It was clear that Joe viewed their childhood as far more idyllic than Lucas’s dad did. Even when he was little, Lucas understood that, felt his father’s edge when Uncle Joe would wax poetic about riding their bikes in the empty lot or leaving pennies out on the rail for the train to flatten. After all, Joe and his family got to leave at the end of the day.
When Steph was nineteen, she moved in with her boyfriend and had a baby girl. Another thing Bryce couldn’t get over—how cool was it that Lucas was an uncle! How he wished he had a sister, too, so he could be an uncle! “Bryce, angel, a baby’s not always a good thing,” Aunt Didi said.
“This baby is,” Lucas said, giving his aunt a dirty look. Mercedes was cute and smelled nice, most of the time, and Steph was a good mom.
Didi didn’t blink. “Well, we’ll see how things turn out, won’t we?” she murmured. “Not all of us are thrilled that our tax dollars pay for Stephanie’s lifestyle.” And though he wasn’t 100 percent sure what she meant by that, Lucas knew that it was a put-down just the same.
Visits from Joe and Bryce and Didi were rare, he didn’t have to think about it much. Would it be nice to take a vacation in Turks and Caicos, wherever that was? Probably. Would it be fun to have a flat-screen TV in your room? Sure. But Lucas wouldn’t trade places, that was for sure. Home always seemed a little nicer after those visits. Careworn instead of shabby, washed in the light of relief that they had each other, at least.
Until Dad was arrested.
Things Lucas Didn’t Know About His Father:
He’d been arrested at age eighteen for grand theft auto (a Camaro left with the keys in it, so really, who could resist? Certainly not an eighteen-year-old American male from the wrong side of the tracks).
He’d been arrested at age twenty-one for breaking and entering and vandalism (Mrs. Ortega’s place, where he and his buddy sat in the living room, watched Cinemax, drinking her schnapps).
He was $95,700 in debt, thanks to Mom’s medical care during her unsuccessful battle with ALS.
He was a drug dealer.
Lucas was fifteen at the time of the bust. The cops showed up, flashed a warrant and searched the house while Lucas made frantic phone calls to the garage. It was too late; the police found several small bags of crystal meth in a shoe box in the back of Dad’s closet.
Seemed like Dad had become a minor dealer in an organization run by one of his old high school friends. It was the only way he’d found to stop the creditors from taking the house after Mom died; he already worked eighty hours a week at the garage. Because of Dan’s “criminal past,” the judge sentenced him to sixteen years.
“I’m sorry, son,” Dan said to Lucas as the bailiff handcuffed him. Lucas hugged his father and tried not to cry. His father, who looked a decade older than he had that morning, didn’t need to see that. Besides, they’d appeal, the public defender said. This wasn’t forever.
Lucas wanted to stay with his sister, but Steph had tearfully turned him down. She and Rich lived in a tiny apartment, and she was pregnant again, this time with twins. Though Lucas swore he’d help, he could sleep on the couch, Mercedes loved him, he could babysit and everything, Steph said he’d be better off with Uncle Joe.
Joe and Bryce showed up as Lucas was packing. “This is so great!” Bryce exclaimed. “You can live with us now! We’ll be like brothers!”
Lucas barely refrained from punching him. It wasn’t great. His father was in jail, and even if he’d be getting out soon—please, God—this was far from great.
Being without a choice in the matter, he went, moving from the South Side, the run-down but tight-knit blue-collar neighborhood he’d lived all his life to a development made up of streets with saccharine names: Shadow Creek Lane, West Wind Way, Shane’s Glen Circle.
Didi showed him his room, the smallest room in the house, jammed full with an unused treadmill (which Didi insisted stay in the room, rather than be moved to the basement), a broken computer from the early nineties and a twin bed under the eaves. Bryce had been hoping they’d bunk in together, but no. There was another unused bedroom, but Didi said it was for company.
It was horribly different.
There was a pool in the back, serviced by Juan the pool boy; he and Lucas would speak in Spanish together, which irritated Didi and filled Bryce with still more admiration. The lawn was mown by a landscaping company. They had a cleaning lady. Didi drove a Mercedes and shopped at high-end retail stores and, according to a receipt Lucas found, spent one hundred and fifty dollars on her hair every five weeks.
Lucas remembered his father asking Joe for money five or six years before. He’d been lingering in the bathroom, needing a break from Bryce’s constant questions, and was washing his hands with much more care than usual.
“I hate to ask,” Dad said. “And I wouldn’t, except...well, the hospital hired a bill collector. I’m working as much as I can, but...”
“No, no, I understand,” Joe said. “Um, I’ll ask Didi.”
A few nights later, Uncle Joe had called, and Dad’s answers got shorter and shorter. “I understand. Of course not. Don’t worry about it. Thanks anyway. No. Sure. Yep.” He hung up the phone, sighed, such a weary, hopeless sound that Lucas must’ve looked stricken, because the next minute, Dad smiled. “Want ice cream for dessert?” he asked, and they both pretended things were okay.
A few months after that phone call, Didi and Joe took Bryce on a Disney cruise around the Mediterranean.
For the first few weeks he was living with them, Lucas kept his clothes in his backpack because he knew he wouldn’t be there long. His father’s sentence had been sixteen years, but come on. That was for ra**sts and murderers. Not for a mechanic who was trying to pay off his dead wife’s medical expenses and support a family. Surely Dad’s lawyer would get that straightened out.
