wet Illinois sun.

"Eat," Dominic said. "We have the heavy bag at ten."

"One," I said, reaching for the toast.

Dominic looked at me over the rim of his coffee cup.

"Due," he whispered.

And for the first time since my mother had walked through the stone gates with two cardboard suitcases and a four-year-old with dirty knees, the man who owned Chicago smiled.

It wasn't a big smile.