I looked up.
“Not the job.” His eyes were steady. “Not who sent you. Just you. Before.”
I felt my pulse race.
“Foster care,” I said. The word landed flat. I’d had twenty years of practice making it land flat, draining it of the weight people attached to it—the pity, the discomfort, the careful recalibration of eye contact. “When I was young, my family kind of, uh, fell apart.” A pause. “I moved a lot.”
He nodded. No expression of sympathy. No careful reorientation. He just received it and waited.
“Chicago mostly. Some suburbs. There was a shelter on the South Side where I spent a winter when I was eleven.” I turned the wine glass by the stem. “A group home in Logan Square. Another one in Humboldt Park. And then West Side—a place called Lakeview House, which was neither a lake nor a view but did have a very thorough lock on the supply closet.”
“How thorough?”
“Five-pin tumbler. Kwikset.” A beat. “I got through it in six minutes the second time.”
He was quiet for a moment. “The first time?”
“Eighteen.” I said. “Reena showed me. Girl in my unit. She’d grown up in a building where the heat got cut off every January, so she’d learned to get into the utility room to mess with the thermostat.” I could see her still—quick hands, dark braids, the particular self-possession of a fourteen-year-old who had learned that the world didn’t give you access and so you took it. “She taught me. Bobby pin and a piece of bent wire. The same tools.”
“That you used on my deadbolt.”
“The very same.”
He picked up his wine. Drank. Set it down. “How old were you?”
“Fourteen.” My turn to watch him. “Young enough to think it was cool. Old enough to know it was useful.”
The thing I didn’t say: the first time a lock opened under my hands it felt like the first time anything in my life had said yes. Every door before that had been closed by someone else, locked by someone else, opened or not opened at someone else’s discretion. The lock didn‘t care about that. The lock had a mechanism, and the mechanism responded to pressure applied correctly, and I had learned to apply it correctly, and after that I had access. To rooms. To options. To the particular freedom of a person who understands that most barriers are just problems nobody bothered to solve.
“Your turn,” I said.
He leaned back against the booth. The leather creaked under his shoulders. “What do you want to know?”
“Your brothers.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not closing—the opposite. A relaxing, like a word finally spelled right. “Dante’s the don.” He said it with a specificity that contained thirty-four years of history. “He runs everything. Knows everyone, forgets nothing, has never in his life raised his voice or lost his tie.”
“Do you like him?”
“He’s my brother.”
“That‘s not what I asked.”
A pause. He turned his glass by the stem, mirroring me. “He’s the best man I know,” he said finally. “He’s also the most exhausting person to have a conversation with because he thinks four moves ahead and by the time you’ve figured out what he’s already decided you were going to do, you’ve already done it.”
I understood that. “And Marco?”
The expression that crossed his face was so specific—fond and exasperated and slightly helpless—that I almost laughed before the sentence even came out.
“Marco,” he said, “has never walked into a room and failed to own it in his life. Doesn’t matter the room. Doesn’t matter who‘s in it. He smiles at people and they give him things. Bank tellers. Cops. Once, memorably, a federal agent.” He paused. “The agent bought him coffee.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I watched it happen.”
“The agent—“
“Bought him coffee. And gave him his card. In case Marco ever needed anything.” Santo‘s jaw tightened with the particular suffering of an older brother who has witnessed this phenomenon too many times and has run out of frameworks to explain it. “Marco kept the card. He sends the man a Christmas card. Every year.”
