He lived on what he earned—they handed him at least that much—and he bought the house we live in, far away from the more affluent part of town where all the other Ragazzinos live. And I’m even further removed from the family than he is. I’m the son of a Ragazzino-by-adoption, and the job they’ve given me, which no one in his right mind would complain about, is to sit in a booth at the entrance to a storage facility three or four days a week and let people in and out. It doesn’t have one of those automatic coded security systems. It has a gate, a chain thicker than my arm, and a padlock with a key that looks like part of a spaceship. I let people in, and relock the gate. I let people out, and relock the gate. And the only people who come in and out, a couple of times a day at most, are Ragazzinos. I don’t ask questions.

It’s a job that pays me well enough—an envelope is dropped off every few weeks with a grand in cash—and I don’t really do anything with the money. I buy gas. I buy food. We eat a lot of takeout, which I pay for, and I buy the groceries because my father doesn’t charge me rent. I would pay for maintenance on the house, too, but whenever something needs to be done, my father says he’ll make a call, and then someone shows up and does the work for free. This work is often sloppy. The men who do it are begrudgingly returning favors—to other Ragazzinos, not to us. But when I point this out to my father, he gets mad. We had the original windows on the house up until last year, when I suggested that we have them all replaced. “I’ll make a call,” my father said. The next day a couple of frightened-looking Asians came out and took measurements. A month later they showed up again, and crack, slap, dab, we had new windows. But they’re crappy. They’re single pane, and the cold air just passes right over the sill. If I mention this, my father argues, “There’s nothing wrong with those windows. Be a man,” and that particular comment always mystifies me, since I don’t think either one of us has ever been particularly preoccupied with what that means beyond the equipment we were born with.

“You want New York to be Florida,” he’s fond of telling me. “You want oranges and girls in bikinis. Well, welcome to Utica.”