Chapter 4: Bensonhurst

I read the banner until the screen dimmed in my hand.

Family funds.

I hadn't been family since Friday. I had the paperwork to prove it.

The train went over again and shook the grit off the tracks onto my hair.

I walked six blocks to my father's house.

It was the narrow brick row house on 79th Street where I grew up. Two floors, a stoop, a postage stamp of concrete out front.

His old Buick sat in the driveway under a gray cover. Nobody had driven it since the funeral.

The key was where it had always been, under the plaster Saint Anthony by the steps.

Inside, everything was under sheets.

His recliner. The kitchen table. The good lamp my mother bought in 1994.

The heat was off. I didn't know how to turn it on without him.

I slept in my old bedroom in the scrubs and the raincoat, with my hand flat on my stomach.

Monday morning I walked to 18th Avenue.

The bank there was the one my father used for forty years.

The safe deposit box was in my name alone. I'd opened it the year I married Silvio.

He never asked what I kept in it. He never asked about anything that bored him.

The clerk let me into the little room and left.

Inside the box was a padded envelope and a smaller white one.

The padded envelope held a black drive the size of my thumb.

It held three years of every dollar that crossed from the family's dirty side to its clean side.

Every date, every amount and every name that touched it.

The only copy in the world.

The white envelope was my father's handwriting.

For when you need it, Mirella. Don't tell your mother.

Inside were three thousand dollars in twenties.

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