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Oh, sigh.
But then, on the day before seventh grade started, when it was time to visit school to check out classes and get our books, his father was there with him, and my father was there with me, and I did something terrible.
Without thinking, I smiled and waved at my friend, and he smiled back, and I bit my lip because of love and delight after not seeing him for the whole summer . . . and his father saw me. He frowned, looked up at my father, scowled, and then grabbed Sawyer’s arm and pulled him away, giving my father one last heated glance. My father grumbled all the way home, issuing half-sentence threats under his breath.
And that was the end of that.
I don’t know what his father said or did to him that day, but by the next day, Sawyer Angotti was no longer my friend. Whoever said seventh grade is the worst year of your life was right. Sawyer turned our friendship off like a faucet, but I can’t help it—my faucet of love has a really bad leak.
Trey parks the truck as close to the Field Museum as our permit allows, figuring since the weather is actually sunny and not too freezing and windy, people might prefer to grab a quick meal from a food truck instead of eating the overpriced generic stuff inside the tourist trap.
Before we open the window for business, we set up. Trey checks the meat sauce while I grate fresh mozzarella into tiny, easily meltable nubs. It’s a simple operation—our winter truck specialty is an Italian bread bowl with spicy mini meatballs, sauce, and cheese. The truth is it’s delicious, even though I’m sick to death of them.
We also serve our pizza by the slice, and we’re talking deep-dish Chicago-style, not that thin crap that Angotti’s serves. Authentic, authschmentic. The tourists want the hearty, crusty, saucy stuff with slices of sausage the diameter of my bicep and bubbling cheese that stretches the length of your forearm. That’s what we’ve got, and it’s amazing.
Oh, but the Angotti’s sauce . . . I had it once, even though in our house it’s contraband. Their sauce will lay you flat, seriously. It’s that good. We even have the recipe, apparently, but we can’t use it because it’s patented and they sell it by the jar—it’s in all the local stores and some regional ones now too. My dad about had an aneurysm when that happened. Because, according to Dad, in one of his mumble-grumble fits, the Angottis had been after our recipe for generations and somehow managed to steal it from us.
So I guess that’s how the whole rivalry started. From what I understand, and from what I know about Sawyer avoiding me like the plague, his parents feel the same way about us as my parents feel about them.
Trey and I pull off a really decent day of sales for the middle of January. We hightail it back home for the dinner rush so we can help Rowan out.
As we get close, we pass the billboard from the other side. I locate it in my side mirror, and it’s the same as this morning. Explosion. I watch it grow small and disappear, and then close my eyes, wondering what the hell is wrong with me.
We pull into the alley and park the truck, take the stuff inside.
“Get your asses out there!” Rowan hisses as she flies through the kitchen. She gets a little anxious when people have to wait ten seconds. That kid is extremely well put together, but she carries the responsibility of practically the whole country on her shoulders.
Mom is rolling out dough. I give her a kiss on the cheek and shake the bank bag in her face to show her I’m on the way to putting it in the safe like I’m supposed to. “Pretty good day. Had a busload of twenty-four,” I say.
“Fabulous!” Mom says, way too perky. She grabs a tasting utensil, reaches into a nearby pot, and forks a meatball for me. I let her shove it into my mouth when I pass her again.
“I’s goo’!” I say. And really freaking hot. It burns the roof of my mouth before I can shift it between my teeth to let it cool.
Tony, the cook who has been working for our family restaurant for something like forty million years, smiles at me. “Nice work today, Julia,” he says. Tony is one of the few people I allow to call me by my birth name.
I guess my dad, Antonio, was actually named after Tony. Tony and my grandfather came to America together. I don’t really remember my grandpa much—he killed himself when I was little. Depression. A couple of years ago I accidentally found out it was suicide when I overheard Mom and Aunt Mary talking about it.
When I asked my mom about it later, she didn’t deny it—instead, she said, “But you kids don’t have any sign of depression in you, so don’t worry. You’re all fine.” Which was about the best way to make me think I’m doomed.
It’s a weird thing to find out about your family, you know? It made me feel really different for the rest of the day, and it still does now whenever I think about it. Like we’re all wondering where the depression poison will hit next, and we’re all looking at my dad. I wonder if that’s why my mother is so upbeat all the time. Maybe she thinks she can protect us with her happy shield.
Trey and I hurry to wash up, grab fresh aprons, and check in with Aunt Mary at the hostess stand. She’s seating somebody, so we take a look at the chart and see that the house is pretty full. No wonder Rowan’s freaking out.
Rowan’s fifteen and a freshman. Just as Trey is sixteen months older than me, she’s sixteen months younger. I don’t know if my parents planned it, and I don’t want to know, but there it is. I pretty much think they had us for the sole purpose of working for the family business. We started washing dishes and busing tables years ago. I’m not sure if it was legal, but it was definitely tradition.
