Chapter 9: Saturday
Lily's school was a low brick building two blocks from our apartment.
The performance was in the gymnasium — folding chairs, a paper banner that read SPRING SHOWCASE in uneven letters, a teacher with a pitch pipe standing at the front.
My father arrived before I did.
He was already in the third row when Lily spotted him from the doorway and ran across the gym in her white dress and crashed into his arms.
"Grandpa, I have a solo."
"I know.
Your mother told me."
"It's only four lines but Miss Hartley says I have the clearest voice in the class."
"Miss Hartley is correct," my father said, completely seriously.
I sat down beside him.
He looked at me and then at the door behind me and then back at me with a question in his eyes that he didn't ask out loud.
Giovanni arrived five minutes before it started.
He found us in the third row and sat on my other side.
My father leaned forward and looked at him.
"You're the Fierro boy," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"My daughter tells me you went to some trouble."
"Your daughter went to the trouble," Giovanni said.
"I just showed up."
My father studied him for a moment the way he used to study people before deciding whether to trust them.
Then he nodded.
Once.
The same nod he had given me in the spare room.
The lights in the gym dimmed slightly.
The teacher raised her pitch pipe.
Lily walked out with her class, found us immediately in the third row, and gave a wave so enthusiastic it was almost a jump.
The teacher gently redirected her attention to the front.
When Lily's four lines came, she sang them with perfect clarity and complete confidence and slightly more volume than was strictly necessary.
The gymnasium applauded.
My father put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, which made Lily break into a grin so wide it took over her whole face.
Afterward, in the hallway outside, Lily stood in front of Giovanni with the frank assessment of a five-year-old.
"You're tall," she said.
"I am," he agreed.
"Do you know my mom?"
"I'm getting to know her."
Lily considered this.
"She makes good pancakes," she said, as if this were the relevant credential.
"That's very useful information," Giovanni said.
Lily seemed satisfied.
She took my father's hand and pulled him toward the table where the class had set out juice and cookies.
Giovanni stood beside me watching them go.
"She has your eyes," he said.
"She has her own eyes," I said.
"She just lets me borrow the expression sometimes."
He smiled.
My father came back with two cups of juice and handed one to each of us without comment, as if this were already a normal Saturday, as if the four of us had been doing this for years.
Maybe that was the moment it stopped feeling like a story that had happened to me and started feeling like a life I was actually living.
The paper banner above the door shifted in the draft from the hallway.
SPRING SHOWCASE.
Lily's voice carried back to us from the cookie table, explaining something important to my father with great urgency.
I held my paper cup of juice and stood in a school gymnasium on a Saturday morning, and for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember, I didn't feel like I was standing at the wrong table.
I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
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Some people come into our lives like a countdown — and change everything before we even reach zero.
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