But as the days turned into weeks, and the first month came around, Joe gently explained that it looked like it might be longer than Lucas hoped. He might as well make himself at home, right?
When it came time for back-to-school shopping, Didi bought Bryce’s clothes from Hollister, and Lucas’s from Kmart. Point taken. Joe bought him a new baseball glove for his birthday, the first never-been-used glove he’d ever had, despite playing for a couple of years already, and five minutes after he opened the package, Didi’s tight lips and hissing whispers managed to convince Joe that Lucas didn’t need a new glove. But Bryce did. Lucas could have Bryce’s old glove.
And so it went. It was Didi’s job that afforded the big house and tricked-out car in the garage (“Isn’t it cool that your niece and our car have the same name?” Bryce said once). Didi was vice president of something, whereas Joe worked from home, and somewhat sporadically.
But despite his uncle’s assurances that they were thrilled to have him, despite Bryce’s adoration, Lucas had never felt so alone. He missed Stephanie, who was kind of a screwup, sure, but who was also funny and who let him have ice cream every night the year after Mom died, when Dad worked nights. He missed his niece, who smiled and drooled on him and babbled at him. Her first word had been Wookus and everything.
Being half–Puerto Rican was not a big deal in his old neighborhood, but here in the suburbs, he was the only nonwhite, as far as he could tell. He missed people knowing who he was—Dan’s son, Steph’s brother, widely regarded as a good kid. He missed his room with the poster of Yoda on one wall, one of Michael Jordan on the other.
Here at Didi’s, the walls were bare. His bedspread was blue, the sheets new and stiff, the bed tightly made, unlike the nest of soft old blankets on his bunk bed back home. Didi asked him to throw out his battered feather pillow, saying she’d bought him a new pillow, and his probably had any manner of microscopic life growing in it. He obeyed.
If it had just been Joe and Bryce, it would’ve been easier. But Didi was constantly irritable when he was around, no matter how hard he tried to be polite. The fact that he needed a haircut or new shoes seemed like a personal insult, and she’d get a look on her face as if she’d just smelled a rotting corpse. When she had to introduce him, she always called him “Joe’s nephew”—never our nephew. Never Bryce’s cousin, even. One night, he overheard Didi describing his parents as “Southie trash,” and he had to go for a long run to burn off the hatred.
Bryce was tiring, too, in a completely different way. Everything Lucas did still fascinated him, from the fact that he flossed his teeth every night (Dad had warned him about that—they couldn’t afford a dentist, so Lucas had been instructed to take damn good care of his teeth) to the fact that he knew how to cook a meal.
He tried to stay out of the way. Kept his head down, showered at night after the rest of them had gone to bed because Didi made comments about the hot water running out. He never asked for seconds and always made sure his room was neat. He worked to catch up in school and wrote to his father and Steph, because a cell phone wasn’t one of the items given to him. But he emailed from the library every day, sitting at the third computer in the second row. He also sent handwritten letters to Dad because Dad had said in one of their weekly phone calls (which Didi resented) that getting mail was really great. And he sure would love it if Lucas could visit.
Lucas asked. He waited until he could have a word alone with his uncle. “Sure, of course, I’ll see when we can make it,” Joe said, but nothing materialized. He asked again, and then again. Late at night at the end of his second month, he overheard Joe and Didi talking through the air-conditioning vent that made for excellent eavesdropping. “I think I’ll take Lucas to see my brother tomorrow,” Joe said affably, and Lucas actually jolted upright, his heart leaping in his chest.
Silence, then, “Excuse me?”
“It’d be good for him. He’s having a tough time.”
“Are you an idiot, Joe? You want to take a child to a prison? Can you imagine how that will impact your son? Lucas is a bad enough influence on him as it is. And I think I’ve bent over backward here, taking him in the way we’ve had to. This is not how I envisioned life, you know. Now you want to take him to see your criminal, drug-dealing brother?”
As usual, Didi got her way.
So the letters and emails had to suffice.
Then, after seven months, word came that Dan was being transferred. Overcrowding in Illinois prisons; Dad was going to a facility in Arizona next week. Joe broke the news at dinner, and Didi’s pinched face froze even harder.
“Do you think you can take me to see him this weekend?” Lucas asked, his fork was clenched in his hand.
“You bet, sport,” his uncle said.
“We’ll see,” Didi answered. “This is not really dinner conversation, though, is it?” She inclined her head toward Bryce, who was texting someone and smiling.
“Please, Aunt Didi.” He hated calling her aunt. She didn’t deserve the title, but maybe, please God, it would soften her up.
“I said, we’ll see, Lucas.”
That meant no.
Dad was being moved on Monday. It was already Wednesday.
That night, after the family had gone upstairs and no voices drifted down through the vents, Lucas packed his cheap backpack, made a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, taking care to wipe down the counter and put the knife in the dishwasher. Left the house, closing the door silently behind him.
His plan was pretty basic: he’d get to his sister’s place and get her to borrow her friend’s car. The prison was about three hours out of Chicago. If she couldn’t take him, Tommy O’Shea’s parents might. They’d liked him well enough back in the day. Once, Lucas had intervened in a fight on Tommy’s behalf and got a black eye for his trouble. Maybe it’d be enough to get a ride. Or he’d hitchhike.
