Page 4 of Harbor

Vito coughed on a heavy drag of the cigarette, and rolled down his window a bit to flick the ash outside. “No, you listen. I’ll spot you what you need, Ren. I bet you don’t like owing somebody money, so I suspect you’re gonna do whatever I want you to do to pay me back, and that’s good. That’s a good thing because you’re smart enough and just quick enough to maybe make something of nothing on these streets. We’ll get you figured out for that. But it’s not that—the money—that you need to worry about, okay?”

Renzo glanced over at the man. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s a book,” Vito said, taking another drag from the cigarette and then eyeing the cherry red tip. “A book called The Angry Christian. The author—a guy named Bert Ghezzi—says that resentment is akin to taking poison into your body willingly, and hoping it kills the person you’re resentful of, or who caused your resentment.”

He didn’t know how to reply to that, so he just stayed quiet. Vito didn’t seem like he minded, really.

“Anger’s the same way, you know. Bitterness, too. You harbor enough of that for them, Ren, and it’s only going to get worse over the years. It ain’t gonna do nothing to them, but it’s going to kill you. Like putting a gun to your head, holding it there, and then pulling the trigger hoping it’s going to kill them. It ain’t never gonna kill them, kid … harboring that only hurts you. Learn to let it go.”

Renzo blinked.

Vito wasn’t wrong.

He hated his parents.

Hated this life they brought him into.

Hated everything.

“Yeah,” Vito said quietly like he could read Renzo’s mind. “Yeah, kid, that right there. Gotta let it go, Ren.”

“I don’t know how—”

“Do you know what harbor means, yeah?”

Renzo cleared his throat. “I guess.”

“Mmm, not the noun, or the usage of the verb I just gave you, the other one,” Vito said.

“No.”

Vito sighed. “If you can’t let go of what you’re harboring, Ren, then you need to learn to be someone else’s harbor. The safe place—the refuge. People are counting on you, right? Don’t let them down. Don’t let them down by falling into the same rabbit hole of the people who made you, kid. You gotta be better.”

Renzo sucked in a sharp breath. “Yeah, all right.”

“You gotta do better.”

With that said, Vito opened the dash on the car to expose stacks of money. He gestured at it with one hand, saying to Renzo, “You take what you need, and you pay it back with forty percent interest on the top. You got me?”

That’s a lot of money.

“Go ahead,” Vito grunted, replacing the cigarette with the toothpick again, “and then we’ll talk about what job you’re gonna do for me next, kid.”

Renzo took the money.

Like Vito said, he had to be that shelter—the safe harbor.

People were counting on him.

He couldn’t let them down.

ONE

The world was prettiest when it was dark. Shrouded in silence, all distractions sleeping for the moment, a person could finally reflect on everything. Their life, and what had become of it. Their choices, and why they made them.

Anything.

A person could think about anything when it was dark.