Joey Colicchio taps his fingers on the steering wheel in time with a beat in his head and does not think about work either. He especially does not think about the fact that Carlo—sweet Carlo, family man Carlo, Carlo of the big heart—has brought in less cash than he was assigned for several months, barely, but enough that Tommy Fianzo has noticed, has asked Joey about it, has said hm, in a tone that Joey knows belies deep suspicion and danger. He especially does not think of that, because he is with his family, and his wife is smiling for the first time in weeks, and the persistent trail of sweat that leaks down into a puddle at his lower back all summer will feel a sea breeze this weekend. Joey knows that Carlo is dissatisfied. Flighty, Tommy calls it. Our flighty friend, he says. Tommy purses his lips; it can’t go on. Commitment is essential in a family. And in those moments Joey nods and feels like a traitor. He is good at his job. He doesn’t feel restless or ambivalent, like Carlo does. Not anymore. Not since he decided he would feel grateful, and accepted, and important instead.

Joey Colicchio had been brought to America by his parents when he was small enough to fit in the crooks of his mamma’s elbows. He imagines that he can remember a wooden bunk attached to the floor and ceiling; the boat rocking steadily on its way to somewhere else. The song of his parents’ hopes for him as they whispered through the seasick nights.

He does know that his papa insisted on Brooklyn, rather than the small Italian neighborhood in the heart of Manhattan, because he had heard there were still farms there. We are farming people, Joey can remember his papa saying. How do you know which way is up if you can’t see the ground? Joey’s father had wanted his children to have a sense of their roots, more than anything. It had caused him physical pain to collect his wife and his son and bundle them onto a boat to a new country, where they would never again feel the warm Sicilian dirt between their toes; where they would lose the ability to tell what time of year it was by the quality of the light, by the melody of the cicadas; where they would forget the old dialect in favor of hybridized American-Italian syntax that would be neither American nor Italian. Joey’s father had wanted Joey to know what it felt like to belong somewhere.