Chapter 7: Kennedy Plaza

I didn't answer him.

I sat on the shop floor in my wet jacket and read his text until the screen went dark.

Then I got up.

I packed one backpack.

It held two pairs of jeans, three tank tops and my good gloves.

My father's watch went on my wrist and his ring on a chain around my neck.

At four in the morning I laid my own phone face up on the workbench.

Twenty-six years of numbers lived in it.

Leni's was the first one.

I didn't turn it off.

I wanted it to ring after I was gone, and ring, and nobody pick up.

The deed to 312 Atwells went into a big yellow envelope.

I wrote LENI on the front, and under it, Keep the lights on.

I propped it against the glass of the front window where anybody walking by could see her name.

Then I switched off the lights and stood in the dark of my father's shop one last time.

The tubes on the wall were cold.

The torch was cold.

Every burn on my arms had come from this room.

I locked the front door from the outside.

I knelt on the wet sidewalk and slid the envelope marked LUCIO under the door.

It skidded across the floor and stopped at the leg of the workbench.

He'd come looking at seven.

He'd find it there.

I walked down Atwells in the dark with my hood up.

The pawnshop was shut, its gold balls dripping.

Federal Hill was asleep except for a bakery light and a cat on a dumpster lid.

At the bottom of the Hill I crossed the highway bridge into downtown.

Kennedy Plaza was a wide wet square of bus shelters and pigeons.

The 5 a.m. bus sat at the curb with its engine shuddering and its sign glowing NEW YORK, NEWARK.

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