Chapter 5 - Shadows in the East Gallery
The football arrived on a Tuesday.
It was not a child’s toy. It was a regulation Wilson leather ball, the kind the Bears used at Soldier Field, dark brown with thick white laces that smelled of tallow and steer hide.
It was too big for my hands. When I tried to hold it against my chest, it covered me from my chin to my navel.
"Drop it," Dominic said.
We were in the east gallery. It was sixty feet long, with marble busts of Roman emperors set on green malachite pedestals every ten feet. Outside, the rain had turned to sleet, rattling against the tall windows like handfuls of rice thrown against the glass.
"Drop it?" I asked.
"Drop it on the floor. When it bounces, hit it with the laces of your shoe. Don't look at me. Look at the point."
I dropped the ball. It didn't bounce; it hit the thick runner rug with a dull *thud* and rolled toward the bust of Marcus Aurelius.
"Again," he said.
He was sitting in an armchair with high wings, upholstered in red velvet that had worn thin at the elbows. He had a file on his lap—blue cardstock with a red rubber band around it—but he wasn't reading it.
"It doesn't jump," I complained.
"Because the rug is wool," he said. "The rug takes the force. Life is mostly wool, Lucy. You have to provide the bounce yourself."
"That doesn't make sense."
"It will when you're twenty."
I picked up the ball. It was heavy. My small arms were already tired, the muscles in my forearms burning with that dull, sweet ache I had seen Dominic rubbing after he did the bench press.
"My mama says you're going to get us killed," I told him, looking at the white laces.
Dominic didn't shift in the chair. He reached out with two fingers and pulled the red rubber band off the file. "Your mother is a sensible woman. Most people are stupid. They think death is something that happens to someone else, like a car accident on the television. Your mother knows better."
"Why does she know better?"
"Because she was born in a place where they leave the bodies on the road to save on the gasoline," he said. His voice was cold, perfectly even, as if he were discussing the price of turnips. "And then she came here, where we put them in the river so we don't have to see them."
"Is my father in the river?"
The gallery became very still.
Even the sleet seemed to pause against the glass.
Dominic looked at me over the top of the blue file. His eyes were like two nickel coins that had been dropped in an alley and run over by a truck.
"No," he said.
"Where is he?"
"He’s in Texas," Dominic said. "He works on a roof. He has three other children with a woman who has a gold tooth. He doesn't send money because he spends it on horses that run too slow."
I processed this. My mother had always told me my father was "away with the trucks."
"Did you see him?" I asked.
"I had a man look," Dominic said. He turned a page in the file. "Three weeks after your mother moved into the carriage house. I like to know who has keys to my doors."
"Is he strong?"
"He’s weak," Dominic said. "A man who leaves his girl with a woman who has to wash another man's sheets is a dog."
"Like Buster?"
"Buster had more honor," Dominic said. "Buster wanted the rabbit. Your father just wanted to drink beer where nobody asked him why he smelled like roofing tar."
I dropped the ball.
This time, I didn't wait for it to settle into the wool. As the leather touched the pile, I swung my right foot—hard, the way he had told me, toe down, ankle locked like a piece of dry pine.
My strawberry sock hit the leather point.
The ball flew six feet. It didn't go straight; it wobbled through the air like a wounded goose and struck the malachite pedestal beneath Marcus Aurelius with a solid *clonk*.
The marble bust didn't fall, but it rocked once, twice, before settling back into its lead collar.
Dominic didn't clap. He didn't smile.
He closed the blue file.
"Better," he said.
"Did you see?" I asked, my face hot with triumph.
"I saw," he said. "Your hip was high. You're leaning to the left because you're afraid of falling on your bottom."
"I am not!"
"You are," he said, rising from the chair. He looked taller in the gallery than he did in the gym; the high ceiling seemed to give him room to expand until he filled the space between the Romans. "Everyone is afraid of falling. The trick isn't to stop being afraid. The trick is to fall so you don't break your wrist."
He walked toward me, his heavy shoes making no sound on the runner. He stopped two feet away.
"Show me your arm," he said.
I held out my right arm.
He reached down and took my wrist between his thumb and forefinger. He didn't squeeze—not the way he had squeezed Silvio—but his grip was absolute. He lifted my arm until it was straight out from my shoulder.
"Make a fist," he said.
I made a fist.
"Tuck the thumb," he said. "Outside the fingers. Not inside. You tuck it inside, you hit something hard, you break the knuckle. Then you have one hand for three months. A person with one hand is half an idiot."
I moved my thumb.
He tapped my knuckles with the flat of his fountain pen. *Tack. Tack. Tack.*
"Hard," he said. "Like iron."
"Like yours?"
"Mine are broken," he said simply. "Three times. Here. Here. And the little one." He showed me the side of his right hand; the bone was thick, twisted like an old tree root that had grown around a stone in the dirt. "They don't bend right in the morning. When it rains, they hurt like the devil. You don't want hands like mine, Lucy."
"Yes, I do," I said.
He looked down at me for a long time. The house seemed to hold its breath again.
May you like
"No," he whispered, and for a second—just a second—the gray in his eyes wasn't river ice; it was deep water with the sun trying to reach through. "You don't."
***
