Chapter 2: Chestnut Street
The rest stop outside Florence had one working light and coffee that tasted like it had been waiting for me since noon.
I sat on the hood with the phone to my ear and said, "I am halfway there, Mom. Do not let him cut the cake without me."
"I would never," Mom said. "Your father tried. I told him the cake has your name on it in spirit, and he backed off."
"That is not how cake works."
"In this family it is." She laughed, then went quiet in the way she always did before she meant it. "Jules."
"Yeah?"
"Will you tell Nico this time?"
Trucks went past on 95. I watched my boots.
"Mom."
"I am not pushing," she said, which meant she was pushing, gently. "I am asking."
"We have talked about this."
"We have talked around it," she said. "There is a difference, baby."
"I am fine," I said. "He is fine. It is his weekend."
"It has been four years of his weekends and your weekends, honey. Four years you have let him think you file paperwork."
"Mom, please."
"You think I do not know that voice?" she said. "That is your radio voice. Calm, even when the house is on fire."
That one landed, because she was not wrong, and because I could hear Dad behind her, pretending not to listen.
I was nine the first time I fixed the kitchen radio.
Dad had it open on the table with a screwdriver in his teeth. "Thing is dead, Marie," he said. "Let it be dead with dignity."
"It is not dead," I said. "You loosened the wrong wire."
"You want to show me, professor?"
I climbed onto the chair in my socks. "Hold the light."
"You heard her, Marie," he said. "Hold the light for the boss."
Mom held the flashlight and said, "Lord, she has been the boss since she was six."
When the music came back, crackling and thin, Dad stared at it like I had raised it from the grave. "Well, look at that," he said. "Our Jules can fix anything except a quiet room."
"I can fix quiet too," I said.
"You can," Mom said, and kissed the top of my head. "That is the problem and the gift."
By twelve I was the switchboard for the whole house.
Nico came home with a split lip from the lot behind the school and stood in the doorway bleeding on the mat.
"I am fine," he said, which was a lie at eleven and stayed a lie at thirty five.
"Sit," I said.
"I do not need you to fix it, Jules."
"I know. Sit anyway."
Mom came in with a wet towel. "Nico, who did this?"
"Nobody," he said.
"Jules?" she said.
I looked at my brother. He gave me the smallest shake of his head, the one that meant please.
"He fell off his bike," I said.
Mom knew. Of course she knew. But she looked between us and chose us over the truth that day. "Then we will fix the bike tomorrow," she said. "Tonight we fix the lip."
Dad came in from the porch with grease still on his hands from the plant. He took one look and said, "You lose a fight or win one badly, son?"
Nico grinned through the blood. "You should see the sidewalk."
"There he is," Dad said, proud and worried in the same breath. "Romano mouth. Romano sense of timing. God help the Marines."
"God help them when they get her too," Mom said.
"They will not get me," I said. "I am going to fix radios."
"You will fix people," Mom said. "Radios are just how you practice."
A trucker slammed a door. Mom said my name again, softer.
"Jules? You still there?"
"I am here."
"Your father is asking if the cake survived. Tell him yourself, he is hovering."
Dad came on, gruff as ever. "You driving safe, Major Pain in My Neck?"
I almost corrected him. He had called me that since I pinned on captain, a joke that was accidentally true and had stayed true.
"I am safe, Dad. Cake is safe. I will be there before dark."
"You tell that brother of yours we are proud of him," he said. "You tell yourself the same, you hear me? Whatever desk they have you chained to, you hear me?"
"I hear you."
"We love you, baby," Mom said, back again. "Both of you. All of you. Even the parts you do not bring home."
I sat with that while the line went quiet, and I did what I had always done on Chestnut Street. I held on, and I did not let go, and I did not tell her that holding on was the whole job.
Chapter 3: Two Uniforms