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I save the large drawer under the desktop for last. I lift out leather-bound ledgers and the company checkbooks. A few bills fall out of a ring binder as I place them in the duffel. I scoop the envelopes off the floor when I see an envelope with Uncle Louie’s handwriting:Italy.

I open the sealed envelope carefully, knowing Uncle Louie is the last of a generation of Italian Americans who still put cash in envelopes. But there’s no cash and no note, just two open round-trip plane tickets from Newark Liberty International Airport to Milan Malpensa Airport on Italia Trasporto Aereo. One in my name and one in his. I hold the tickets to my heart. We were really going to go to Italy; it wasn’t a dream.

“Jess?” Joe calls to me from the bottom of Aunt Lil’s stairs. “We gotta go.”

I clutch the duffel, bulging with files, receipts, bank statements, and checkbooks, close to my chest as though it’s a baby I must protect through a war zone.

“Jess?” Joe calls out again.

“On my way!”

Uncle Louie used to say,Trust no one. Yet, he moved through his life as though every person he met was his best friend. He embracedthe outcasts, the misfits, and the occasionally nefarious just like family. Everyone has secrets, but I hope the extent of Uncle Louie’s are the eye lift he had in 2010 and the seventeen kids he adopted around the world through Save the Children since 1987. He was a tough guy, but he would weep openly when the kids sent him their annual letters. I don’t know if the FBI knowsthatLouie Cap, and I don’t care. I hold everything in my arms to prove them wrong, clear his name, and restore his reputation. Someday, when I’m on the other side and find Uncle Louie in the afterlife, I will tell him what I really think. I’m angry at him for putting me in this position, but it’s nowhere near how sad I am at having lost him.

8

The Big Secret

After I ransackedUncle Louie’s home office with Aunt Lil’s permission, Joe and I returned to our mother’s kitchen. We’d helped Aunt Lil get ready for bed and made her a cup of tea. She was exhausted and went upstairs to sleep. Now I’m the one who is spent. I drop the heavy duffel near the top of the cellar stairs.

Mom claps her hands together. “You’re back! I’ll put on a pot of coffee.”

“No, thanks. Had a cup at Aunt Lil’s,” Joe says.

“I’ll have a cup,” Connie says as she slides into the booth close to Dad, who sits in his chair at the kitchen table.

“If I drank, I’d swear this was an intervention,” I joke.

“We need a debrief,” Mom says pleasantly.

“Maybe tomorrow. I need to sleep.” What I really need to do is go through Uncle Louie’s laptop.

“We should talk,” Dad says.

“Why?” I joke. “We’ve done so well avoiding one another, why ruin it?”

No one answers. They look nervous. Joe slides into the booth next to Connie and indicates that I should sit in the straight-back chair on the other side of the table.

“Ma, why are you crying?” Connie asks.

I turn to look at my mother. “You can’t make a decent pot of coffee with salt water,” I remind her. She shakes her head. I start to get nervous.What is going on here?

“We love you, Jess,” my father says.

“What exactly is there to love about me?” I stand back and look at my family.

Not a peep as my mother makes herself busy measuring Chock Full o’Nuts out of the canister and scoops the coffee grounds into the strainer of the percolator.

“Dad, you want to take a swing at an answer?” My father looks down at the table. “Joe? No? Connie? Mom? All right. Allow me. I am your loser child. The almost thirty-four-year-old with nothing to show for a third of her precious life. I am alone. I don’t own anything. Well, my car. But even when I left the keys in it with the noteShe’s all yours, no one bothered to steal it. The only job I ever had, in an undistinguished career, turns out to be a front for a second business in the Cayman Islands run by a man I loved and trusted who died suddenly and didn’t leave instructions. He did, however, leave me his companies, so let me amend my comment. I do ownsomething. And now I’m either going to be held responsible by the FBI and IRS, or the creeps Louie Cap associated with will do the job for them. The anxiety I experienced in the past is nothing compared to how frightened I am in this moment.”

A hush falls over the kitchen until Connie says, “Your therapy is working.”

How would Connie know? It doesn’t matter. In Exercise 3, Dr.Mohammed schooled me about an emotional place calleda position of strength. I assume the position. I sit down at the table and lean in.

“Going forward, let’s be clear.” I place my hands on the table.

My mother makes a plate with the last of the sfogliatelle. “Here.” She puts the pastries in front of me. “Eat.”

“They’re stale.”