she wanted her crutches and was worried about being late, how they’d taken a car service and because there was no traffic had arrived absurdly early. How they’d walked around for a while, admiring the neat blocks of brownstones, the daffodils and pansies in the window boxes, the number of families out on the street pushing strollers, jogging lightly behind kids on bikes with training wheels, planting the tiny garden beds around the tree trunks. How they finally decided to go over to Stephanie’s a little early and see if she was home. How the man on the stoop had stood there and stared at them like he was seeing a ghost. How even with one arm Vinnie had caught Tommy O’Toole as he fainted, preventing him from hitting the sidewalk facedown and God only knows! Matilda would tell their wide-eyed children then, God only knows what would have happened if he’d hit his head. If your daddy hadn’t caught him? He could have been dead. Worse! His brain could have been damaged and he’d never be the same. But no! Your father reached out—with one arm—and caught him around the waist and set him down like he was no heavier than a big bag of rice. A full grown man!
Matilda would tell how Stephanie had dropped her bags and flowers and started running down the street when she saw Tommy fall, how she’d sat and cradled his head in her lap and held his hand and made him stay still until the paramedics came and told them he was going to be fine. How they’d finally gotten him to his feet and helped him inside and then they knew why Tommy had fainted, why seeing Vinnie and Matilda on the street had made him dizzy and confused.
It was a statue of Mommy and Daddy! As soon as Vinnie junior was old enough to know the story, he’d always interrupt and say that part. It was a statue of you guys!
That’s right. Matilda would run her hand over his head, his glossy hair dark like his mother’s, curly like his father’s. It was a famous statue from France. The lady was missing a foot and the man was missing an arm, just like your mommy and daddy. I took one look at that statue and I knew.
Here, if Matilda and Vinnie were in the same room, she would always pause, always give him the look, a look like she’d given him that day brimming with awe and revelation, a look that fixed his world and made him whole and filled him with such unbearable desire and hope that he was always the first to turn away because the look was almost too much, a virtual sun flooding his world with light.
I saw that statue, Matilda would say, smiling at her boys (first Victor Jr., then little Fernando, then Arturo for Vinnie’s grandfather), and I knew. That statue? It was my sign.
CHAPTER FORTY–FOUR
Nearly ten months after the unexpected nor’easter blew through Manhattan in late October, freezing branches, killing 185 stately trees in Central Park, destroying nearly all the autumnal foliage of the five boroughs, including the colorful mums that lined Park Avenue and the decorative pots of kale the denizens of Brooklyn favored for their front stoops while trying to effect a kind of incongruent country gentility, the birthing centers of New York City were hit with a miniature baby boom. As spring turned to summer and the days grew longer and the humidity crept northward and eastward, slowly making its way up the Jersey shore until it settled over the city like a clammy, uninvited embrace, the citywide birth rate for July nearly doubled, forcing doctors and nurses and midwifes and anesthesiologists to work double shifts, cancel vacations, operate on zero sleep.
“Snowtober babies” they started calling them, the Ethans and Liams and Isabellas and Chloes that appeared in late July in place of the corn, which had failed to thrive because after that early snowstorm the rest of the winter was dry as a bone and the winter’s drought extended into spring and summer. But the babies came—their hair as abundant and soft as corn silk, their new bodies unfurling to expose tiny grasping fingers and clenched toes that looked as sweet as newly bared kernels of corn.
Stephanie had been having prelabor contractions for weeks, but she was five days past her due date and still didn’t have a baby. She’d stopped going into her office, preferring to spend a