Chapter 12: Our Own Trucks

"Watch me," I said.

I left them to their cards.

On the sidewalk outside the dry cleaner's I stood with my hands in my coat pockets and did the math.

Forty tons of tile.

A coffee freighter from Santos due at my piers Thursday with eighty containers.

Zero trucks.

"You have a plan," Gianni said.

"I have a list."

I took my father's yellow sheet out of my bag under the streetlight.

Nineteen names.

Some of them had sons.

Some of them had wives who'd been driving their kids to hockey in minivans for twenty years.

By Tuesday noon the bakery's back room looked like a campaign office.

My mother had put out three trays of pignoli cookies and a coffee urn the size of a fire hydrant.

The foreman's wife came first.

She was a tiny woman in a purple tracksuit who had driven a school bus in Sunset Park for twenty-two years.

"I've got a Class B," she said. "How hard can a box truck be?"

After her came the big shy kid in the Carhartt jacket and his two cousins, who had their commercial licenses and nothing to drive.

After them came the widow of a man on my father's list.

Her husband had left her two old flatbeds, and she'd been trying to sell them for a year.

"Don't buy them," she told me. "Rent them. I want to see them work again."

By Wednesday night we had nine trucks, eleven drivers, and a whiteboard that said CONFORTI FREIGHT across the top in my crooked red letters.

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