The Avenue | 2011 going to call the cops, dad won’t let her, that is ridiculous” and “do you know she forgot how to make macaroni the other day, I mean even that she needed to boil the water first?” and “maybe if you’d spend some time over there” and “you called Carmella?” I heard the phone slam and my dad hush what sounded like muffled sobs and then my mother dialing the phone a few more times, calling each of her sisters and hearing similar stories of how Grandmom had called them and told them the horrible things my dad must be capable of, stealing from a poor old woman like her. I thought about going downstairs but was afraid of what more I might hear, and after a while decided to stop trying to listen and started trying to shut it out. My mother was still on the phone when I fell asleep on top of my pink and purple bedspread with my newest library book, Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, open on my hardly-developing chest two hours later.
The next morning was Sunday and the electric red numbers of my alarm clock burned my eyes as my father knocked on my door to wake me for mass at 7 a.m. Reluctantly, I pulled a brush through my auburn hair and slipped on my glasses, blinking the green eyes I had inherited from a German-Irish father at a reflection that didn’t look the least bit Italian and a body that looked two years short of thirteen. How I came from the same bloodline as a woman who at sixteen looked like a model in a lace wedding dress confused and annoyed me. The car ride to Our Lady of Assumption was quieter than usual. I was too tired to try to break the silence and my mother kept fidgeting with the golden crucifix that hung around her
neck. My father said a few things that went unacknowledged. “Nice weather this morning,” and “I wonder who the celebrant will be today.” We pulled into the church parking lot right next to a familiar black 1970’s Cadillac with an Italian flag sticker on the bumper and a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror. The first three pews on the Blessed Mother’s side were filled with Romanos and the families of women who used to be Romanos. In the third pew sat my mom’s oldest sister Carmella and her husband John with John Jr. and his pregnant wife Valerie. Their other kids were away at college and graduate school or living somewhere else. The four of them were dressed up in ties and skirts like it was Easter Sunday mass (which is how you knew they don’t go very often). Uncle Anthony and Aunt Sophie and Olivia sat in front of them in the second pew next to Aunt Teresa, Uncle Joey and their twins Sam and Kenny. Olivia waved at me. Olivia was in the sixth grade and we were at the same middle school. I waved back and continued walking down the intimidating center aisle with my parents toward her and the rest of the family. Aunt Daniella and her new husband, Uncle Nick, must have arrived just before us and were filing in the first pew with Nick’s two children Mark and Maggie. We slid in next to them. I didn’t see Grandmom or Poppa at first. I picked up a discarded Church bulletin from the ground and checked the front page to make sure it wasn’t a holiday. “Third Sunday of Ordinary Time” it read – which CCD had taught me basically meant nothing special was going on. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Grandmom or Poppa’s birthdays or their anniversary or anything. It’s not that it was out of the ordinary for some members the family to go to church together, but all of us? I wanted to sit next to Olivia. She was always bad in church and it might take 29