Her Birthday Celebration Was My Exit novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Seven Fishes

"Then it's my daughter's word," Pop said. "And mine. And this guy's." He jerked a thumb at the lead lineman, who had followed us out with his coffee. "Write that down."

The agent almost smiled.

"I'll write it down, Mr. Bellini."

She drove away with two years of the Salerno family's secrets in her back seat.

Pop watched the sedan go.

"That man just handed the government his whole shelf," he said. "For you."

"I know."

"Don't go soft on me now."

"I'm not going soft. I said no."

"I heard." He unlocked the Buick. "Best word you ever said in that hangar."

I stayed in Bridgeport after that.

I was grounded, I was paid, and I had a federal agent's card in my wallet.

Pop said I could be grounded in my old room as well as anywhere.

Tommy flew down on the twenty-third with a duffel bag full of frozen fish.

"Alaska cod," he announced at the door. "Somebody has to class up the Seven Fishes."

"We have cod in Chicago," Pop said.

"Not like this. This cod has seen things."

Ryder and Sunny landed at O'Hare on the morning of Christmas Eve.

Sunny came through the arrivals door at a dead run in her purple parka, a rock bag thumping against her hip.

She hit me in the stomach.

"We saw the lake from the plane! It's so big! Is that the one with the rocks?"

"That's the one."

"Dad says I get one rock. I'm going to argue."

Ryder came behind her with two bags and his right hand bare.

The stitches were out.

A new pink line ran across his palm, right under the old white scar on the back.

"It matches now," he said, when he caught me looking. "Front and back."

"Does it hurt?"

"Only when I make a fist." He picked up my hand instead. "So I don't."

By four o'clock the two-flat smelled like the whole Adriatic had washed up on Thirty-First Street.

Baccalà soaking in the sink.

Clams in a bucket.

Shrimp.

Calamari rings drying on paper towels.

An octopus in a pot that Sunny refused to be in the same room with.

"It has arms," she said from the doorway.

"Eight," Pop said. "That's why it's worth eight fishes."

"That's not how it works."

"In this house it's how it works."

Tommy took the smelts.

He stood at the stove in Mom's old apron over a pan of hot oil.

Sunny stood on a chair beside him, dredging the little silver fish in flour.

"Heads on," he told her. "That's how you know it's a smelt and not a lie."

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