nothing.”
John laughed. “My happiness is that confusing for you, huh?”
“No, but usually you’re not as … open about it,” she settled on saying.
“I’ll give you that.”
“So what is up?”
John drummed his fingers on the steering wheel with the beat of the music. “Nothing, Lucy. I just think it’s going to be an interesting few months in this family. Something feels different. Things are beginning to happen. I’m looking forward to the changes.”
She had no idea what her brother was talking about, but he was happy. Lucia took that for what it was, and chose to leave the rest alone.
“Whatever you say, John.”
TWO
Everyone likes to say you can choose your own path. But that would be a lie. No one chooses to be born poor, disenfranchised and struggling before they even know their own name. No one wakes up one day and decides to be born to an addict mother who can’t seem to control her ability to produce children she can’t care for, or love. No one chooses to be a child on the streets, or a child neglected.
No one chooses those things.
So, what did Renzo Zulla choose?
Renzo chose to step up where his mother didn’t. For every bad choice she made, Renzo worked twice as hard to correct it. Not for him necessarily. He had two younger siblings that needed a hell of a lot more than he did.
Everything he did was for them.
It always would be.
“Ren!”
Renzo sucked the last drag from a cigarette, and tossed it to the ground. Glancing up, he found his usual guys waiting at the corner store. Calling them friends might be a little too much. And calling them coworkers would be illegal. Or that’s what Vito always liked to say.
“Are you heading over to do the drop off today?” Noah asked.
Perry and Diesel, the youngest two of the group, continue their conversation like Renzo hadn’t even arrived. Not that he minded. As long as they did what they were told, he didn’t give a shit what they did on their spare time. And since work hadn’t started today, he still considered this their spare time.
Besides, they did behave.
They fucking listened.
Vito let Renzo run the guys whenever he wasn’t on the streets doing business, and these fools knew how this worked. Noah, Perry, and Diesel … well, they came from the same trash Renzo did, in a way. Their home lives weren’t any better than his had been growing up. There was a reason each of them met up at this corner store every single day to take their cut of product, and get it on the streets. They needed cash in their hands.
They all had a reason to be here. They all had reasons for why they did this.
Nobody just decided one day that they wanted to be a drug dealer peddling dope to people who were already too far gone to save. It wasn’t like the money was good enough to justify the whys of it all, either. Sure, Renzo made a ten percent cut on everything he sold, and another five percent cut for handling this small crew of guys who worked under Vito Abati. And for every pickup or drop off he made, he got another handful slapped into his palm for his troubles.
Again, that’s how Vito liked to put it.
As if calling the risks Renzo took to move dope from one end of the city to another troubles was adequate or accurate. He didn’t think it was, but this was his life. And these were the choices he made considering no one was looking at the almost twenty-year-old white boy from the Bronx for fucking anything.
He came from trash.
All he was going to be was trash.
He’d heard it enough times in his life to know it was true, or rather, that it was exactly how everyone else looked at him. All he had to do was slap his address on a job application, and that was enough to make someone look at him like he was the lesser between them. Once they figured out he hadn’t made it far enough in the twelfth grade to get his diploma, as he had to drop out to make sure his brother and sister got fed three times a fucking day, he was already screwed.
This society wasn’t built for people like him. Already poor, and struggling all the damn time. Already marked with stains from circumstances that pushed him to make choices that would affect the rest of his life so that