Chapter 17: Her Mother's Door

We were in the car in four minutes, with my hair still wet and a coat thrown over my sweater.

Gaspare drove with his good hand and a pistol under his thigh.

Cesare sat beside me with his phone to his ear.

He said one flat word, "Where?", over and over, to men who didn't have an answer yet.

I held my own phone in both hands and watched the black screen.

"Pick up, Mom," I said. "Please."

"She's asleep," Cesare said.

"If she's asleep, why did somebody take a picture of her door at night?"

He didn't answer.

The streets of Newark went by in strips of orange light.

The house I grew up in is a narrow white two-story on a street where everybody still sweeps their own stoop.

It had a porch light and a plastic Virgin in the front garden.

A gray sedan was parked across the street with its engine running.

Two shapes sat inside.

Gaspare killed the headlights and rolled the last half block in the dark.

"Stay in the car," Cesare said.

"No."

"Margo."

"That's my mother's house."

He looked at me for a moment.

Then he opened his door and held out his hand, and I took it.

The porch light was on, and the front door opened before we reached the steps.

My mother stood in her blue bathrobe with a kettle in one hand and her glasses pushed up in her hair.

She was sixty-three, five foot two, and had driven a school bus through Newark for thirty-one years.

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