Running From The Law

“But what if I shouldn’t have started it? What if he was using me, like you said?”

“It don’t matter.”

“Can’t I change my mind? Maybe you were right in the first place, Dad.”

He straightened himself to his full height, which was five foot five. “I was right. I was right the first time and I’m right the second time, too. You don’t quit just because it’s tougher than you thought.” He drew a horizontal line in the air with the fork. I had no idea what this meant, except maybe it was the thirty-eighth parallel and I was North Korea and he was South.

“It’s not that simple, Dad.”

“No? Why not?”

“It’s not getting tougher, it’s getting different.”

He turned to LeVonne and pointed to him with the fork. “Do you understand what that means, Mr. President?”

LeVonne shook his head.

“It means it’s not what I bargained for, Dad. I’m not a criminal lawyer. What’s the matter with getting the judge a good criminal lawyer?”

“It’s wrong!”

“Why?”

“General principles.”

“General principles?” I smacked myself in the forehead. “How could I forget about general principles?”

“Go ahead, make fun.”

“You should write the general principles down somewhere, Dad, like they do with the United States Code. This way we could all look them up and know how to live. We wouldn’t have to come to Ninth Street every time we had a question. Think of the time it would save us!”

He shook the fork at me. “You could visit more. It’s not the worst thing.”

I rubbed my eyes and began to wonder why I had come. Had I really thought he could help? I didn’t even eat sausage. “Now, getting back to general principles. Which general principle is it we’re talking about? There are so many, and you can never find the index.”

“You know which one, Miss Wiseguy.”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t take general principles in law school. Maybe it was an elective?”

LeVonne turned around in his seat, facing almost backward out the screen door to the tiny cement back of the store’s lot. I don’t know what he was looking at, there was nothing in the back except a cinderblock wall, two battered garbage cans, and a fig tree growing out of the concrete floor. Come to think of it, it was something to see.

“The principle, Miss, is that you don’t quit. I didn’t raise a quitter. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Why does it come down to what you raised? This has nothing to do with you. Whatever decision I make, it doesn’t reflect on you.”

“Of course it does. Everything I do, everything you do… what did you say? What was that word?”

“Reflects?”

“Reflects on each other. On all of us.” He made a circle in the air with the fork, and I figured we were talking the entire globe now, not just Korea. “It all reflects on us. Everything reflects on us. Our family name.”

“Our what?” The concept was so ludicrous I couldn’t repeat it. “We’re the Morrones, not the Kennedys. Not the Rockefellers.”

He slammed the fork down on the spoon rest. “Where did you get the idea that you have to have money to have a family name?”

His vehemence took me aback, and LeVonne shifted farther out the back door.

“Wherever you got it, it was wrong! We do have a family name-Morrone. It was my father’s name, and he came and started this shop in 1914. He was one of the first to come over, to come to the Market. My father, Vito Morrone, Senior. Your grandfather, you understand me?”

“Sure, but-”

“He had a name, and it counted as much as anybody else’s, and everybody respected it. He never disgraced it. When he couldn’t get hired at an inside job he started his own shop. He and my mother worked in it every day until they died. My father, he never gave up and never, ever quit. That’s what I’m doing here and that’s what LeVonne’s doing here,” he said, red in the face under his fresh shave.

“Dad, relax.”

“We’re all making our own name here. Nobody gave it to us, and we’re making it every day. So are you. You don’t disgrace it. You don’t run away.” He turned his back on me, picked up the fork, and jabbed it into the sausage. The meat spat in protest. Black smoke rose from the pan. Burned.

I felt a light touch on my arm.

LeVonne. His fingers were slim, his hand looked like a nimble spider against the white table. He shook his head, no.

“What?” I mouthed to him silently.

His almost-black gaze slid over to the left. I followed his eyes to the photographs on the wall, speared with steel tacks to a bulletin board of crumbling cork. I’d stopped noticing the pictures long ago: my father’s old mutt, me at Holy Communion, my grandfather and grandmother, with maybe three teeth between them. But I sensed which picture LeVonne meant, and it was none of those.

Her hair was a white-gold swirl behind her head, her wedding dress was a white- gold swirl at her feet. My father towered over her in the photo, he must have been standing on a stepladder. His jacket was a rented white, his hair two wings of pomade. He looked like a lovestruck young man who would never believe the lithe woman at his side would someday run away.

My father never spoke of her, and I’d stopped pressing him to. I didn’t know why she left until one of the Espositos told me, when I was ten, that it was Another Man. Before that, I thought it was because she was Canadian, since Jimmy DiNardo said it wouldn’t have happened if my father had married an Italian girl instead of a Canadian girl. My child’s mind assumed that Canada was an exotic country, which accounted for my mother’s singular looks and manners. Even her clothes were different; stiff linen dresses, orange capri pants, midriff tops that tied at the bellybutton. She was the talk of the Market, but I had not associated disgrace with what she did to my father until this very minute. He protected me from that, as he did from the fact that she died shortly after she left.

And it took LeVonne, who was stone silent, to explain my own father to me. I glanced back at LeVonne. His head was cocked as if he were listening. His dark eyes moved over my father’s back, seeming to scan his posture and stance for clues.

I watched my father, too, then. I listened as he snapped off the gas and reshuffled the sticky sausage. And after he had tended the sausage forever and I couldn’t stand wondering why he wouldn’t turn around, I made a silent promise to him, or more accurately, to his back. I wouldn’t quit the Hamilton representation, no matter what. There would be no running away. Not anymore.

After all, I had a family name to uphold.

Not Rockefeller. Not Kennedy. Morrone.

On general principles, no less.

When I got back to the office, my secretary, Janine, was sitting at my desk. Her black clogs were crossed on my mail and she was yapping away on my telephone. Janine Altman was a complete