Page 138 of Graceless

"Your magma chamber is above your vent."

"So?"

"So your mountain would detonate sideways and take out this village." A finger, very gently, on a cotton-ball sheep. "Which is what the real one did. Your teacher will not expect that. Show the sideways."

"Sideways," Marco breathed, like a man receiving scripture, and that school is never going to be the same.

"Cat." Nina, over the braciole, refilling my seltzer without asking. "He fixes volcanoes now. Anthony, tell him about the transmission."

"He doesn't want to hear about the transmission⁠—"

"He does," Raq said. "I want to hear about the transmission."

And God help me, Anthony told it — the whole saga, the cousin, the junkyard in Canarsie, the part where the guy says that's not a Chevy part — and Raq listened the way he listens to the harbor, complete, unhurried, and at the punchline he nodded slowly, one professional to another, and said, "He was correct. It was not a Chevy part," and Anthony pointed at him with the carving knife and told Nina they were keeping him.

Joey leaned over his coffee, quiet, under the noise, brother-channel.

"Nonna's taxes. You really cleared it? All of it?"

"All of it. Paid Wednesday. House is settled, Joe."

He looked at me a second, and his shoulders came down from wherever they'd been living since the funeral, and he nodded once.

"Good," he said.

And that was the entire war, over, in one syllable — because that's all it had ever been with Joey. Not the house. The worry, wearing the house like a coat.

Then he pushed back from the table and looked at Raq.

"C'mon. We got time before dark. Let's go shoot around."

Raq looked at him. He clearly had no idea what Joey was talking about.

"Shoot," Raq said, carefully, "around."

"Hoops. The park." Joey was already up, finding his jacket. "Basketball, dude. What planet did you come from?"

"This one," Raq said.

Dead level. Complete sincerity. And I choked on my seltzer, and Joey launched — the full Fontana laugh, head back, hand on the table — "This one, he says—" pointing at him, delighted, adopting him on the spot.

And Raq laughed too.

Dry, short, real — the rare one, the one I'd stopped being able to count because the count had been mine, all of them, every laugh since the stoop had happened in my kitchen or my bed or my wrecked yard.

This one belonged to Joey.

"Well?" Joey had the ball under his arm and the door half open. "You coming or what?"

"Sure," Raq said.

He stood, and shrugged — an actual shrug, where did he learn a shrug — and took the ball out of my brother's hands, turning it over once like an artifact, and followed him out the door into the last of the Sunday light.

Nina came and stood next to me at the front window with a dish towel over her shoulder, and we watched them go down the block — Joey talking with both hands, the ball under his arm, and next to him, shortening that enormous stride to match, the fallen Watcher of the ninth name, chief of ten, going to the park to learn basketball.

"Madonna," Nina said. "Look at that."

"I'm looking."