She asked me to stay with her to chop potatoes, but I said I was going with Baba. “I need your help here!” she yelled, but Baba stepped in and told her we wouldn’t be long at all. We both scurried out before she could think of an argument.

He looped an arm around my shoulders as we walked, but removed it to make the sign of the cross as we passed the St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church on 9th Street. I’d never seen him do that before, not once in the dozens of times we had walked the eight blocks to Colonial Village and passed the somber, gray-stone church. But I instinctively crossed myself too, just because he had.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, tugging on his arm.

“Why not?”

“Baba, c’mon. How come? You never did that before.”

He ignored me, and we continued quietly side-by-side, past the Dominican hair salon, past the Lebanese café, where Baba waved to the slim, mustached man behind the counter, past the Italian bakery, where the smell of fresh bread and pastries stirred my appetite. “They’re baking cannolis in there,” I hinted.

“On the way back,” he promised. “First, the turkey.”

But in the refrigerated meat department in the rear of the store, his face blanched as he watched the butcher wrap the headless bird in plastic, and I thought he would faint at the sight of the other butcher, trimming the fat off blocks of red meat, bright blood smeared over his white apron.

“Seeing that blood freaked me out,” he confessed on the way home, as we lugged the turkey back, each of us grasping one of the plastic bag’s handles. “It made me sick to my stomach.”

I didn’t think anything ever freaked Baba out, not even when he’d almost lost his own finger putting an air conditioner in the living room window. He actually had scars all over his hands, the result of working in a cart where you had to chop steaks all morning to have them ready to grill by lunchtime. That had never made him sick to his stomach. And what about the time a police car jumped the curb and slammed into his cart? Hot grease had splashed on his face and the whole cart had slammed to the ground. One broken collarbone—had that scared him? I doubted it—I doubted anything could scare him, until now.