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I look down at my phone. “How does he know exactly when to call? It’s creepy.”

“Not in the least. He’s an intuitive salesman. Make a note.”

I scroll to the notes app on my phone and await instructions.

“Aldo and Rena Lovisone’s reno. Granite drop. Arrange with client.” Uncle Louie dictates as he takes a right turn off Sixteenth Avenue and onto Main Street into the business district.

He slows down, surveying the buildings from one side of the street to the other.

“The Italian American Riviera is on the comeback.” Louie gives a low whistle of approval as he observes the new apartment building next to the renovated mixed-use warehouse, set among the restaurants, liquor store, radio station, and condos on the main drag. He stops the car in front of the vacant firehouse and leans out the window and squints. “They’re putting in a barbecue joint, Five Alarm, they’re calling it. It suits. Names matter.”

Yes, they do. I was thirteen years old in 2004 when South Belmar, New Jersey, had become a sorry suburban pit stop between Belmar and Spring Lake. Our pretty, working-class town had turned into a zoo for party animals. Property values had plummeted. It was decided that the best way to save our town was to start over. We needed a new name.

The residents agreed the sooner South Belmar was in the rearview, the better. Our town was settled on the lake close to the ocean one hundred years ago by Irish, Dutch/German, and Italian immigrants, and here, three generations on, they remain. The local Italians ran a campaign to change the name from South Belmar to Lake Como. The Irish and Dutch/Germans initially balked at naming the town for the lake, but the Italians argued thatComowas easy to spell. Good point. It was also true that nobody was elated about the alternatives: Fuerstenfeldbruck or Lake Nobber.

Uncle Louie led the charge, and under his leadership, Lake Como won in a landslide, by 167 votes! We were South Belmar, New Jersey, no more. The new name proved to be lucky. A lyrical name creates a space to fill with beauty, like a contralto as she steps into a circle of golden light on the stage of an opera house.

No one knows that names matter more than me, as I have been tortured over mine. When I was born, my parents, determined toswaddle me in family history and my mom’s version of Tuscan style, named me Giuseppina Capodimonte Baratta. When my brother couldn’t pronounce it, he called me Jess for short. It stuck. Everyone calls me Jess except my mother, the purist.

Uncle Louie and I coast to a stop, joining the line of stalled traffic on East Street.

“Poor timing,” Uncle Louie grunts.

“Drop-off.” I watch a gaggle of girls in navy jumpers walk up the front steps. How is it possible that the girls of Saint Rose School are wearing the same uniform I wore twenty-five years ago? While we wait in the traffic, I open the notes app on my phone. I follow the prompt from Dr. Sharon. I connect the feeling to the words as I remember waiting for my mother. I write.

It was oneof those warm October afternoons that felt as hot as the soupiest, most humid days in August. I dripped sweat as I wove through the line of cars throwing heat. The moms waited in air-conditioned comfort with their engines idling, ripping a permanent hole in the ozone layer over New Jersey. There was a reason we said a schoolwide rosary on Earth Day. We wanted to live.

I climbed into my mom’s Plymouth minivan with plastic seat covers that stuck to my legs when I sat down. It was the year 2000; I was nine years old. I wore a hand-me-down school jumper and Lands’ End loafers. My sister, Connie, was eleven years old. She wore an identical uniform one size up. She was strapped into the back seat behind Mom. I sat in the back seat my entire life until Connie learned that whoeversits in the front passenger seat is most likely to die first in a car wreck; ever since then, it’s had my name on it.

My classmates looked like a flock of bluebirds in their jumpers with their regulation cardigans tied around their waists like aprons. It was so hot, the girls rolled their white knee socks down into small inner tubes around their ankles. This was the kind of fashion trend that caught on at Saint Rose, and everyone had to follow the fad or die a slow social death. I refused to roll my knee socks until I was allowed to shave my legs.

“Mom, when can I shave my legs?”

“You have to wait,” Connie piped up. “I just got permission.”

“I didn’t ask you. I asked Mom.” If the hair on my legs grew for three more years, I’d need to shave twice a day like Cousin Bear Baratta, who grew a full beard between breakfast and dinner.

“Let me think about it, Giuseppina.”

“Hey, Jess!” Lisa Natalizio called out from the sidewalk. Lisa’s blond braids were as thick as hay and had expanded in the humidity. Her smile was as wide as her round head. She held her Butterfinger candy bar in the air like Sister Jean’s pointer in music class and shouted, “Don’t forget the milk carton!”

“Ma, I need a milk carton for school tomorrow. Lisa and I are going to make a mailbox. We’re going to send get-well cards to the pope.”

“Those nuns. Always with the projects. All right. I can air one out tonight. Good thing your brother is going through a growth spurt. He’s a milk lush. Put on your seat belt.” Mom wore a pink spandex jumpsuit with a ruffle around the waist that made her look like a piece of saltwater taffy. She’d just come from Zumba class. Her chest was freckled, a gold cross ona delicate chain nestled in her cleavage. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and flipped open the lunch box on my lap. “You ate your lunch! Good girl.”

“Bobby Bilancia stole it.”

Mom frowned. “Did you tell Sister Theresa?”

“Nobody likes a snitch,” I reminded her. “Bobby steals from Lisa’s lunch too, and she gave up. Now her mom includes an extra pack of Tastykakes, just in case he comes prowling.”

“I refuse to feed the entire fourth-grade class at Saint Rose.” My mother lit a Virginia Slims cigarette on the third try and held it as far out the window as she could so we wouldn’t get secondhand cancer. “I am calling the school when we get home.” She sighed. “Giuseppina, you have to stand up to him.”

“I can’t, Ma.”

“Why not?”

Connie answered for me. “Because every girl in her class and every nun in our school is in love with Bobby Bilancia. And Jess likes him too, don’t you, Jess?”