Chapter 11: The Union Hall

I picked up the hard hat with a dish towel.

It was brand new.

The price sticker was still on the brim.

Someone had wanted me to know exactly whose it was.

My mother came down the stairs in her robe with a baseball bat.

She looked at the window.

She looked at the hat.

She looked at me in my socks in the glass.

"Don't move," she said. "You'll cut your feet."

She traded the bat for a broom and swept a path to me.

Nobody called the police.

In Little Italy, nobody ever did.

By six in the morning, half of High Street was on our sidewalk.

The shoe repair man brought plywood.

The pastry chef brought coffee.

Two men from the parish brought a drill and argued about screws for twenty minutes.

By seven, the bank had a plywood window.

By eight, somebody had spray-painted MAZZOLA on it in gold.

The crossword teller had done it.

She had paint on her cardigan and no regrets.

I stood on the sidewalk with my coffee and looked at that plywood for a long time.

Tullio wanted me inside, behind the counter, scared.

He wanted me hiding.

My father had hidden for twenty-six months.

I went upstairs and got my Harbor binder.

The dockworkers' union hall was on Caroline Street, two blocks from the pier.

It smelled like coffee and diesel and a hundred years of cigarettes.

The steward I'd seen at the port board was standing at a folding table when I walked in, eating a hard roll.

He was a broad man with a gray crew cut and the union pin on his jacket.

"The bank lady," he said with his mouth full. "Somebody broke your window."

"Somebody did."

"Heard it was a hard hat."

"Brand new," I said. "Price sticker on it."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Loved Me in Secret, Until I Became Someone He Could Never Have from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.