Rowan looks relieved to see us. She’s got the place under control, as usual. “Hey, baby! Go take a break,” I whisper to her in passing.
“Nah, I’m good. I’ll finish out my tables,” she says. I glance at the clock. Technically, Rowan is supposed to quit at seven, because she’s not sixteen yet—she can only work late in the summer—but, well, tradition trumps rules sometimes. Not that my parents are slave drivers or anything. They’re not. This is just their life, and it’s all they know.
It’s a busy night because of the holiday. Busy is good. Busy means we can pay the rent, and whatever else comes up. Something always does.
By ten thirty all the customers have left. Even though Dad hasn’t come down at all this evening to help out, Mom says she and Tony can handle closing up alone, and she sends Trey and me upstairs to the apartment to get some sleep.
I don’t want to go up there.
Neither does Trey.
Four
Trey and I go out the back and into the door to the stairs leading up to our home above the restaurant. We pick our way up the stairs, through the narrow aisle that isn’t piled with stuff. At the top, we push against the door and squeeze through the space.
Rowan has already done what she could with the kitchen. The sink is empty, the counters are clean. The kitchen is the one sacred spot, the one room where Mom won’t take any garbage from anybody—literally. Because even after cooking all day, she still likes to be able to cook at home too, without having to worry that Dad’s precious stacks of papers are going to combust and set the whole building on fire because they’re too close to the gas stove.
Everywhere else—dining room, living room, and hallway—is piled high around the edges with Dad’s stuff. Lots of papers—recipes and hundreds of cooking magazines, mostly, and all the Chicago newspapers from the past decade. Shoe boxes, shirt boxes, and every other possible kind of box you can imagine, some filled with papers, some empty. Plastic milk crates filled with cookbooks and science books and gastronomy magazines. Bags full of greeting cards, birthday cards, sympathy cards, some written in, some brand-new, meant for good intentions that never happened. Hundreds of old videos, and a stack as high as my collarbone of old VCRs that don’t work. Stereos, 8-track players, record players, tape recorders, all broken. Records and cassette tapes and CDs and games—oh my dog, the board games. Monopoly, Life, Password, Catch Phrase. Sometimes five or six duplicates, most of them with little yellowing masking-tape stick
ers on them that say seventy-five cents or a buck twenty-five. Insanity. Especially when somebody puts something heavy on top of a Catch Phrase and that stupid beeper goes off somewhere far below, all muffled.
We weave through it. Thankfully, Dad is nowhere to be found, either asleep or buried alive under all his crap. It’s not like he’s violent or mean or anything. He’s just . . . unpredictable. When he’s feeling good, he’s in the restaurant. He’s visible. He’s easy to keep track of. But on the days he doesn’t come down, we never know what to expect. We climb those stairs after the end of our shift knowing he could be standing right there in the kitchen, long-faced, unshaven, having surfaced to eat something for the first time since yesterday. And rattling off the same guilt-inspired apologies, day after day after day. I just couldn’t make it down today. Not feeling up to it. I’m sorry you kids have to work so hard. What do you say to that after the tenth time, or the hundredth?
Worse, he could be sitting in the dark living room with his hands covering his face, the blue glow from the muted TV spotlighting his depressed existence so we can’t ignore it. It’s probably wrong that Trey and Rowan and I all hope he stays invisible, holed up in his bedroom on days like these, but it’s just easier when he’s out of sight. We can pretend depressed Dad doesn’t exist.
Tonight we breathe a sigh of relief. Trey heads into the cluttered bathroom, its cupboards overflowing with enough soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and toilet paper to get us through Y3K. Thank God our bedrooms are off-limits to Dad. I peek into my tidy little room and see Rowan is sleeping in her bed already, but I’m still wired from a long day. I close the door quietly and grab a glass of milk from the kitchen, then settle down in the one chair in the living room that’s not full of stuff and flip on the TV. I run through the DVR list, choosing a rerun of an old Sherlock Holmes movie that I’ve been watching a little bit at a time over the past couple of weeks, whenever I get a chance. Somebody else must be watching it too, because it’s not cued up to the last part I watched. I hit the slowest fast-forward so I can find where I left off.
Trey peeks his head in the room. “Night,” he says. He dangles the keys to the meatball truck, and when I hold out my hand, he tosses them to me.
“Thanks,” I say, not meaning it. I shouldn’t have agreed to only ten bucks a week, but I was desperate. It’s not nearly enough to pay for the humiliation of driving the giant balls. “Where’s my ten bucks?”
“Isn’t it only eight if one day is a holiday?” He gives me what he thinks is his adorable face and hands me a five and three ones.
“Sorry. Not in the contract.” I hold my hand out for more.
“Dammit.” He goes back to his room for two more dollars while Sir Henry on the TV is flitting around outside on the moors in fast mode, which looks kind of kooky.
Trey returns. “Here.”
I grab the two bucks from him and shove all ten into my pocket with my tips. “Thanks. Night.”
