“My appointment,” he says. “He’s coming here. He’s making a payment today.”

I shrug.

“You’re not working, huh?”

“I won’t get in your way, Dad. I’ve got stuff to do.”

“It’s just delicate. Guys like Wilson—” He drops his eyes to the table, to the mess of newspapers, magazines, and sweepstakes forms, as if information about Wilson is buried in there somewhere. “I should just retire,” he says, and then the other kind of cough takes over.

He’s not entirely wrong—not about everything. The name Ragazzino is well-known in Utica, particularly among certain people. The family goes back locally three, maybe four generations, and has owned a number of businesses both on and off the books. Car dealerships, soft-drink distributorships, sports bars. A catering company that seems to flourish without ever actually catering anything, and a trucking company that ships something somewhere, I’ve never been clear on the specifics. Since my arrival here in 1978, three Ragazzinos have been shot (never fatally), at least four have done time in prison for white-collar crimes, and one of them—Benicio Antonio Ragazzino, a.k.a. Uncle Benny—vanished from the area and, as far as we know, from the face of the earth. There’s a whole section of one living room wall devoted to family photographs. There’s a grade-school photo of my sister, one of me, and the rest are all locals, Ragazzinos, portraits in black and white, in pastel tint, and in full-blown color. Most of them I couldn’t name if my life depended on it.