Chapter 3 - Bread, Salt, and Iron
By autumn, my presence in the house had become an irregularity that everyone had grown tired of trying to correct.
Alina tried. God knows she tried. She bought three different baby gates from a secondhand shop on 18th Street and jammed them into the doorway of the carriage house kitchen, but I learned to use a plastic milk crate as a step-stool before the leaves had even turned brown.
The security team—four men in dark suits who rotated through eight-hour shifts in the gatehouse and the back terrace—had given up reporting me. The first time Jimmy "The Hook" Varga had found me sitting on the stone lion by the garage, he had carried me back to my mother by the waistband of my dungarees, looking as if he had picked up an unexploded mortar shell.
"Delgado," he had growled, "the boss sees this kid near the cars, he’ll have my balls for a paperweight."
Dominic had walked out of the kitchen door at that exact second, carrying a cup of black coffee in an espresso cup so small his thick fingers looked ridiculous holding it.
He had looked at Jimmy. He had looked at me, dangling three feet off the gravel.
"Put her down, Jimmy," Dominic had said.
"Boss, she was near the sedan. The tailpipe’s still hot from the run to O'Hare—"
"I have eyes, Jimmy. Put her down before you tear her trousers. They cost four dollars at the parish sale, and Delgado doesn't make enough to buy new ones every time you have an attack of professional competence."
Jimmy had dropped me so fast I landed on my bottom in the pea gravel.
Dominic had taken a sip of his coffee, looked at the sky—which was gray and smelled of the slaughterhouses down on the South Side—and then looked down at me.
"Your left ear is dirty," he said.
"It’s not dirt," I said, rubbing it with a gravel-dusted palm. "It’s chocolate."
"It’s dirt," he said. "Go wash it."
Then he had walked back inside.
That was how the rules were written. They were not spoken; they were carved out of what he ignored.
He ignored me when I sat on the third step of the gym stairs while he worked the iron.
The gym became my schoolroom. I would bring my coloring books—the ones with the thick black outlines of barnyard animals—and sit with my ankles crossed on the cold riser.
He never spoke to me while he was lifting. His workouts had the regularity of an engine room on a freighter.
Three sets of ten on the bench with two hundred and eighty pounds. The bar would come down until the knurling touched the gray hair on his sternum, stay there for the space of one heartbeat, then rise with a short, wet puff of air from his nostrils: *Hssst.*
Then the click of the iron on the hooks.
Silence for sixty seconds.
He used a silver stopwatch with an onion-bulb winding crown. He didn't look at his phone; he didn't have a television mounted on the wall like the men in the magazines. He had a clock, a towel, and a green bottle of water that had no label.
"One," I would say from the stairs.
*Hssst.*
"Two."
*Hssst.*
Once, when he was doing dips between two parallel bars set into the brick wall, Benny fell out of my lap and tumbled down the five wooden steps, landing facedown on the rubber floor.
Dominic finished his set. Eight. Nine. Ten.
He dropped down. His arms were the size of my thighs, the skin shiny with sweat, the blue veins standing up like the rivers on the map of South America in the library.
He walked over to the stairs. He didn't pick up the rabbit with his fingers; he scooped it up with the flat of his hand, like a loaf of bread, and set it back on the step next to my knee.
Benny’s ear was now secure. Alina had used the blue nylon thread Dominic had given me. She had done it with tiny, viciously tight stitches, her hands shaking while she worked by the forty-watt lamp in our kitchen. The thread was so dark it looked almost black against the blue-gray felt, like a surgical scar on an old soldier.
"He looks like he’s been in the wars," Dominic said.
"He was," I said. "He fought the dog."
"Did he win?"
"He didn't die," I said.
Dominic wiped his neck with the towel. He leaned one huge hand against the pine handrail, looking down at me. For the first time, I noticed that the bridge of his nose had a slight crook in it—a break that had set just a fraction of an inch to the west.
"That’s not the same as winning," he said.
"It’s almost the same," I argued.
"No," Dominic said. "Winning is when the dog doesn't come back. Living through it is just the part where you wait for him to get hungry again."
"Buster moved to Evanston," I told him. "His lady went to a home."
Dominic was silent for a moment. Then he made a sound that might have been a snort or might have been the start of a laugh that had died thirty years ago in an alley behind Grand Avenue.
"Then the dog won," he said. "He’s got a lawn now."
He turned back to the rack. "Ten more," he said to the wall.
"One," I called out as his elbows bent.
"Count in Italian," he said without looking back.
"I don't know Italian."
"Then you don't count."
"Mami knows Spanish."
"Spanish is for people who live where it’s warm," Dominic said, his shoulders dropping down until his chest was level with his hands. "Chicago is not warm. *Uno.*"
"*Uno,*" I repeated.
"*Due.*"
"*Due.*"
From the top of the stairs, hidden in the shadows where the laundry baskets were stacked, my mother watched us.
May you like
She didn't come down. She didn't call me. She just stood there with her hands wrapped in her apron, her face half in light and half in shadow, watching the man who controlled half the aldermen in Cook County teach her daughter how to count to ten in the language of men who died with their coats buttoned up.
***
