“And if I disagree with the board?”
Lindsey pushed back from the table and rose, a clear sign the meeting was over. “Then perhaps you really aren’t in a position to do this job anymore, Adele. In that case, the board and I feel strongly that you should consider tendering your resignation, effective immediately.”
Chapter 10
Jimmy Vega had forgotten how crowded the Bronx could be, especially on a Saturday before Christmas. Cars and delivery trucks jammed the intersections, sloshing through potholes and sending icy sprays of black water to the curbs. People crowded the crosswalks, maneuvering strollers, shopping carts, and children through the crush.
Joy wiped a sleeve of her skimpy black jacket across the passenger-side window of Vega’s truck to clear the condensation. She balanced a grave wreath of pine boughs on her lap and frowned at the noise and confusion. They each saw this place so differently. Vega came back as a long-lost native, here to find the things he’d lost. Joy tagged along as a tourist, fascinated and bewildered by the grime and the chaos, her father’s boyhood world as foreign to her as the Spanish he could roll off his tongue.
“Did you actually like growing up here?”
“At the time I did,” said Vega. “I was angry when Lita told me we were moving all the way up to Lake Holly.” He could still remember his first winter in the far northern suburbs. All that cold white land. All those cold white faces. “Of course if we’d stayed, I’d have probably never gone to college—or never finished, in any case.” It was possible he never would have become a police officer either but he didn’t want to dwell on those implications. “Your abuelita’s decision to leave really opened up my life in ways I couldn’t appreciate back then.”
They turned a corner and Vega pointed to a storefront with a flashing red-and-yellow neon sign above a greasy plate-glass window. “See that place? Best little cuchifritos joint in the Bronx. Only place that could match your abuelita’s cooking. I’ll take you there after we go to the cemetery.”
“Daaad, do you really think I’m going to be able to eat anything in a place that specializes in deep-fried pork fritters?”
“Oh. Right.” He slammed his brakes for a jaywalker and leaned on the horn. “In that case, you might have to survive on a glass of New York City tap water and a packet of hot sauce until we leave the Bronx.”
Joy stuck her tongue out playfully at him. Vega smiled. Her presence distracted him from his pain as only a child’s presence can. Vega lost himself in the moment. He delighted in pointing out the parochial school he used to attend, the one with wire mesh across the windows where all the nuns smelled like peppermint. He drove past Manny’s Bodega where they still sold El Diario in the rack out front. He pointed out his old tenement building where he and Henry Lopez liked to hang out on the fire escape and throw water balloons at the girls jumping rope on the sidewalk below.
“How far away is Fordham?” asked Joy.
“The university?” Vega blew out a breath of air. “Geographically, it’s just a little north of here. Emotionally, it’s light-years away. Why?”
“Danielle’s a freshman there.”
“Who?”
“You know—my friend Danielle Camino? She’s studying to be a teacher.”
“Oh. You want to go see her today?”
“No. But sometime,” said Joy. “I’d like to see the campus. Maybe apply there when I finish up at Valley Community.”
“You want to go to school in the Bronx?” Vega pulled a face. “My mother killed herself to get me out of here—and her granddaughter wants to come back?”
“Not—here.” Joy gestured to the gritty five-story brick buildings that rose like cell blocks on either side of the street. “The university.”
“Have you checked out their premed program? You probably should before you start thinking in that direction.”
Joy didn’t answer. She hunkered down in her seat and played with the red velvet ribbon on the grave wreath in her lap. Every time Vega mentioned her old dream of going to medical school, she got quiet these days. He didn’t understand it. Her grades were good, especially in math and science, so the problem wasn’t academic. He wanted to talk to her about it but today wasn’t the day. He could already feel himself deflating at the sight of the white marble cemetery arches. He could pretend Luisa Rosario-Vega was still alive when he wasn’t here. He could not pretend in the presence of so many reminders that she was really, truly gone.