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My nephew said to me, “What’s your favorite thing?”
He was five or six, a crazy-haired smirker tall enough to tug my
shirt. He tugged my shirt. I scooped him up, gave a goofy look, and
waited for him to get that I’d given my answer.
“Speak up,” he said.
Speak up—exactly what his ma would say whenever she had you
where she wanted, at the wrong end of her questions. Awful ques-
tions, the kind she used to cut you open. A lousy woman, but there
she was, a piece of her in my nephew’s throat—my nephew whose fate
it was to turn eighteen, get good-looking, and talk, spilling every-
thing he thought he had, grabbing at my arm to tell me he’d been
cooked down and carbonized, was needing weight, real weight, the
kind you carried in your chest. My nephew who would borrow my
van (my suggestion), pack it with his buddies (my suggestion), and
hit the road in May, in the summer before college was supposed to
put him and us and all his friends in separate places.
His ma would slap me on the ear and scream, “You think we think
you didn’t know?”
I didn’t know how long, how heavy: he would come back that
August by himself on a bus, broke and sunburnt, a scar like a stain
on his neck.
“Speak up!” he said, and tugged with both tiny hands. We were at a clump of picnic tables in the woods, waiting, like
every other knucklehead, for Auntie Rossella’s mostaccioli to arrive
in pans the size of suitcases. Gnats burst up wherever you walked.
Cicadas went to town in every tree. Cousins from the South Side,
Cicero, Kenosha, Carbondale, they’d all come out to the wooded
western burbs to see our weepy Nanu turn ninety-five, wave his wrin-
kled arms, and press any nearby hand to his face. “Family,” he was
famously saying, tottering to each of us, “you, and you, and you!”
while we stood, rooted, looking like bad sketches of each other, want-
ing guiltily to go back to bocce, briscola, beers.
“Speak up speak up speak up!”
“You speak up.”
“You speak up!” he shouted, so I gasped and mimed together the
dreaded drill-fist, popping it from an imaginary case. He squealed. I
switched the drill-fist on and tickled until he fell squirming into the
grass, his armpits, his ribs, his little plank of a belly. It might have
been I was trying to dislodge his mother.
My own uncle used to say, “Some hearts, they beat in the belly.”
When I was growing up he’d sometimes spend all day laying cement
in the neighborhood and pop by for dinner, sweaty, crusted, un-
invited, always looking like he was hugging what he said. My ma,
charmed, would rip open an extra pound of pasta. It didn’t make a
difference, there’d be hardly any leftovers. That’s not to say my uncle
was too much. He just made the many messes on his plate disappear,
so gracefully, in breaks between grins. This alone astounded me. At
the time I couldn’t clean my plate, I’d push the food around and push
the food around